Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides / by Jane Ellen Harrison.

  • Jane Ellen Harrison
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides / by Jane Ellen Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Laconia elsewhere^ he does not use it here. He says the in- habitants of Athens lived ‘in towns’ {tcara TroXe/^), or, as it would be safer to translate it, ‘in burghs.’ It is necessary at the outset to understand clearly what the word polis here means. We use the word ‘town’ in contra- distinction to country, but from the account of Thucydides it is clear that people could live in a polis and yet lead a country life. Our word city is still less appropriate; ‘city’ to us means a very large town, a place where people live crowded together. A polis, as Thucydides here uses the word, was a community of people living on and immediately about a fortified hill or citadel— a citadel-community. The life lived in such a community was essentially a country life. A p)olis was a citadel, only that our word ‘ citadel ’ is over-weighted with military association. Athens then, in the days of Kekrops and the other kings down to Theseus, was one among many other citadel-communities or burghs. Like the other scattered burghs, like Aphidna, like Thoricus, like Eleusis, it had its own local government, its own couDcil-house, its own magistrates. So independent were these citadel-communities that, Thucydides tells us, on one occasion Eleusis under Eumolpos actually made war on Athens under Erechtheus. So things went on till the reign of Theseus and his famous Synoikismos, the Dwelling-together or Unification. Theseus, Thucydides says, was a man of ideas and of the force of character necessary to carry them out. He substituted the one for the many; he put an end to the little local councils and council- houses and centralized the government of Attica in Athens. Where the government is, thither naturally population will flock. People began to gather into Athens, and for a certain percentage of the population town-life became fashionable. Then, and not till then, did the city become ‘great,’ and that ‘great’ city Theseus handed down to posterity. ‘And from that time down to the present day the Athenians celebrate to the Goddess at the public expense a festival called the Dwelling-together^.’ One unified city and one goddess, the goddess who needs no 1 Thucyd. i. 5, 10. ^ Thucyd. ii. 15 koX ^wolKLa eKelvov ^AdrjvaloL /cat vvv ry deep iopryv dyiioreXy TTOLOVat.