Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/892

 financial distress. He amended the constitution in some respects, and instituted a new national festival, the Panhellenica. In the period of the Antonines the endowment of professors out of the imperial treasury gave Athens a special status as a university town. Her whole energies seem henceforth devoted to academic pursuits; the military training of her youth was superseded by courses in philosophy and rhetoric; the chief organs of administration, the revived Areopagus and the senior Strategus, became as it were an education office. Save for an incursion by Goths in 267 and a temporary occupation by Alaric in 395, Athens spent the remaining centuries of the ancient world in quiet prosperity. The rhetorical schools experienced a brilliant revival under Constantine and his successors, when Athens became the alma mater of many notable men, including Julian, Libanius, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, and in her professors owned the last representatives of a humane and moralized paganism. The freedom of teaching was first curtailed by Theodosius I.; the edict of Justinian (529), forbidding the study of philosophy, dealt the death-blow to ancient Athens.

The authorities for the history of ancient Athens will mostly be found under : History, and the various biographies. The following books deal with special periods or subjects only:—(1) Early Athens: W. Warde Fowler, The City-State, ch. vi. (London, 1893). (2) The fifth and fourth centuries: the “Constitution of Athens,” ascribed to Xenophon; W. Oncken, Athen und Hellas (Leipzig, 1865); U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aus Kydathen (Berlin, 1880); L. Whibley, Political Parties at Athens (Cambridge, 1889); G. Gilbert, Beiträge zur inneren Geschichte Athens (Leipzig, 1877); J. Beloch, Die attische Politik seit Perikles (Leipzig, 1884). (3) The Hellenistic and Roman periods: J. P. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, from 323 to 146 (London, 1887), chs. v., vi., xvii.; A. Holm, Greek History (Eng. trans., London, 1898), iv. chs. vi. and xxiii.; Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Antigonos von Karystos (Berlin, 1881), pp. 178-291; W. Capes, University Life in Ancient Athens (London, 1877); A. Dumont, Essai sur l’Ephébie attique (Paris, 1875). (4) The Latin rule: G. Finlay, History of Greece (Oxford ed., 1877), vol. iv. ch. vi. (5) Constitutional History: The Aristotelian “Constitution of Athens”; U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aristoteles und Athen (Berlin and Leipzig, 1893), vol. ii.; G. Gilbert, Greek Constitutional Antiquities (Eng. trans., London, 1895), pp. 95-453; A. H. J. Greenidge, Handbook of Greek Constitutional History (Oxford, 1896), ch. vi.; J. W. Headlam, Election by Lot at Athens (Cambridge, 1891). (6) Finance and statistics: A. Boeckh, The Public Economy of the Athenians (Eng. trans., London, 1828); Ed. Meyer, Forschungen zur alten Geschichte (Halle, 1899), vol. ii. pp. 149-195. (7) Inscriptions: Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum, with supplements (Berlin, 1873–1895). (8) Coins: B. V. Head, Historia Numorum (Oxford, 1887), pp. 309-328.

8. Byzantine Period.—The city now sank into the position of a provincial Byzantine town. Already it had been robbed of many of its works of art, among them the Athena Promachos and the Parthenos of Pheidias, for the adornment of Constantinople, and further spoliation took place when the church of St Sophia was built in 532. The Parthenon, the Erechtheum, the “Theseum” and other temples were converted into Christian churches and were thus preserved throughout the middle ages. The history of Athens for the next four centuries is almost a blank; the city is rarely mentioned by the Byzantine chronicles of this period. The emperor Constantine II. spent some months here in 662-663. In 869 the see of Athens became an archbishopric. In 995 Attica was ravaged by the Bulgarians under their tsar Samuel, but Athens escaped; after the defeat of Samuel at Bēlasitza (1014) the emperor Basil II., who blinded 15,000 Bulgarian prisoners, came to Athens and celebrated his triumph by a thanksgiving service in the Parthenon (1018). From the Runic description on the marble lion of the Peiraeus it has been inferred that Harold Hardraada and the Norsemen in the service of the Byzantine emperors captured the Peiraeus in 1040, but this conclusion is not accepted by Gregorovius (bk. i. pp. 170-172). Like the rest of Greece, Athens suffered greatly from the rapacity of its Byzantine administrators. The letters of Acominatus, archbishop of Athens, towards the close of the 12th century, bewail the desolate condition of the city in language resembling that of Jeremiah in regard to Jerusalem.

9. Period of Latin Rule: 1204–1458.—After the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, Otho de la Roche was granted the lordship of Athens by Boniface of Montferrat, king of Thessalonica, with the title of Megaskyr ( = great lord). His nephew and successor, Guy I., obtained the title duke of Athens from Louis IX. of France in 1258. On the death of Guy II., last duke of the house of la Roche, in 1308, the duchy passed to his cousin, Walter of Brienne. He was expelled in 1311 by his Catalonian mercenaries; the mutineers bestowed the duchy “of Athens and Neopatras” on their leader, Roger Deslaur, and, in the following year, on Frederick of Aragon, king of Sicily. The Sicilian kings ruled Athens by viceroys till 1385, when the Florentine Nerio Acciajuoli, lord of Corinth, defeated the Catalonians and seized the city. Nerio, who received the title of duke from the king of Naples, founded a new dynasty. His palace was in the Propylaea; the lofty “Tower of the Franks,” which adjoined the south wing of that building, was possibly built in his time. This interesting historical monument was demolished by the Greek authorities in 1874, notwithstanding the protests of Penrose, Freeman and other scholars. The Acciajuoli dynasty lasted till June 1458, when the Acropolis after a stubborn resistance was taken by the Turks under Omar, the general of the sultan Mahommed II., who had occupied the lower city in 1456. The sultan entered Athens in the following month; he was greatly struck by its ancient monuments and treated its inhabitants with comparative leniency.

10. Period of Turkish Rule: 1458–1833.—After the Turkish conquest Athens disappeared from the eyes of Western civilization. The principal interest of the following centuries lies in the researches of successive travellers, who may be said to have rediscovered the city, and in the fate of its ancient monuments, several of which were still in fair preservation at the beginning of this period. The Parthenon was transformed into a mosque; the existing minaret at its south-western corner was built after 1466. The Propylaea served as the residence of the Turkish commandant and the Erechtheum as his harem. In 1466 the Venetians succeeded in occupying the city, but failed to take the Acropolis. About 1645 a powder magazine in the Propylaea was ignited by lightning and the upper portion of the structure was destroyed. Under Francesco Morosini the Venetians again attacked Athens in September 1687; a shot fired during the bombardment of the Acropolis caused a powder magazine in the Parthenon to explode, and the building was rent asunder. After capturing the Acropolis the Venetians employed material from its ancient edifices in repairing its walls. They withdrew in the following year, when the Turks set fire to the city. The central sculptures of the western pediment of the Parthenon, which Morosini intended to take to Venice, were unskilfully detached by his workmen, and falling to the ground were broken to pieces. Several ancient monuments were sacrificed to provide material for a new wall with which the Turks surrounded the city in 1778.

During the 18th century many works of art, which still remained in situ, fell a prey to foreign collectors. The removal to London in 1812 of most of the remaining sculptures of the Parthenon by Lord Elgin possibly rescued many of them from injury in the period of warfare which followed. In 1821 the Greek insurgents surprised the city, and in 1822 captured the Acropolis. Athens again fell into the hands of the Turks in 1826, who bombarded and took the Acropolis in the following year; the Erechtheum suffered greatly, and the monument of Thrasyllus was destroyed. The Turks remained in possession of the Acropolis till 1833, when Athens was chosen as the capital of the newly established kingdom of Greece; since that date the history of the city forms part of that of modern Greece. (See : History, modern.)

.—W. M. Leake, Topography of Athens and the Demi (2nd ed., London, 1841); C. Wachsmuth, Die Stadt Athen im Alterthum (vol. i., Leipzig, 1874; vol. ii. part i., Leipzig, 1890); E. Burnouf, La Ville et l’acropole d’Athènes aux diverses époques (Paris, 1877); F. C. Penrose, Principles of Athenian Architecture (London, 1888); J. E. Harrison, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (London, 1890); E. Curtius and A. Milchhöfer, Stadtgeschichte von Athen (Berlin, 1891); H. Hitzig and H. Blümner, Pausanias (text and commentary; vol. i., Berlin, 1896); J. G. Frazer, Pausanias (translation and commentary; 6 vols., London, 1898. The commentary on Pausanias’ description of Athens,