- the Caryatid porch and the columns of the north porch - were often copied in antiquity and in nineteenth-century Europe.
The historian of this war, Thucydides of Athens, makes the great leader Pericles say that Athens will be remembered for having ruled more
Greeks than any other Greek state. Thucydides (or Pericles) was wrong; it is only specialist ancient historians who know about Athenian
imperialism, but everybody has heard of the Parthenon, and of Greek tragedy. We ought rather to say Athenian tragedy, because Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides were all Athenians. Specifically, the treatment by those tragedians of a handful of myths continues to provide the
direct inspiration for modern thinkers (such as Freud), dramatists (Brecht, Anouilh), and novelists (Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is a
variant on Euripides' Bacchae). These are the achievements which justify the intensive study to which ancient Greek culture, and especially its
literature, have been exposed since the Renaissance. Thucydides was not alone in the lopsidedness of his judgement: Aeschylus wrote his own
verse epitaph, boasting of his military service in the Persian Wars, and neglecting to mention that he was a playwright; Socrates, the great
teacher and philosopher, features in the contemporary histories only for the stand he took over a piece of purely political injustice. It is even
possible that Sophocles' Oedipus, a legendary king of Thebes, is meant as a portrait of imperial Athens: quick-witted, meddlesome, and
doomed because of those precise elements in his greatness. An audacious anachronism.
The Entrance To The Acropolis At Athens Seen From The Hill Of The Areopagus. The small, late-fifth-century B.C. Temple of Athena Nike
(Athena Victory) stands clear on a bastion beside the entrance, to the right. The dominant outline is of the Classical entrance-way, the
Propylaea, which housed a picture gallery; but from this view the bulk and sheer sides of the rock demonstrate well the Acropolis' original
role as a citadel.
But we should not be lopsided in the other direction, and neglect the military and political successes which underwrote fifth-century culture.
First, it was the Persian Wars which, by worsening the political atmosphere in Ionia, filled Athens with a diaspora of intellectuals such as
Hippodamus of Miletus who replanned the Piraeus, the harbour town of Athens; and Anaxagoras, the philosopher friend of Pericles. But
above all, aristocrats such as Cimon and Pericles, by their political and military leadership, brought in the public wealth which subsidized the
buildings and sculptures of Phidias, Ictinus, and Mnesicles on the Acropolis; and, by making available their private wealth for public
purposes, they financed the festivals and dramatic productions which gave classical Athens its attractive power. (This was the liturgy system,
a tax on the rich which conferred prestige when taken beyond what was obligatory.) Pericles' first known act was to pay for Aeschylus' great
historical opera, the Persae. We know this not from Thucydides, who idealized Pericles, but from a list carved on stone. Such lists are the raw
material of the present chapter, which is political and military. We should not forget that such evidence can help the literary student.