A Day in Old Athens - William Stearns Davis

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: it is obvious that the outward conditions under which this Athenian genius developed deserve our respectful attention. For assuredly such personages as Sophocles, Plato, and Phidias were not isolated creatures, who developed their genius apart from, or in spite of, the life about them, but rather were the ripe products of a society, which in its excellences and weaknesses presents some of the most interesting pictures and examples in the world. To understand the Athenian civilization and genius it is not enough to know the outward history of the times, the wars, the laws, and the lawmakers. We must see Athens as the average man saw it and lived in it from day to day, and then perhaps we can partially understand how it was that during the brief but wonderful era of Athenian freedom and prosperity,1 Athens was able to produce so many men of commanding genius as to win for her a place in the history of civilization which she can never lose. 3. The Small Size and Sterility of Attica. Attica was a very small country according to modern notions, and Athens the only large city therein. The land barely covered some 700 square miles, with 40 square miles more, if one includes the dependent island of Salamis. It was thus far smaller than the smallest of our American " states " (Rhode Island = 1250 square miles), and was not so large as many American counties. It was really a triangle of rocky, hill- scarred land thrust out into the .SCgean Sea, as if it were a sort of continuation of the more level district of Boeotia. Yet small as it was, the hills inclosing it to the west, the seas pressing it from the northeast and south, gave it a unity and isolation all its own. Attica was not an island; 1 That era may be assumed to begin with the battle of Marathon (490 B.c.), and it certainly..."