Why athens is important

Throughout the city's history Athens was involved in numerous wars, including conflicts with the Persians and other Greeks, but it was also a great center of learning. The Agora was the central marketplace of ancient Athens. Athenian citizens gathered there to discuss politics and socialize as well as shop.

The ancient Athenians enjoyed a deeply intimate relationship with their city. Civic life was not optional, and the Athenians had a word for those who refused to participate in public affairs: idiotes. There was no such thing as an aloof, apathetic Athenian. All of ancient Athens displayed a combination of the linear and the bent, the orderly and the chaotic. The Parthenon, perhaps the most famous structure of the ancient world, looks like the epitome of linear thinking, rational thought frozen in stone, but this is an illusion: The building has not a single straight line.

Each column bends slightly this way or that. In retrospect, many aspects of Athenian life—including the layout and character of the city itself—were conducive to creative thinking. The ancient Greeks did everything outdoors. A house was less a home than a dormitory, a place where most people spent fewer than 30 waking minutes each day. The rest of the time was spent in the marketplace, or working out at the gymnasium or the wrestling grounds, or perhaps strolling along the rolling hills that surround the city.

The Greeks viewed body and mind as two inseparable parts of a whole: A fit mind not attached to a fit body rendered both incomplete. Master shipbuilders and sailors, they journeyed to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and beyond, bringing back the alphabet from the Phoenicians, medicine and sculpture from the Egyptians, mathematics from the Babylonians, literature from the Sumerians. The Athenians felt no shame in their intellectual pilfering.

Athens also welcomed foreigners themselves. Some of the best-known sophists, for example, were foreign-born. It was part of what made Athens Athens—openness to foreign goods, new ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, odd people and strange ideas. Women, slaves and foreigners could not become citizens. So democracy in Athens meant rule by the men of Athens. Slaves made up about a quarter of the working population on Athens.

Most were people who had been captured in warfare and sold to slave dealers. They were then put on sale in the slave market. Find out what Athens and Sparta were really like Sparta's powerful army is ready for war.

Athens knows that it cannot defeat this army The year is BC. Poliphus and his family from Athens and Sparcus and his family from Sparta are thinking about the future. They each have different points of view!! Cool site! Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance.

Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Ancient History and Latin Expert. Gill is a Latinist, writer, and teacher of ancient history and Latin. Updated March 06, Chapter I.