# Athens

Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning around 3,400 years, and the earliest human presence around the 11th–7th millennium BC. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state that emerged in conjunction with the seagoing development of the port of Piraeus. A centre for the arts, learning and philosophy, home of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, it is widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy, largely because of its cultural and political impact on the European continent and in particular the Romans. In modern times, Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political and cultural life in Greece.

## Quotes

* From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone - Greece with its immortal glories - is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation.
** Winston Churchill, speaking in 1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, United States
** Sinews of Peace. (2009, July 29). In Wikisource, The Free Library.
* A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
** Benjamin Disraeli, as quoted in Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, by Tristram Hunt. Page IX. Editor Hachette UK, 2010. ISBN 0297865943.
* While many of the world's richest people live in London, four of its boroughs rank among the twenty poorest in England, and 27 percent of the city's population live in poverty. London's polarized economic landscape is typical of "superstar" cities. Other leading cities of Europe—Oslo, Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, Madrid, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna, Vilnius—also suffer widening gaps between the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy.
** Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020), p. 133
* If we consider merely the subtlety of disquisition, the force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance of expression, which characterise the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most valuable; but what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments, and the brilliant fancy of Cicero; the withering fire of Juvenal; the plastic imagination of Dante; the humour of Cervantes; the comprehension of Bacon; the wit of Butler; the supreme and universal excellence of Shakspeare? All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling.
** Thomas Babington Macaulay, 'On Mitford's History of Greece', Knight's Quarterly Magazine (November 1824), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 178
* Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,—wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,—there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.
** Thomas Babington Macaulay, 'On Mitford's History of Greece', Knight's Quarterly Magazine (November 1824), quoted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (1860), p. 179
* Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence, native to famous wits.
** John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671), IV. 240–241
* Athens, of a part of whose political life Thucydides tells the story, must ever be an object of the highest interest to every political student, because in what has come down to us of her history and of her literature, we have so complete and so minute a picture of all the features of her public life, not only historians and biographers, but the philosophers, the orators, the poets, have combined to analyse the springs of her actions and to reveal her to us as she really was. And there was that in the Athenian character that made such a revelation the easier; for with all their faults—and they were many—they were a people deserving the praise which Pericles bestowed on them when he said: "Our social march is free, not only in regard to public affairs, but also in regard to intolerance of each other's diversity of daily pursuits. For we are not angry with our neighbour for what he may do to please himself; nor do we ever put on those sour looks which, though they do no positive damage, are not the less sure to offend."
** Stafford Northcote, speech at his installation as Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh (30 January 1884), quoted in Rectorial Addresses delivered before the University of Edinburgh 1859–1899, ed. Archibald Stodart-Walker (1900), pp. 241-242
* How they love freedom on this soil!
** Rita Boumy Pappas in the poem "Athens"
* Let there be light! Said Liberty, And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!
** Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas

## See also

* Sparta