Europe's southernmost mainland capital still runs on ancient fame
Athens, Greece's capital, holds over 3.6 million people in its urban area—Europe's eighth-largest and the continent's southernmost mainland capital. Recorded history tops 3,400 years; human presence may reach the 11th–7th millennia BC. Myth credits Athena; scholars debate the name's true root.
Ancient Greeks called the city Athênai, a plural, though Homer's Greek used a singular form, and most modern scholars think the goddess was named after the city rather than the reverse, because the -ene ending typically marks places. The founding myth pits Athena against Poseidon for patronage, with King Cecrops judging whose gift was better and choosing hers. Athenians were nicknamed cicada-wearers for their golden cicada pins, perhaps a badge of their claim to be earth-born like their legendary founder Erechtheus, and Pindar hailed it as the city of the violet crown.
The Cave of Schist holds the oldest traces of people, and the site has been lived in without a break for at least 5,000 years. By 1400 BC the Acropolis carried a Mycenaean fortress whose Cyclopean walls still show. Solon's sixth-century reforms paved the way for Cleisthenes to introduce democracy in 508 BC, and Athens, by then a naval power, helped beat Persia at Marathon in 490 BC under Miltiades and at Salamis in 480 BC under Themistocles.
A golden age followed. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides wrote plays, Herodotus and Thucydides wrote history, Hippocrates practised medicine, and Socrates and Plato taught, while Pericles sponsored a building programme that crowned the Acropolis with the Parthenon. Under Rome it enjoyed free-city status thanks to its admired schools, and Hadrian, himself an Athenian citizen, added public buildings. Germanic raiders sacked it in 267 AD, and once Constantinople became the imperial seat, emperors carried off many of its artworks to adorn the new capital.
Source: Athens
