ATHENIANS. Surviving the Catastrophe: the peoples' response to the invasion, and the threat of becoming stateless (apolis) in the case of the Persian Wars

Abstract

The Director of the Athenian Agora Excavations (1946-1967), Homer A. Thompson, said the following regarding the Persian-led destruction of Athens: "people's reaction to disasters is more indicative of a nation's character than their response to triumphs". The catastrophe of Athens by the Persian Empire in 480 and 479 B.C.E. appears to have been a deliberate attempt to cut the Athenians' connection to their ancestral homeland Attica, a landscape topographically diverse and self-sufficient that bounded ancestral memory, physical culture (nature and architecture), and civic organisation with its large, but scattered population. Evidence to permanently displace the Athenians is discovered in the historical and archaeological records through the destruction of the Agora and Akropolis. In religious and civic centre of the Agora, buildings and cultural materials (ceramic-wares) were destroyed and dumped into Athens' water-wells, a scheme which appears aimed to prevent any salvage operation by a returning population. On the sacred citadel of the Akropolis, votive offerings such as the beautiful Akropolis korai, statues that captured the realism of Archaic period Athenian mothers and daughters, were targeted and brutally mutilated beyond repair. The manner of their 'execution' was traumatic enough that the people buried these 'daughters' around the sanctuary and their presence disappeared. By abandoning their country twice within 12 months to the invading forces of the Great King, the Athenians became a stateless people, bereft of their city (apolis). The situation in Athens was one of many encountered by Greek poleis during one of the ancient world's most turbulent epochs when Herodotus and Thucydides describe metoikesis (migration) and apolis (becoming stateless) as a frequent occurrence. How did the Athenians recover from the Persian invasions and achieve what should be considered the unthinkable? In history, the Athenian abandonment, devastation and subsequent recovery of their polis, is arguably one of the greatest feats of endurance by a settled population. However, the extent of destruction, cultural repair and economic recovery has not been adequately analysed. 'Athenians' is an introductory study of a catastrophic invasion and a people's response, survival and repair of their polis and identity. The study reinvestigates the Kleisthenic reforms to identify Demokratia as a system which integrated Attica's key strengths; topography, resources, together with its people to defend, withdraw and recover economically time and again from formidable opponents and devastating defeats.