Home
"Acropolis" is a word we use all the time. It comes out of the Greek, as so many words that will come up as we talk about the Greeks that filter into our own language and meaning. Acropolis is not unique to Athens. Most Greek city-states that had decent cities in them had an acropolis. It simply means a high area around which the city is often built and it was often built up or walled around so you had a large, flat area on top; essentially as if you were building a base for a fortress or in this case they would say a citadel. It would be a place that if something bad happened to the city, and the original city was really close around where the acropolis is, people could then retreat up onto the citadel and they could be safe there, or relatively safe, there and hopefully withstand the siege.
All the picture of Athens, of course, are dominated by the Athenian Acropolis and the building that sits on top of it, because it's this great, flat, dominant space. So, it comes to be an iconic thing to the Athenians themselves as it is to us and it becomes the focal point for major civic and religious structures and ceremonies. It becomes a big part of their lives. It certainly would have been visually a big part of their lives as they looked up at it on a daily basis because you could see it everywhere when you were in Athens. It had been there, there had been some structures. The older structures had been destroyed by the Persians when they took the city. Then we get that great building, which is the Parthenon, and is built by the Athenians as they grow in wealth.
Their economy had been booming. They were involved extensively in trade at sea throughout the Mediterranean and they had found silver mines in Attica. Due to the great wealth that they were acquiring, they were able to build this immense structure filled with columns on the outside and in the inside, and it would eventually have a gigantic statue of the patron goddess of the city which is, of course, Athena. But the building takes up many meanings; the fact is that anyone entering the city would be immensely impressed with the structure. It emphasizes Athens' power and wealth. The actual Athenians, we must remember and as I will state again, are very religious people. Ancient peoples—we often don't understand their religion perhaps, therefore we don't think they are religious. Athenians are very religious people and are very serious about their worship of the gods, in particular Athena, and they saw this as a way to win her favor and to continue to keep her favor. So, a very important building, and often if there were religious processions they would go up onto the Acropolis; certainly getting closer to the gods.
The Agora is kind of a good term used for the overall kind of center where Athenian political and cultural life happened. The Agora is also attached to the vast market area that the Athenians liked to engage each other in. It had a number of the political buildings. It would also have places where they gave plays which were very important to the Athenians. They also imbued the plays with religious significance in some ways. The Athenians, remember, don't just talk to each other in a political building, since every Athenian who is a citizen is a voter—and voting directly, not to representation, but voting directly. You have political discussions, and arguments, and interactions all throughout the city. So, it was the very notion of very vibrant things.
Visitors would often say that the Athenians seemed to be drunk with politics; they just wanted to argue and talk about these things all the time. Remember too that an ancient argument means two people talking to try to come up with a better idea; not just two people talking to shout each other down. So, the Agora, in and around the Acropolis, create this great, immediate, visual, physical reality of the Athenian democracy and the Athenian economy; its political and cultural life which are all kind of vibrantly around there. So, perhaps with it we can see why the Athenians see themselves as the, perhaps, natural leaders of the Greek world—not that the rest of the Greek world sees that—but they come to see themselves as the inheritors of the mantle of Greek leadership, which will lead to problems in the future.