I would like to continue the Introduction to the Acropolis.
I would like to speak a little bit about an attack that was organized against the city-state of Athens by a superpower at the very time when democracy was born here. When this little miracle called democracy started in Athens, we had all these changes in the political and social system of the city of Athens. On the other side of the Aegean Sea, we also had major events. The King of Persia, Darius, had expanded his kingdom, his empire, from the Indian borders to the Aegean Sea, and he had conquered one by one all the Greek states of the coast.
Athens, feeling an obligation, sent some soldiers and ships to help Miletus. Miletus was considered the twin city of Athens. Finally, all of Asia Minor was conquered, and for Darius, the help Athenians had sent to Miletus was a very good pretext to expand his empire further west. So, for the first time in history, we have an attack from east to west, from Asia to Europe, from an empire, the super military power of that time, against a city-state. The attack is like the attack of an elephant against an ant. When Athenians heard that 100,000 Persian soldiers led by two generals were crossing the Aegean Sea and coming against Athens, they were scared to death. The Athenian assembly, the body of the citizens, gathered at the square and decided that all men from the age of 16 to 65 had to join the army. They then had to make a very important and crucial decision about the slaves. The city at that time had slaves, and even one of them escaping to the enemy could make the position of the Athenians even worse by revealing secrets of the city to the Persians. In another society, they might have killed all the slaves before the attack for their own safety.
However, the Athenians decided to do something else. They took the risk to set them all free by giving them equal rights with themselves, making them citizens of Athens with one condition: those who could fight had to fight on their side. Since then, and for a while, the city of Athens was a city of free people, with no slaves in Athens. All the Athenian men from ages 16 to 65, including the former slaves, gathered at Marathon Beach.
They were 10,000 to face the coming Persians, one to ten. They went there not expecting any victory; they went there to die with honor, defending their place. But behind history is the Master. There are many who say that history is written by the winners of the battlefields and the leaders of human thought. Actually, these are just methods in the hands of the Master of History. The Master of History had another idea. By the end of the day of the battle, more than 6,000 Persians had vanished in a nearby marsh. From the Athenian side, only 192 were killed. This is why, after the battle a soldier, in full armor, ran from Marathon to the city to announce the good news of victory. This man is the first marathon runner of antiquity. He arrived in the city, in the Agora, the square, and said, “Be joyful. We won,” and then he fell dead. The Persians were pushed back for 10 years. Darius was offended, and he ordered one of his servants every morning before breakfast to repeat the phrase, “Don’t forget the Athenians.” Ten years later, in the year 480, his son Xerxes, a biblical figure mentioned in the Book of Esther as the husband of Queen Esther, decided to fulfill his father’s dream and come against Athens personally. According to the historians of the time, he came out of Asia, crossing the Dardanelles into Thrace, leading 1,700,000 soldiers. He was escorted by a terribly big navy consisting of 1,400 ships, and he was responsible for the food supplies for this army. They went through the Thermopylae gates and finally arrived in Athens. They found the city of Athens evacuated. The Athenian navy, consisting of 85 ships, had brought the Athenians to the islands. And then the city of Athens was totally leveled. Everything seemed to be over for Athens forever. The Persian admirals thought that the shortest way for them to go from Athens to Corinth was through the Straits of Salamis. There they were blocked by the Greek navy, consisting of 120 ships, 85 of them Athenian ships coming back from the evacuation of the city. Not because of any attack, but because of panic, the Persian ships started crashing into one another, and so the Persian navy destroyed itself, leaving the army without food supplies. This forced Xerxes to go back home. When the Athenians returned a year later, in 479, they decided to reconstruct their place and their political system. The people who participated in these Persian Wars decided altogether to leave the Acropolis of Athens intact so future generations of Athenians could see what a barbarian attack means. But the second and third generations, being emotionally distant from the events of the war and being in the culmination of the golden age of democracy when the city was very rich for many reasons, decided to reconstruct the Acropolis. The Acropolis of Athens is the first monument in history registered as being built by free people, not slaves, people experiencing the best human-made political system: democracy. Being under the euphoric feelings of such a brilliant and unexpected victory, they depicted all that inner situation in the aesthetics of the monuments. This is what makes the Acropolis of Athens today the emblem and symbol of Western civilization based on freedom, equality, democracy, and human rights, especially the temple which was first built up there called the Parthenon.
We are going to speak now about the monuments. This little theatrical structure, and the other monument at the top of the hill are also gifts to the city of Athens, like the Stoa of Attalos was a gift, like the upper part of the stadium, Hadrian’s Library, Hadrian’s Aqueduct, the Agora of Octavian Augustus, the Forum, and many other gifts. The structure you see here is not a theater for theatrical plays. The first theater of history, the Theater of Dionysus, was much bigger.
The little theatrical structure here is The Odeon.
The Odeon was roofed, had a capacity of approximately 5,000 seats, and was mostly for orations and musical performances.
In many cases in later antiquity, it was used by the assembly of Athens for their meetings. It was destroyed at the end of the third century by the attack of the Heruli. It was excavated in the 19th century, and the lower part of it was found in good shape, and so today, it is still in use.
During the summer weekends, the Athenian festival takes place there, and prominent musicians are honored to perform at this theatrical structure, which is called the Herodium, after the name of the benefactor, Herod Atticus.
Now, up there at the top of the hill, we have another monument erected in the second century AD, by a prominent man of the Mediterranean world who was not Athenian, nor Greek.
He was the throne prince of a country between Turkey and Syria today called Commagene. The name of this benefactor was Gaius Julius Antiochus Philopappos. We still call this monument of the second century AD the Philopappos Monument.
