Aristotle, the philosopher of empirical reality and tutor to Alexander the Great, began his treatise, the Politics, with the statement "man is a political animal." This is the kind of conclusion that only a Greek could make: it acknowledges a step beyond the areas of sexuality, tool-making, and religion that already distinguished humans from other species to bring them into cities. The word "political" refers specifically to the Greek city, the polis, which was not merely a city as a collection of densely arranged buildings, with a large collection of people doing diverse occupations, but a political unit that exercised a high degree of autonomy and was supported by its dependent territory and towns. The Greek city-state, the polis of around 500 BC was a law-making community that governed itself and negotiated whether to pursue war or peace with other states. It usually came into being through the act of synoikismos, a process of social consolidation of local tribal and territorial differences. After the coming together of synoikismos, the citizens of the Greek city-state agreed upon shared religious and legal beliefs. The polis was thus always understood as a social construct for a place where people had agreed to live together and where they subsequently needed to debate the terms and obligations of this agreement.
The polis was different from the city of the Egyptians, who were greatly admired by the Greeks as having the highest level of culture. The Egyptian state in this case was a far- flung absolute monarchy and the city was generally not much more than a dependency of the royal palace--although the trading centers in the Nile delta, such as Memphis, probably had some degree of autonomy and diversity. The great Sumerian cities of the second millenium, such as Ur and the first Babylon under Hammurabi, were initially self- sufficient city-states, governed by a religious priesthood. The council of elders that often made the decisions for these cities was called by the Greeks the gerousia (the word from which we derive hierarchy). In all cases the gerousia eventually yielded to a single ruler. The autonomy of the relatively self-sufficient Sumerian cities during the second millenium BC was undermined by the expansionism of less productive cities to the north whose military rulers succeeded in assembling short lived empires. David's Jerusalem, Sargon II's Khorsobad, and the second Babylon of Nebuchadnessar are examples of cities during the first millenium that controlled extensive dependencies through military and diplomatic conquest and imported slaves and agricultural surplus to augment the local supply. The greatest adversary for the Greeks during the rise to power of their citystates was just such an empire, the Persian Empire of Xerxes that had swallowed up Nebuchadnessar'a Babylon.
The geographic situation of Greek cities as well as the historic wave in which they emerged might suggest some of the determinants that led to the peculiar system of autonomy and self government of the polis. While the occupation of the majority of Greeks was definitely agriculture, as it was for all peoples of antiquity, a much greater percentage of the population lived in cities, up to 35% in Greece. The land, due to the predominance of mountainous terrain was not very productive, but the sea, which was never more than 40 miles from any of the Greek cities, offered itself as an obvious resource. Travel by land was treacherous, but the Greeks excelled in sea travel, and like the Phoenicians, from whom they may have learned the idea of the polis, established trade contacts throughout the Mediterrenean and the Black Sea. Some of their trading partners were actually colonies set up since the 8th century BC to absorb their excess of population. Through trade the Greeks were able to augment their insufficient grain supply.
Athens, which was the largest and most influential of a network of dozens of citystates in the Aegean, could in some ways be seen as a proto-industrial city, with a huge navy, lots of merchants, and lots of manufacture. Aside from the typical production of wine and olive oil, Athens had established a near monopoly on the production of ceramics during the period of its greatest development, and the high level of artistic practice in the fine arts can been seen as one of the consequences. The rich marble quarry of the nearby Penteli mountains, favored the local sculptors, whose work was in high demand, especially under the Roman hegemony of the later centuries. The first silver coins were struck in Athens around the year 700, and became one of the first universal forms of currency for the Mediterrenean. There is evidence of an active banking operation in most of the network of Greek city-states.
So we find in the polis, not just the usual aristocratic lords of lands and agricultural surplus, but also a highly diversified collection of traders and craftsmen, who will accumulate surplus through exchange. The class stratification of a city like Athens was still formed of aristocratic, religious, and military hierarchies, but now included economic strata as well. The protection of the rights of those in the commercial sector is probably the factor that put the aristocratic order of the city into crisis in the move from the rule by a few or by a single tyrant to the rule by the many, the demos, the people.
In examining Athens in detail a new category of urban artefact becomes important: namely, public space. There was not much provision for it in Ur, or in Babylon, or in Solomon's Jerusalem, or Ahkenaten's Amarna. We could say there are three types of public space: one for ritual, one for commercial exchange, and the last for political life. The great 73 foot-wide processional route in Babylon was a magnificent act of planning, resulting in a highly controlled public thoroughfare adjacent to a series of restricted palace and temple compounds. The market place was usually outside of urban walls in this same period, but there may have been open spaces such as Baker's square in Ur, that served as public markets, and there were definitely shop lined streets in Jerusalem that we would recognize as accessible to the public. That peculiarity of the Greeks to seek a form of justice arrived at through public concensus, what we will repeatedly call "popular sovereignty," gave rise to new spatial solutions--in particular the agora--and new architectural typologies- -especially the colonnaded stoa. Openness, accountability, and accessibility were the new conditions for the urban architecture of the Greek city-state in the classical period that distinguished it from the earlier experience of city making. Now the ability to see and hear other people on equal terms became a new ordering principle. The Greek theater will be its consummate artistic outcome.
Sociologists such as Richard Sennett, author of the Fall of Public Man are currently lamenting the loss of the public realm and the space of accountability in the 20th century megalopolis, in part because of the strong historical tradition of the polis transmitted by Athens. The scale of the modern megalopolis and the despatializing technologies that accompany it are easily blamed for the end of the public realm, but in the end it is the social impetus and not the material conditions that is the determining factor. Why do we need public space when the most obvious real demand is to escape the pollution, crime, and poor education of the city? In looking at Athens we should then be careful of the scale and the way that information was transmitted, but realise that it is here that the social factor was invented, where an ideology of civic duty took hold. Attica, the territory of Athens was 1,000 square miles (a little less than twice Houston's territory). It had a population that never exceeded 320,000 (Houston's is currently 3 million, which means that Houston is actually much denser than the Athenian city-state). Only 43,000 of Athens inhabitants were qualified as citizens, the rest were women, foreignors (known as metics), free laborers, and slaves, all of whom had certain human rights but did not have voting rights. (We might notice that despite universal sufferage, only 40% of Houston votes--and only about 20% in local elections). Yet Houston, as we all know, not withstanding these surprizing advantages over Athens, is not the sort of place that you would associate with popular sovreignty. And if there is public space here it is a residue from another age that has little or nothing to do with the current power structure of the city.
The two basic conditions for citizenship in the Athenian city-state were property ownership and military service. While Americans may be shocked that Athenian popular sovreignty did not include everyone, and that there was no ethical question about owning slaves, they would also be shocked by the degree of participation that the members of the Athenian demos were expected to provide for religious, military, and political activities. This is explicit expressed in the public space of the city. The first thing that characterizes Athens is of course the dramatic escarpment of the Akropolis, which rises from the plain to a height of 350 feet (half the height of the Transco Tower) and atop which were the shining temples dedicated to the Goddess who in archaic times gave her name to the city, Athena. This compound might remind us of the Ziggurat at Ur, and the temple in Jerusalem, as it is an enclosed temenos that dominates the city establishing an axis mundi.
But aside from this sacred aspect so artfully monumentalized, the map of 5th century Athens shows that scattered at the base of the Akropolis were several open spaces: the Aereopagus hill, where the old nobility met; the Pnyx, a larger open space engineered for good drainage and good acoustics and large enough to accomodate crowds of over 6,000 for the popular assembly; and the Agora, a space comparable in size to a football field. Around its edges were the city's political institutions but the space had a mixture of uses from being an early military mustering point, to the place for athletic contests and theater, to altars for sacrifice, to the place for philosophical sessions, to political meetings.
Aristotle mentions that a high fortress site is appropriate for kings and tyrants, but democracy needs flat land. The topography of Athens embodies this transition, since the Akropolis, a word that initially meant fortress, was once the site of the king's palace in the second millenium. Two of the city's legends tell something of the origins of Athens in connection to Minoan and Mycaenean culture. These are the tale of Daedalus, the first architect, and Theseus, the founding hero, responsible for Athens' primal act of synoikismos.
Like many architects Daedalus became a victim of his own pride. He had invented almost every clever thing for the crafts and was upset when he learned that a carpenter invented the saw, and in a fit of jealousy threw him off a cliff. He then fled from Athens to Crete where his talent as an inventor was required to solve the indelicate questions of the royal family of King Minos. Minos, famously rich but also stingy, was required by Poseidon to sacrifice a white bull, but instead sacrificed a less prestigious black bull. The god put a curse on his wife Pasaphae, making her lust for intercourse with a bull. Daedelus's first job was to rig up a brace for the queen to have union with the bull, and his next job was to devise a hiding place for their monstruous offspring, the minotaur. He built the labirynth, which in fact would seem to be a retroactive metaphor for the maze-like palace of Knossos, built around 1600 BC, which in its center had a large courtyard where the famous bull games depicted in the frescoes took place. Knossos was a city organized around a palace and evidently had no fortifications. Labirynthine organization is often thought in ancient military theory to be an excellent form of defense.
At this point the stories of Deadalus and Theseus intersect, since Theseus, son of the King of Athens volunteered to be one the fourteen youths sent as a yearly tribute to King Minos in Crete to sacrifice to the hungry minotaur. Theseus will be the one to slay the Minotaur and defeat the genius of the labyrynth through the guile of princess Ariadne's ball of yarn, which she advised him to unravel as a path marker. Theseus's victory marks the demise of Minoan culture which disappeared misteriously around 1400 probably as the result of cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic disturbances from Santorini.
The Greek penchant for tragedy is invested in all her founding legends, as Homer sang: "There is no creature more dismal than man." When Theseus returns home to Athens, not only has he abandoned Ariadne on the shores of Asia minor, but he neglected to fly the white sail that his father asked him to put as a sign of his survival, thus causing the old man's suicide. Theseus as the unifying king of Athens occupied the fortress of the Akropolis with a palace that might have been similar to the one excavated in Mycenae. These dark and lumpy settings, where huge polygonal blocks were used for making the heavy fortifications and the palaces had tiny rooms with few windows were the trappings for the characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey: Agamenon, Achilles, and Odyseus. Their cities, like those on the other side of the Agean, were dominated by fortifications and always pitched in a high place. All of the protagonists of the Mycenaenan Age will meet an unhappy end some time after the Fall of Troy, around 1150 BC. Written language and some forms of agriculture disappeared during the time known as the Dark Age of the Doric invasions, only to be revived in the 9th century.
Sparta: The Mycaenaen stronghold of the Athenian Akropolis was remembered as the dwelling place of warrior kings and rededicated, after the city moved to the more level ground surrounding it, to shrines to Athena, a warrior goddess, but also the goddess of learning. Athens by the end of the 6th century emerged as the most powerful of the many city-states with the only true rival being Sparta located on the Pelopenisan peninsula to the south. The rivalry between the two cities is not only a military question that will erupt in the disastrous Pelopenesian Wars at the end of the 5th century, but recurs in the philosophical discussion about the polis of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the many excellent thinkers of the age. Athens, the extreme democracy, ever more inclusive in her infranchisement, is matched against Sparta, the inflexible society of warriors, run by a limited oligarchy. The nature of the city is thus the basis of a fundamental ideological debate.
It is quite revealing to try to describe Sparta, which was the loose agglomeration of four towns stretching along a river, that had no fortifications, city gates, or monumental architecture. The inhabitants of the Spartan state were divided into the elite class of landowners, the Spartiates, who were the military and political class, the free but non- participating Perioikoi, and the state-owned slaves, or helots, a class of sharecroppers distributed by the state to the landowners. Land was apportioned to the aristocracy according to service in the military in order to guarantee that all continued the self-sufficient agrarian basis of the state while insuring that no one had more property than the other. Sparta was ruled by two hereditary kings, who were advised by a council of 30 elders (a gerousia). To insure political continuity, the elite class groomed itself in strict formations, separating the young men at an early age of 14 and putting them into a military school, where until age 30 they would belong to an eating club. The elite never grew to a population of more than 5,000, which we should note is suspiciously close to the ideal number of 5,040 suggested by Plato in his republic. The population in a territory of 2,000 square miles reached about 200,000 at its height. There were no philosophers or artists in Sparta, the wealth of the society went to preparing atheletes for the Olympic games. The territory of Sparta was called Laconia, from whence we have the adjective laconic, which means literally of few words, or terse. This could also apply to their spatial traditions, where they demonstrated a lack of reliance on shaped space, creating a landscape where things appear to be missing. The spreading quality of Sparta, which needed no walls because as Thucydides reports "her soldiers were her walls," was due to the role of its militia which was constantly mobilized. Sparta was thus open but without events, architectural or social, and reminds me in some ways of the spread of suburbia, very open, but without a center, incredibly conformist and static culturally, despite the perpetual movement of commuting it requires.
Athenian democracy: Athens in comparison was a dynamic society, the one that allowed Plato the liberty to develop his critique of the polis (philosophers were not allowed freedom of speech in Laconia). Plato schematized the development of city authority as a cycle of three pairs of good and bad solutions. There was the monarch who ruled justly versus the tyrant who ruled cruelly, the aristocracy which ruled with a sense of civic duty versus the oligarchy which ruled only for their own class interests, and a democracy of balanced rule by all citizens versus the ochlocracy of the manipulated mob. His solution, which always favored elites, was that of the philosopher kings. Athens was too full of change and too open both to outsiders and to lower classes for Plato's pursuit of the ideal.
The radical experiment in democracy that occured in Athens resulted in a decision- making process that may have on occasion seemed impractical since it always required some form of democratic concensus before going into effect, a process requiring debate, evidence, and even research. Even Aristotle, who is less rigid in his expectations for society than Plato, proposes that the polis have no more than 10,000 citizens, for that is the maximum number of people he surmizes that one can recognize in a lifetime--Athens in her prime had 43,000, far beyond the recommended number. Agora: The space of the Agora tells the story of the formation of democratic institutions in Athens. The name of the space to begin with is indicative because it does not refer to a place or thing but means the social act of gathering. If you reflect on the psychological condition of agoraphobia, which is the fear of leaving the house, it is both a fear of open space and of the contamination by people in public space.
The Agora in Athens was a protected open space in the city where commerce, justice, spectacle and political gatherings could occur. It was much larger than we would consider comfortable as a public space, more like the Rice stadium parking lot than the quadrangle. Its irregular shape was roughly 600 feet by 700 feet (about three times the quadrangle--but half the size of Jerusalem's Temple Mount), and the open space was protected from development by boundary markers called horoi. It sloped gently toward the northern Dypylon gate of the city. Trees grew in the Agora and its was unpaved except for the gravel surface of the diagonal path that cut through it, the Panathenaic Way, used for the annual games and procession to the Akropolis in honor of Athena. A regular line of plane trees was planted along this route. There were some small shrines dotting the open space, in particular the Altar to the 12 gods, a place where one could claim sanctuary. So the Agora was a rather casually arranged open space, more like an American park with trees and statues in it than an Italian piazza.
The edges of the Agora were lined with an irregular arrangement of a number of stoas, rectangular buildings with an open colonnade on one of the long sides. This building type was usually used to conduct public business, slightly elevated but visible. In the northwest corner were two of the earliest stoas: the Royal Stoa and kitty corner to it the Painted Stoa, or Poikile. The Royal Stoa was where the Archon, the king of Athens left over from an earlier period, and during the period of democracy a figure-head in the aristocratic group of the Archons, would pass judgement. The Poikile was a more propagandistic place that did not usually serve for political services. Here four large paintings, depicting the military history of the city, from the mythical battle with the Amazons, to the recent victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 were depicted. This area of the Agora was protected by figural posts known as herms, blocks of stone with a set of genitals and the head of Hermes. On the southern side of the Agora was a fountain house, where the women would come early in the morning to get water. Women were otherwise not allowed in public. The phallic nature of the Herms seems to mark the space for a separation of genders.
During the 6th century, Solon instituted an elected senate, the Boule of 500 members, which met in a senate house called the Bouleterion, which had a horseshoe, theatre-like seating arrangement. The Boule was elected by the Ecclesia or genreal assembly. After a period of tyranny the democracy was reconstituted under Cleisthenes during the last years of the 6th century, who cleared away the final obstacle to popular sovereignty, the rigidity and imbalance of kinship groups. He effected an electoral reapportionment replacing the four Ionian tribes based on blood lines, with ten phylae based on geographic positions. This essentially broke down the feudal authority of the landed aristocracy of Athens, giving power to new urban elites. Each tribe would have equal representation of urban, coastal and interior residents, so that no one category would be favored over the rest. Each month fifty members of one tribe who were participating in the senate were to dine in the round building, the tholos, next to the Bouleterion, and some of their members were expected to sleep in this building, so that in case of an emergency, there would always be elected officials available to begin the discussions for quick decisions.
One of the more curious monuments allowed on the open space of the Agora was the line of ten statues known as the Eponymous heroes. Each of the new tribes was named after one of Athens's legendary heroes and messages concerning legal and military information were posted here daily. This was like a newspaper for the Athenian citizen, who needed to go to the Agora every day to keep informed. This was the literal space of information that made public space so important to dailiy life.
The democracy of Cleistenes might have disappeared if it were not for the invasions of the Persians. The ability of the Athenians to organize the resistance to the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490, not only strengthened the democracy in the city's own eyes but made the city prevail over the neighboring city-states. The Delian league was then established through Athenian diplomacy to resist the second invasion of the Persians in 480. Athens was sacked at this time, the temples on the Akropolis burned to the ground, and many of the structures in the Agora were destroyed. But through the naval superiority of the Delian League the Persians were eventually expulsed at the Battle of Salamis and Athens entered a period of great strength. After the brief leadership of Cimon who was ostracized because his peers suspected him of wanting more power, a new leader, Pericles, came to power. Pericles, whose skills with language endeared him to the Athenians, was accused by conservative historians of opening Greek democracy too much and causing the city's demise. One of his reforms was to demand payment for jurors so that not just the wealthy would have enough free time to sit on juries. This was one of many ways he tried to spread the power of the city to non-aristocratic classes. Important trials, such as the trial of Socrates, 399, were carried out in the Heliaia, a square building that could fit up to 1,500 jurors. The lottery system for selecting jurors and the use of ballots so that the opinion of the individual juror would not influence the other (hollow ballots for guilty, full for not guilty) were ways of insuring fairness.
During the period of Pericles, 460-429, the new surplus that was being raked in from the Delian League was channeled into one of the most impressive public works programs the world has ever seen. Athens, because of its great size, strong economic power and crucial military position, became the center of a small empire that controlled most of the Aegean. The walls of the city were rebuilt and extended to the port of the Peireius; the walls went five miles around the city, and seven miles down to the Peireius, the narrow space ifor military convoys while a third wall was added to protect the merchants' route. The Temple of the Hephasteion, which sits on the hill used for public markets just above the Bouleterion was begun. Hephaistus or Vulcan as the Romans called him was the blacksmith god, especially close to the interests of the working class.
Pericles, who convinced the city to make the major monumental transformations that characterize the place to this day drew upon the judgement of the sculptor Phidias, who advised architects Callicrates, and Ichtinus on the design of the Akropolis. The siting of the Greek temple shows this basic relationship with the world: it is sensitive to nature and selected for the holiness that one can feel in these spots on the land--but the architecture is independent, raised on a plynth, built according to a modular system with rational proportions--no longer an imitation of nature (like the ziggurat mountains) but an unequivocal product of human reason (and one about which every detail has been debated).
The approach from the Propylaia is not axiall but oblique. This is the secret of Greek architecture: it was meant to be experienced obliquely, like the path leading up to the oracle at Delphi. The regularity of the temple was best revealed by an irregular approach.
The design of the parthenon seems conservative, a rectangular Doric box, but when you consider the refinements used to create the illusion of geometric perfection, it almost seems radical--no two columns are alike, notice the columns at the corner are just slightly closer together than the others. More detailed study would show the the columns are tapered and the whole box itself is tapered. The Parthenon has a metaphoric tie to the age of Pericles: for if the classic greek temple with its evenly spaced colums is like the democratic society of equals, the Parthenon conveys the illusion of equals, but has no two measures alike, repsecting the difference of individuals.
The Parthenon was full of things we do not see: inside the colossal statue of Athena by Phidias, accessible only to the aristocracy and priesthood; throughout the temple was guadiliy painted red, blue and in parts gilded. The inner frieze relief sculptures reveal the story of the city's annual ritual: aristocratic virgins during 9 months weave the sacred peplos for the goddess which they bring in procession through the dypylon gate on the Panathenian way in the company of metics, old men with olive branches, colonists, allies, cavalry, chariots and magistrates.
They deliver the peplos not to the magnificent statue in the Parthenon but to a crude wooden statue that had been sported out of the city during the Persian sack and was preserved in the Erectheion. The erectheion, for all the seeming classical rigor of the Parthenon, breaks all the canons. It does not rise from a single plynth base but is split level, negotiating the hill, it does not use a single order but three different orders. It does not have a single axis but three. It is an aggregate building, a collage: the olive tree sacred to Athena, grave of Erecthus legendary king, memory of his daughter sacrificed to save the city is depicted in the famous Karyatids holding up the porch.
The small ionic temple Athena Nike, Athens victorious, was built on the western edge of the Akropolis in 430 at the beginning of the Pelopenesian wars.
Peireius was rebuilt in the 460s according to a plan by Hippodamus. This is the first time that there is written evidence of a professional doing the planning and the evidence of the results seems to be a grid of long blocks, similar to the sort found in the Greek colonies of Paestum and Naples (or New York for that matter). Hippodamus allegedly came from the Ionian city of Miletus which was destroyed by Persian seiges and rebuilt in the 470s on a grid of small square blocks. Aristotle mentions that his contribution was not in design but in the organization of the city into functional districts for religious, civic, and commercial activities, the sort of planning that seems evident in the public spaces of Miletus.
The fabric of Athens was dense and not made of straight streets. It was more like what has been excavated at Delos. The streets follow the lay of the land and are basically the left- over spaces between the houses. Athenian houses gave blank walls to the streets and got their interior light from courtyards, not unlike the houses we saw of a millenium earlier in Ur.
To be a citizen in Athens required literacy and the population invested much in education, although there were no state schools. The higher education of Athens occured in the stoas and on the roads leading a few miles out of town to the Academy, where Plato taught or the Lyceum, where Aristotle would later teach. In Plato's writing we find the dialogue form, which is essentially a theatrical device. Theater, both building and institution was to me the most significant contribution of Athens.
Theater began as part of the religious festivals devoted to the orgiastic cults of Dyonisus,, and there was always a temple present in the theater buildings. It evolved from the exposition of a monologue surrounded by a chorus, to a dialogue, and finally toward the end of the 5th century the possibility of a third character. The content of the theater in the age of Perikles was always devoted to the ethical questions of war, justice, education, and the differences of men and women. Yearly competitions were held for which ten judges were selected by ballot, and even the actors were assigned to the poets by lottery so as not to give an unfair advantage.
Theatrical events in Athens moved from the Agora to the southern slopes of the Akropolis. The fan-like form of the theater was engineered for the perfection of sight and sound, so that everyone in the outdoor theater could have an equal opportunity to observe and judge the play. Greek theaters were always built into the site, using the topography to compose a very formal and truly public space where all can be seen together.
Though the empire of Athens evaporated in the 4th century, and the democracy was formally terminated in 322 after the dominion of Alexander the Great, the city continued for a few hundred years to maintain itself as the most respected cultural center in the Mediterrenean. The dialectical process, which institutionalized the right of challenge and debate, had produced a city made of carefully decided moments and truly public spaces. What strikes us from the time of Kleistenes and Pericles is the commitment to social investment: enfranchinsing ever broader political participation, sponsoring public monuments, sponsoring education and sports, patronizing art, music, philosophy, history, poetry, often in the form of competitions: all of this was subject to the review process-- often with dire consequences, such as the condemnation of Socrates in 399. This investment created a cultural richness that long outlasted the power of the Athenian empire. Future powers such as the Attalids of Pergamon, Alexander, or Hadrian will seek legitimacy through support of this source of intelligence, adding new monuments and restoring old ones. Through their patronage they tried to bypass the very thing that made the polis great: politics; and my homily in this respect would be that you can't have a real public realm without those conflictual processes.
Sources
E. J. Owens, The City in the Greek and Roman World, London, 1991.
Mason Hammond, The City in the Ancient World, Cambridge, 1972.
Peter Jones, ed., The World of Athens, Cambridge, 1984.
Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia, A Regional History, 1300-362, London. 1979
I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates, Boston, 1988
Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development from the Dawn of History to the
Present,trans. C. Braider, Chicago, 1988.