Empires: The Greeks - Crucible of Civilization (2000) s01e01 Episode Script
The Revolution
The Greeks.
A people glorious and arrogant, valiant and headstrong.
These were the men and women who laid the very foundations of Western civilization.
Their monuments still recall perhapsaps the most extraordinary two centuries in history a time which saw the birth of science and politics philosophy, literature and drama which saw the creation of art and architecture we still strive to equal.
And the Greeks achieved all this against a backdrop of war and conflict.
For they would vanquish armies, navies, empires many times their size and build an empire of their own which stretched across the Mediterranean.
For one brief moment the mighty warships of the Greeks ruled the seas their prosperity unequaled.
These achievements, achievements which still shape our world were made not by figures lost to time but by men and women whose voices we can still hear whose lives we can still follow.
Men such as Themistocles, one of the world's greatest military generals Pericles, a politician of vision and genius and Socrates, the most famous philosopher in history.
This is the story of these astonishing individuals of the rise and fall of a civilization that changed the world.
THE GREEKS CRUCIBLE OF THE CIVILIZATION CHAPTER I: REVOLUTION 508 B.
C.
five centuries before the birth of Christ.
In a town called Athens, a tiny city in mainland Greece pandemonium ruled the streets.
The ordinary people had turned on their rulers demanding freedom from centuries of oppression.
At this moment, one man looked on an Athenian nobleman named Cleisthenes.
Cleisthenes had been brought up from birth to be a ruler to look down on these common people with contempt.
But this one night would be a turning point in his life, in the history of Greece, and in the history of civilization.
In a flash of inspiration, Cleisthenes would see that these ordinary people should have freedom a chance to shape their own destiny, to govern themselves.
And with this decision, Cleisthenes would set his fellow Greeks on the path to empire.
Historians estimate that Cleisthenes was born around 570 B.
C.
He was hardly the type to become a man of the people.
From his earliest days, he had been taught that he was an "aristocrat".
Ancient Greek for a member of the ruling class.
In the sixth century B.
C.
these aristocrats controlled everything that happened in Cleisthenes hometown.
A small settlement called Athens.
Athens lay in the center of a Mediterranean peninsula which Cleisthenes knew as Hellas and which we now call "Greece.
" In the days of Cleisthenes youth it would have seemed impossible that this city would soon rule an empire.
It certainly is not what at we'd call a city, forget Manhattan.
Athens, in the center, has public buildings but otherwise, I think one should imagine more a village style of accommodation and habitation.
The town was built around the Acropolis a steep-sided outcrop of bare rock a stronghold from which the Athenians could fend off the attacks of their neighbors.
In then arrow streets surrounding the Acropolis huddled the simple homes of farmers and tradesmen.
For these Athenians, reading and writing was a rare skill.
There was nothing that we might call science or medicine.
Life expectancy at birth was less than 15 years.
I think the idea that ancient Greek life was nasty, brutish and short would be entirely accurate.
Certainly, life was extremely tough.
And this was no society of equals.
The common Athenians lived under the rule of the aristocrats, men such as Cleisthenes father.
Athens was, in a sense, turned against itself.
You had one part of the population, the aristocratic elite, holding power at the expense of the rest of the citizen population.
For the great writer, Aristotle this was a world riven by injustice.
"The whole country was in the hands of a few people".
"The hardest and bitterest thing for the masses was their state of serfdom, not that they weren't discontented with anything else for to speak generally, they had no part nor share in anything".
Dominated by aristocrats interested only in preserving their own power, Athens hardly seemed a state on the verge of building a great empire.
But then, Greece also seemed an unlikely land to give rise to greatness.
If you look at the physical world of Greece it's not the kind of place that you'd immediately expect to produce a great civilization.
Simply too many mountains.
Greece does not have the obvious kind of physical unity that typically seems to be associated with the really great imperial civilizations of the ancient world.
The great civilizations of Cleisthenes day lay to the south and east in Egypt and Persia.
They had grown up around rivers and the fertile plains stretching from their banks.
But mainland Greece had no great rivers or open plains.
This was a landscape riven by mountain ranges.
Off her coast lay countless tiny islands.
It was impossible for a single ruler to dominate this fragmented world.
Instead, Greece was divided into countless tiny nations called city-states, each fiercely independent, each with its own culture and history.
And Cleisthenes Athens was not nearly the most powerful or important of these tiny nations.
Argos had stood for over a thousand years.
Her citizens were able to trace their history back to the mythical days of the Trojan war.
The Corinthians dominated Greek trade.
Their ships plied the Mediterranean ferrying goods back and forth from Egypt, Assyria and Italy.
But there was one city-state which had military power, which appeared that it might come to dominate all of Cleisthenes Greece.
In the south of Greece around the reed beds of the river Eurotas lay the city-state of Sparta.
The Spartans were brought up from birth to be soldiers.
Raised in the field, separated from their families their lives structured around discipline and war.
The center of an average Spartan man's life was his barracks and he was brought up to be a military man.
The Spartans lived a life stripped of comforts with few possessions apart from their weapons and their cloaks, dyed red to conceal their or their victim's blood.
Spartans were brought up to put up with anything and all sorts of storiesthe best being of a visiting Sybarite visiting Sparta, eating the local food and saying now he understood why the Spartans were so willing to die because death was as nothing to eating their food.
The Spartans were ruthless expansionists.
By Cleisthenes time they'd conquered all of the surrounding regions, more than 4,000 square miles.
For the rest of the Greeks the Spartans were a threat always on the horizon.
This then was the world of Cleisthenes childhood brought up a member of a self-interested elite in a state that was only a third-rate power.
It was an unlikely beginning for the man who would set Greece on the path to empire.
But then, Cleisthenes had always been a man fired by a dream the uniquely Greek vision of the greatness a man could achieve.
If there was one thing that inspired Cleisthenes and his fellow Greeks it was their stories ancient tales and myths.
The country was continually crisscrossed by hundreds of traveling bards who recited these tales to whoever would pay.
These traveling bards would have regularly visited the Athens of Cleisthenes childhood and their stories would have influenced and shaped him from his earliest days.
The two most famous tales these singers told are still preserved: The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed by the legendary poet Homer.
These works tell of mighty battles and epic struggles.
And at their heart lie the heroes mythical figures whose strength had won them power and glory.
Heroes, almost by definition were doers of great deeds.
The more heads you knocked and the more young women that you deflowered the grater your heroic status.
Heroes were terrific achievers.
Images of heroes are found all over Greek art.
These warlike figures, valiant, beautiful determined to seize victory are all costs were the Greek ideal.
This, the vision of the hero, the ideal of the man of action was the model that Cleisthenes was brought up to follow to pursue a life of greatness and glory won through strength and valor to seize power and victory for himself and himself alone to become a real-life hero.
But Cleisthenes was not the only one to take the tales of the mythical heroes to heart.
There's a big change in the middle of the sixth century, when one man seizes control of the government as what at the Greeks called a tyrant.
The story of how this "tyrant," or sole ruler, came to power has been preserved by the historian Herodotus.
One day, a man of dignified and noble bearing rode into the city of Athens.
Beside him stood a tall and beautiful woman, a woman he claimed was the patron goddess of Athens Athena.
This dashing figure demanded that he be given the rule of Athens for like one of Homer's heroes he had the protection of a goddess.
Surprisingly, he was welcomed by the Athenians as their new ruler despite the fact that the goddess was simply a particularly tall girl from a neighboring village.
And the heroic figure was an ordinary man called Peisistratus.
Cleisthenes' own brother in law.
Peisistratus was, I think an excellent politician.
He was a man, without doubt, with an eye for the main chance.
But as he consolidated his rule it became clear that Peisistratus had far greater ambitions than simply gaining power.
Peisistratus was an extremely intelligent man.
He clearly understood that if he was going to maintain control of Athens if he was going to be able to consolidate his rule and pass it on to his sons, which is clearly his ambition he would have to find allies.
Peisistratus took an extraordinary step.
He turned to the common Athenians for support, undermining the whole hierarchy of aristocrats and commoners that had endured for centuries.
Peisistratus redued taxes and introduced free loans to allow the people to build up their farms.
And by offering the Athenians the chance of prosperity Peisistratus began to transform his city.
With the rise of Peisistratus we start to see the success of agrarianism accelerated at Athens and that's going to be a kernel that's going to grow and grow and grow in the ensuing two centuries.
And one of the results of that is we see more vines and olives.
Olive trees manifest themselves in every aspect of Greek culture.
Economically, they allow people to have cooking oil they allow people to eat olives they allow people to use lubricants, soap, fuel.
So it's a very valuable economic commodity.
The land around Athens produced excellent olives, the best in the Greek world.
And, as production soared the Athenians found a ready market for this oil not only in the other Greek states, but across the sea in Egypt and Phoenicia, Persia and Assyria.
Greece is in the middle of an extraordinary grouping of ancient civilizations.
It's bounded on the east by the great Persian empire on the south by the age-old civilization of Egypt on the west, the Etruscans and the Romans.
Greeks were scattered, Plato has a rather nice phrase, "like ants or frogs round a pond.
" The eastern Mediterranean was the greatest marketplace of the ancient world.
It seemed that everyone had something to sell: grain from Scythia, salt fish from the Black Sea wine from the great vineyards of the island of Chios gold, silver, art and finery from Egypt.
And everyone was willing to trade for Athenian olive oil.
As goods flowed in and out of the Athenian harbor the Athenians found their wealth and prosperity on the rise.
But the most astonishing consequence of Athens' sudden expansion was to be found in the darkest streets of the city Athens' first great artistic legacy: the vase.
I think that what at's fascinating about the pottery is that, in its own time, it wasn't a big deal artistically.
What was inside the pots was almost invariably worth more than the pot itself.
Here, in the area known as the Kerameikos, ancient Athens' red-light district, could also be found the potters' workshops.
These common artisans were amongst the lowest of the low in Athenian society.
If you were a potter in Athenian society I won't say you were the scum of the earth but you certainly, had no especial respect.
It was hard, incessant work unenvied by the citizen population.
Pottery had been a staple across the ancient world for hundreds of years used in the kitchen at home and for transporting oils and food.
But it had always been simple in design using geometric patterns and basic figures, designs based on Egyptian and Assyrian art.
But Athenian potters, as they decorated their work began to develop a whole new style of painting, a freshness and a naturalism never before seen.
A style still astonishing today.
It's now become almost commonplace for a Greek vase on the modern antiquities market to fetch millions of dollars or pounds.
And if the makers of those vases had any idea of what we were shelling out for them, their graves would spin with either resentment or just absolute hilarity.
These Athenian potters seem to have been motivated not by the idea of producing great art for eternity but of outdoing each other.
On one particularly fine vase, we find the proud comment "Euthymides, son of Polias drew this.
" And then underneath "And I'll bet Leuphronias couldn't have managed it.
" For the first time in their history the ordinary Athenians had tasted freedom.
And they had shown their capacity for extraordinary achievement.
Cleisthenes grew to man hood under Peisistratus' rule.
And he saw how Athens changed.
His home had turned from a modest rural settlement in to an international economic power.
But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
In the year 527 B.
C.
, he died and was laid to rest here in the Athenian graveyard.
His son, Hippias, took over.
At first, Hippias followed in his father's footsteps ruling Athens with a fair hand.
But soon, the Athenians discovered the perilous nature of tyranny.
Historians tell us that in the year 514 B.
C.
, Hippias' brother was murdered.
Aggrieved and bitter the tyrant's behavior completely changed.
Hippias not only executed the murderers but cruelly tortured one of their wives to death as well.
Aristotle described the ruler's slide towards madness.
After this, the tyranny became much, much harsher for Hippias ordered numerous executions and sentences of exile in reve ge for his brother.
And he became embittered and suspicious of everybody.
The freedoms that the common Athenians had gained under Peisistratus were now stripped away.
There was now a real tyranny in the modern sense, in Athens.
Peisistratus had come into power for a cause.
His son now had no cause other than self-preservation.
Life for Cleisthenes had now become increasingly dangerous for the paranoid dictator knew that it was from here, from the aristocrats, that the greatest threat to his power could come.
And Hippias' fears would be proved right.
With the hardening of the attitude of the tyranny the time now seemed to be ripe.
Cleisthenes decided to take his first great gamble.
He would try to overthrow Hippias to gain power for himself and his family.
Cleisthenes ambition to make his mark upon the scene is something that, of course, would have been impressed on him from a very early age from the stories of the heroes that their need to succeed and to strike at the right time.
For Cleisthenes himself it would be an achievement.
Cleisthenes assembled a conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant.
Hippias was trapped in his stronghold captured and banished from Athens forever.
The year was 510 B.
C.
, and Cleisthenes was now one of the most powerful figures in Athens.
He had lived up to the heroic myths he'd been brought up to follow since childhood.
But Greek society was changing.
The heroic urge that drove Cleisthenes was no longer reserved for the elite.
It was now permeating every level of Greek society.
This is Olympia in southern Greece.
Here, once every four years men from across the Greek world would gather to compete in a vast contest of athletic skill.
This was the ancestor of the modern Olympic games.
The competitions had been founded in 776 B.
C.
two centuries before Cleisthenes had even been born.
Then, they had been an exclusive competition for the wealthiest of the Greeks.
But by Cleisthenes time the games had evolved to allow anyone to take part.
A nobleman could now race against a potter a king against a fishmonger.
The Olympic games were a chance for any Greeks to display the sort of heroic qualities that, the heroes of Homer had displayed.
The competitions had their roots in the skills displayed by the mythical heroes chariot racing running wrestling boxing.
But here there was no real prize just a wreath of olives and fame through out Greece.
A competitor would be surrounded by the largest gathering of Greeks, in peace, that he would ever experience.
Perhaps as many as 40,000 Greeks would gather for the Olympic games.
Greeks would travel hundreds of miles to attend the Olympics and during the festival, the land surrounding the stadiums would be covered with encampments.
But for the Greek man, whatever his origin or class to win here would be the highlight of his life.
You had, briefly a moment of glory, of extreme fame which was what the competitive culture of the Greeks valued so highly.
Here, the Greeks had perhaps found a civilized way to satisfy the heroic ideal.
They had built a meritocracy based on skill and ability where anyone could win.
But a world what ere everyone could seize victory could only make Athens even more unstable.
As soon as Cleisthenes gained power he found that others were conspiring against him.
Here, heroism still meant one thing: seize power whenever and however you can.
The only rule is that you get what you can and that you fight.
You have to go in there and show that you can win.
The most ambitious of those conspiring against Cleisthenes was a man named lsagoras.
Isagoras was an oth er Athenian aristocrat.
He, too, had been brought up to beleve that power was his right.
But lsagoras also knew that he could not gain power on his own.
Isagoras took an unprecedented step.
He turned outside Athens for support.
He sent a message to the Spartans, Greece's most feared warriors.
Isagoras was an old friend of the Spartans.
Rumor had it that he had shared his wife with the Spartan king.
The Spartans immediately provided a force of their finest troops to back up lsagoras's bid for power to help him betray his city.
lsagoras really was upping the stakes.
He brought to the most powerful state in Greece.
It was pretty clear he was going to turn Athens into a subject state to Sparta.
With his Spartan force lsagoras staged a coup, seizing control of Athens.
He and his troops would rule from the high point of the city the stronghold atop the Acropolis.
The first targets of the new tyrant were the other aristocrats Cleisthenes, most of all.
Over 700 households were cast out of Athens including Cleisthenes and his entire family.
Cleisthenes would leave his city living once again under the hand of a despotic dictator a dictator who now ruled with the support of the most fearsome power in Greece, the Spartans.
For Cleisthenes all his childhood lessons seemed betrayed.
He had been brought up to be an aristocrat and a ruler to emulate the mythical heroes.
But all this had led to was conflict and feuding, death and exile power struggles amongst an aristocratic elite.
How could Athens ever escape from this pointless cycle of violence? But even as Cleisthenes agonized in exile Athens was rocked by an extraordinary even t.
Like their mythical heroes the ordinary people of Athens now took their destiny into their own hands.
They rose up in revolution.
Isagoras and his Spartan allies blockaded them selves atop the Acropolis, the high point of the city.
But even there, they could not escape the fury of the common Athenians.
For two days and nights lsagoras held out against this extraordinary uprising.
Until finally, on the morning of the third day he was forced to surrender.
The year was 508 B.
C.
This would be Athens' first step to empire and glory.
For the first time in recorded history the people had turned on their rulers and seized power forthem selves.
Athens, at this point is in control of the mob the ordinary people who had risen up, with out organized leadership, and then the question is, what happens now? At this new dawn the Athenian people now turned to one man a figure whose life, whose experiences and disappointments had given him a unique vision.
Cleisthenes was recalled from exile and asked to build a government.
When Cleisthenes returned to Athens after the expulsion of the Spartans he faced a really remarkable challenge.
There was no possibility for just simply putting back in power a group of aristocrats.
There was no possibility for him to declare himself tyrant.
In a sense, what Cleisthenes had to do is design a revolutionary governmental solution for a revolutionary political situation.
For Cleisthenes the problem was how to give his fellow Athenians the say in their future that he knew they must now have.
On an Athenian hillside he had a great meeting place carved out from the bare rock.
Here, in the shadow of the Acropolis the citizens of Athens could now gather to discuss the future of their state.
On these very steps, rich and poor a like could stand and address their fellow citizen s.
This is the ancestor of the British House of Commons the American Congress, of parliaments across the world.
And where government had once been decided by the strength of a swordarm or the thrust of a sharpened spear.
Cleisthenes instituted the simple vote: a white pebble for yes, a black pebble for no.
And with this elegant and simple idea Cleisthenes instituted the rule of the people, a system of government which we now know as democracy.
The great Athenian assembly would gather every nine days to vote on issues covering the entire administration of the state.
From the raising of taxes to the building of roads from the price of figs to the declaration of war.
Athenian democracy is a very different sort of democracy from ours.
One has a sense, as an Athenian citizen that you really can make a difference.
There is no "us and them.
" There is no government separate from the ordinary Athenian citizen body.
They are the government.
Democracy represented a sharp break.
An originally elitist, heroic culture was now turned on its head, and the idea was that even ordinary Greeks who weren't aristocratic, who were not rich could be, as it were, heroes in politics.
It was a system of government that would transform this tiny state, and would set off one of the greatest flowerings of civilization the world had ever seen.
It's not just an accident that you had democracy and you had this tremendous flourishing of culture.
I think that democracy really does, in a very real way unleash, make possible potentials within human societies that are very unlikely to be unleashed, to be made actual in any other way.
But it would not be Cleisthenes task to lead Athens on to her greatest days.
For a new generation of Athenians would take up his legacy.
These Athenians would face struggles that would have stunned their ancestors for they would have to defend their state from invasion and destruction.
The world's first democracy would now be tested in the crucible of war and conflict.
Created, Adapted and syncronyzed by @Goanzaloo.
with some of the most important individuals with whom he talked.
There's jokes that suggest that Aspasia actually was the person what o wrote Pericles' speeches.
Pericles and his circle were to become one of the most famous and influential groups in Western history.
But in fifth-century Athens the highest achievements of art and culture were not restricted to the elite.
Here in the shadow of the Acropolis sits the world's first theater.
Twice a year the Athenian population would gather here to watch a great festival a festival of drama.
Television, cinema, theater all owe their existence to this place.
For here is the home of popular entertainment.
There's one huge difference between the ancient theater and our own and that is that it was incredibly noisy.
We hear stories of how when they didn't like a play the audience booed and they hissed and they actually got actors driven off the stage.
But there's other stories that showed that when they were going with the story and deeply involved in it they actually all collectively burst into tears.
The favorite tales of the Greek stage were called tragedies.
These were stories as shocking as a contemporary horror movie.
The tragedies told stories of great men falling from their heights, losing everything they owned.
Greek tragedy shows human beings however able, however brilliant, however intelligent quite unable to alter the destinies which have been decreed forthem.
These tragedies have fascinated audiences ever since.
This 19th century painting shows the story of the mythical ruler Agamemnon, who was murdered by his own wife.
Another tragedy told of King Oedipus who gouged out his eyes when he discovered that he had married h is own mother.
These Athenians, natives of the greatest city in the ancient world seemed to revel in seeing how frail greatness could really be.
I don't think we can use Greek tragedy to tell us exactly what happened in reality.
It's not a document of Athenian social life.
But what it does do is take us directly and immediately into the psychological heart of those Athenian men.
Th e kin d of dreams an d fantasies an d fears and imaginary scenarios that they came up with in the theater have to tell us just as much about them as any document of everyday reality could.
Theaters were built in every major Greek city in Sparta, Corinth, on the island of Delos, here in Delphi.
Athens was the heart of a cultural revolution that would spread across the Mediterranean and echo around the world.
Pericles an Athens seems to me to belong in a smallish collection of cities where truly great moments in the human experience took place.
Culture, in the broadest sense, reaches a peak.
But after 20 years of building the cultural capital of the Western world, Pericles and his fellow Athenians would now find that their theater and their tragedies would hold a bitter sting.
It is possible to think of Pericles, indeed, I think of him.
As a man with atragic flaw as the sort of man whose greatest qualities the ones that make him most admirable and successful turn out to be the seeds of his own destruction.
Pericles began to plan a grand new venture a venture even more ambitious than the Parthenon.
He wanted to make Athens the undisputed leader of the Mediterranean.
Little did Pericles know that he would now bring Athens not glory, but death, destruction and the loss of her empire.
- Created, synced and
A people glorious and arrogant, valiant and headstrong.
These were the men and women who laid the very foundations of Western civilization.
Their monuments still recall perhapsaps the most extraordinary two centuries in history a time which saw the birth of science and politics philosophy, literature and drama which saw the creation of art and architecture we still strive to equal.
And the Greeks achieved all this against a backdrop of war and conflict.
For they would vanquish armies, navies, empires many times their size and build an empire of their own which stretched across the Mediterranean.
For one brief moment the mighty warships of the Greeks ruled the seas their prosperity unequaled.
These achievements, achievements which still shape our world were made not by figures lost to time but by men and women whose voices we can still hear whose lives we can still follow.
Men such as Themistocles, one of the world's greatest military generals Pericles, a politician of vision and genius and Socrates, the most famous philosopher in history.
This is the story of these astonishing individuals of the rise and fall of a civilization that changed the world.
THE GREEKS CRUCIBLE OF THE CIVILIZATION CHAPTER I: REVOLUTION 508 B.
C.
five centuries before the birth of Christ.
In a town called Athens, a tiny city in mainland Greece pandemonium ruled the streets.
The ordinary people had turned on their rulers demanding freedom from centuries of oppression.
At this moment, one man looked on an Athenian nobleman named Cleisthenes.
Cleisthenes had been brought up from birth to be a ruler to look down on these common people with contempt.
But this one night would be a turning point in his life, in the history of Greece, and in the history of civilization.
In a flash of inspiration, Cleisthenes would see that these ordinary people should have freedom a chance to shape their own destiny, to govern themselves.
And with this decision, Cleisthenes would set his fellow Greeks on the path to empire.
Historians estimate that Cleisthenes was born around 570 B.
C.
He was hardly the type to become a man of the people.
From his earliest days, he had been taught that he was an "aristocrat".
Ancient Greek for a member of the ruling class.
In the sixth century B.
C.
these aristocrats controlled everything that happened in Cleisthenes hometown.
A small settlement called Athens.
Athens lay in the center of a Mediterranean peninsula which Cleisthenes knew as Hellas and which we now call "Greece.
" In the days of Cleisthenes youth it would have seemed impossible that this city would soon rule an empire.
It certainly is not what at we'd call a city, forget Manhattan.
Athens, in the center, has public buildings but otherwise, I think one should imagine more a village style of accommodation and habitation.
The town was built around the Acropolis a steep-sided outcrop of bare rock a stronghold from which the Athenians could fend off the attacks of their neighbors.
In then arrow streets surrounding the Acropolis huddled the simple homes of farmers and tradesmen.
For these Athenians, reading and writing was a rare skill.
There was nothing that we might call science or medicine.
Life expectancy at birth was less than 15 years.
I think the idea that ancient Greek life was nasty, brutish and short would be entirely accurate.
Certainly, life was extremely tough.
And this was no society of equals.
The common Athenians lived under the rule of the aristocrats, men such as Cleisthenes father.
Athens was, in a sense, turned against itself.
You had one part of the population, the aristocratic elite, holding power at the expense of the rest of the citizen population.
For the great writer, Aristotle this was a world riven by injustice.
"The whole country was in the hands of a few people".
"The hardest and bitterest thing for the masses was their state of serfdom, not that they weren't discontented with anything else for to speak generally, they had no part nor share in anything".
Dominated by aristocrats interested only in preserving their own power, Athens hardly seemed a state on the verge of building a great empire.
But then, Greece also seemed an unlikely land to give rise to greatness.
If you look at the physical world of Greece it's not the kind of place that you'd immediately expect to produce a great civilization.
Simply too many mountains.
Greece does not have the obvious kind of physical unity that typically seems to be associated with the really great imperial civilizations of the ancient world.
The great civilizations of Cleisthenes day lay to the south and east in Egypt and Persia.
They had grown up around rivers and the fertile plains stretching from their banks.
But mainland Greece had no great rivers or open plains.
This was a landscape riven by mountain ranges.
Off her coast lay countless tiny islands.
It was impossible for a single ruler to dominate this fragmented world.
Instead, Greece was divided into countless tiny nations called city-states, each fiercely independent, each with its own culture and history.
And Cleisthenes Athens was not nearly the most powerful or important of these tiny nations.
Argos had stood for over a thousand years.
Her citizens were able to trace their history back to the mythical days of the Trojan war.
The Corinthians dominated Greek trade.
Their ships plied the Mediterranean ferrying goods back and forth from Egypt, Assyria and Italy.
But there was one city-state which had military power, which appeared that it might come to dominate all of Cleisthenes Greece.
In the south of Greece around the reed beds of the river Eurotas lay the city-state of Sparta.
The Spartans were brought up from birth to be soldiers.
Raised in the field, separated from their families their lives structured around discipline and war.
The center of an average Spartan man's life was his barracks and he was brought up to be a military man.
The Spartans lived a life stripped of comforts with few possessions apart from their weapons and their cloaks, dyed red to conceal their or their victim's blood.
Spartans were brought up to put up with anything and all sorts of storiesthe best being of a visiting Sybarite visiting Sparta, eating the local food and saying now he understood why the Spartans were so willing to die because death was as nothing to eating their food.
The Spartans were ruthless expansionists.
By Cleisthenes time they'd conquered all of the surrounding regions, more than 4,000 square miles.
For the rest of the Greeks the Spartans were a threat always on the horizon.
This then was the world of Cleisthenes childhood brought up a member of a self-interested elite in a state that was only a third-rate power.
It was an unlikely beginning for the man who would set Greece on the path to empire.
But then, Cleisthenes had always been a man fired by a dream the uniquely Greek vision of the greatness a man could achieve.
If there was one thing that inspired Cleisthenes and his fellow Greeks it was their stories ancient tales and myths.
The country was continually crisscrossed by hundreds of traveling bards who recited these tales to whoever would pay.
These traveling bards would have regularly visited the Athens of Cleisthenes childhood and their stories would have influenced and shaped him from his earliest days.
The two most famous tales these singers told are still preserved: The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed by the legendary poet Homer.
These works tell of mighty battles and epic struggles.
And at their heart lie the heroes mythical figures whose strength had won them power and glory.
Heroes, almost by definition were doers of great deeds.
The more heads you knocked and the more young women that you deflowered the grater your heroic status.
Heroes were terrific achievers.
Images of heroes are found all over Greek art.
These warlike figures, valiant, beautiful determined to seize victory are all costs were the Greek ideal.
This, the vision of the hero, the ideal of the man of action was the model that Cleisthenes was brought up to follow to pursue a life of greatness and glory won through strength and valor to seize power and victory for himself and himself alone to become a real-life hero.
But Cleisthenes was not the only one to take the tales of the mythical heroes to heart.
There's a big change in the middle of the sixth century, when one man seizes control of the government as what at the Greeks called a tyrant.
The story of how this "tyrant," or sole ruler, came to power has been preserved by the historian Herodotus.
One day, a man of dignified and noble bearing rode into the city of Athens.
Beside him stood a tall and beautiful woman, a woman he claimed was the patron goddess of Athens Athena.
This dashing figure demanded that he be given the rule of Athens for like one of Homer's heroes he had the protection of a goddess.
Surprisingly, he was welcomed by the Athenians as their new ruler despite the fact that the goddess was simply a particularly tall girl from a neighboring village.
And the heroic figure was an ordinary man called Peisistratus.
Cleisthenes' own brother in law.
Peisistratus was, I think an excellent politician.
He was a man, without doubt, with an eye for the main chance.
But as he consolidated his rule it became clear that Peisistratus had far greater ambitions than simply gaining power.
Peisistratus was an extremely intelligent man.
He clearly understood that if he was going to maintain control of Athens if he was going to be able to consolidate his rule and pass it on to his sons, which is clearly his ambition he would have to find allies.
Peisistratus took an extraordinary step.
He turned to the common Athenians for support, undermining the whole hierarchy of aristocrats and commoners that had endured for centuries.
Peisistratus redued taxes and introduced free loans to allow the people to build up their farms.
And by offering the Athenians the chance of prosperity Peisistratus began to transform his city.
With the rise of Peisistratus we start to see the success of agrarianism accelerated at Athens and that's going to be a kernel that's going to grow and grow and grow in the ensuing two centuries.
And one of the results of that is we see more vines and olives.
Olive trees manifest themselves in every aspect of Greek culture.
Economically, they allow people to have cooking oil they allow people to eat olives they allow people to use lubricants, soap, fuel.
So it's a very valuable economic commodity.
The land around Athens produced excellent olives, the best in the Greek world.
And, as production soared the Athenians found a ready market for this oil not only in the other Greek states, but across the sea in Egypt and Phoenicia, Persia and Assyria.
Greece is in the middle of an extraordinary grouping of ancient civilizations.
It's bounded on the east by the great Persian empire on the south by the age-old civilization of Egypt on the west, the Etruscans and the Romans.
Greeks were scattered, Plato has a rather nice phrase, "like ants or frogs round a pond.
" The eastern Mediterranean was the greatest marketplace of the ancient world.
It seemed that everyone had something to sell: grain from Scythia, salt fish from the Black Sea wine from the great vineyards of the island of Chios gold, silver, art and finery from Egypt.
And everyone was willing to trade for Athenian olive oil.
As goods flowed in and out of the Athenian harbor the Athenians found their wealth and prosperity on the rise.
But the most astonishing consequence of Athens' sudden expansion was to be found in the darkest streets of the city Athens' first great artistic legacy: the vase.
I think that what at's fascinating about the pottery is that, in its own time, it wasn't a big deal artistically.
What was inside the pots was almost invariably worth more than the pot itself.
Here, in the area known as the Kerameikos, ancient Athens' red-light district, could also be found the potters' workshops.
These common artisans were amongst the lowest of the low in Athenian society.
If you were a potter in Athenian society I won't say you were the scum of the earth but you certainly, had no especial respect.
It was hard, incessant work unenvied by the citizen population.
Pottery had been a staple across the ancient world for hundreds of years used in the kitchen at home and for transporting oils and food.
But it had always been simple in design using geometric patterns and basic figures, designs based on Egyptian and Assyrian art.
But Athenian potters, as they decorated their work began to develop a whole new style of painting, a freshness and a naturalism never before seen.
A style still astonishing today.
It's now become almost commonplace for a Greek vase on the modern antiquities market to fetch millions of dollars or pounds.
And if the makers of those vases had any idea of what we were shelling out for them, their graves would spin with either resentment or just absolute hilarity.
These Athenian potters seem to have been motivated not by the idea of producing great art for eternity but of outdoing each other.
On one particularly fine vase, we find the proud comment "Euthymides, son of Polias drew this.
" And then underneath "And I'll bet Leuphronias couldn't have managed it.
" For the first time in their history the ordinary Athenians had tasted freedom.
And they had shown their capacity for extraordinary achievement.
Cleisthenes grew to man hood under Peisistratus' rule.
And he saw how Athens changed.
His home had turned from a modest rural settlement in to an international economic power.
But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
In the year 527 B.
C.
, he died and was laid to rest here in the Athenian graveyard.
His son, Hippias, took over.
At first, Hippias followed in his father's footsteps ruling Athens with a fair hand.
But soon, the Athenians discovered the perilous nature of tyranny.
Historians tell us that in the year 514 B.
C.
, Hippias' brother was murdered.
Aggrieved and bitter the tyrant's behavior completely changed.
Hippias not only executed the murderers but cruelly tortured one of their wives to death as well.
Aristotle described the ruler's slide towards madness.
After this, the tyranny became much, much harsher for Hippias ordered numerous executions and sentences of exile in reve ge for his brother.
And he became embittered and suspicious of everybody.
The freedoms that the common Athenians had gained under Peisistratus were now stripped away.
There was now a real tyranny in the modern sense, in Athens.
Peisistratus had come into power for a cause.
His son now had no cause other than self-preservation.
Life for Cleisthenes had now become increasingly dangerous for the paranoid dictator knew that it was from here, from the aristocrats, that the greatest threat to his power could come.
And Hippias' fears would be proved right.
With the hardening of the attitude of the tyranny the time now seemed to be ripe.
Cleisthenes decided to take his first great gamble.
He would try to overthrow Hippias to gain power for himself and his family.
Cleisthenes ambition to make his mark upon the scene is something that, of course, would have been impressed on him from a very early age from the stories of the heroes that their need to succeed and to strike at the right time.
For Cleisthenes himself it would be an achievement.
Cleisthenes assembled a conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant.
Hippias was trapped in his stronghold captured and banished from Athens forever.
The year was 510 B.
C.
, and Cleisthenes was now one of the most powerful figures in Athens.
He had lived up to the heroic myths he'd been brought up to follow since childhood.
But Greek society was changing.
The heroic urge that drove Cleisthenes was no longer reserved for the elite.
It was now permeating every level of Greek society.
This is Olympia in southern Greece.
Here, once every four years men from across the Greek world would gather to compete in a vast contest of athletic skill.
This was the ancestor of the modern Olympic games.
The competitions had been founded in 776 B.
C.
two centuries before Cleisthenes had even been born.
Then, they had been an exclusive competition for the wealthiest of the Greeks.
But by Cleisthenes time the games had evolved to allow anyone to take part.
A nobleman could now race against a potter a king against a fishmonger.
The Olympic games were a chance for any Greeks to display the sort of heroic qualities that, the heroes of Homer had displayed.
The competitions had their roots in the skills displayed by the mythical heroes chariot racing running wrestling boxing.
But here there was no real prize just a wreath of olives and fame through out Greece.
A competitor would be surrounded by the largest gathering of Greeks, in peace, that he would ever experience.
Perhaps as many as 40,000 Greeks would gather for the Olympic games.
Greeks would travel hundreds of miles to attend the Olympics and during the festival, the land surrounding the stadiums would be covered with encampments.
But for the Greek man, whatever his origin or class to win here would be the highlight of his life.
You had, briefly a moment of glory, of extreme fame which was what the competitive culture of the Greeks valued so highly.
Here, the Greeks had perhaps found a civilized way to satisfy the heroic ideal.
They had built a meritocracy based on skill and ability where anyone could win.
But a world what ere everyone could seize victory could only make Athens even more unstable.
As soon as Cleisthenes gained power he found that others were conspiring against him.
Here, heroism still meant one thing: seize power whenever and however you can.
The only rule is that you get what you can and that you fight.
You have to go in there and show that you can win.
The most ambitious of those conspiring against Cleisthenes was a man named lsagoras.
Isagoras was an oth er Athenian aristocrat.
He, too, had been brought up to beleve that power was his right.
But lsagoras also knew that he could not gain power on his own.
Isagoras took an unprecedented step.
He turned outside Athens for support.
He sent a message to the Spartans, Greece's most feared warriors.
Isagoras was an old friend of the Spartans.
Rumor had it that he had shared his wife with the Spartan king.
The Spartans immediately provided a force of their finest troops to back up lsagoras's bid for power to help him betray his city.
lsagoras really was upping the stakes.
He brought to the most powerful state in Greece.
It was pretty clear he was going to turn Athens into a subject state to Sparta.
With his Spartan force lsagoras staged a coup, seizing control of Athens.
He and his troops would rule from the high point of the city the stronghold atop the Acropolis.
The first targets of the new tyrant were the other aristocrats Cleisthenes, most of all.
Over 700 households were cast out of Athens including Cleisthenes and his entire family.
Cleisthenes would leave his city living once again under the hand of a despotic dictator a dictator who now ruled with the support of the most fearsome power in Greece, the Spartans.
For Cleisthenes all his childhood lessons seemed betrayed.
He had been brought up to be an aristocrat and a ruler to emulate the mythical heroes.
But all this had led to was conflict and feuding, death and exile power struggles amongst an aristocratic elite.
How could Athens ever escape from this pointless cycle of violence? But even as Cleisthenes agonized in exile Athens was rocked by an extraordinary even t.
Like their mythical heroes the ordinary people of Athens now took their destiny into their own hands.
They rose up in revolution.
Isagoras and his Spartan allies blockaded them selves atop the Acropolis, the high point of the city.
But even there, they could not escape the fury of the common Athenians.
For two days and nights lsagoras held out against this extraordinary uprising.
Until finally, on the morning of the third day he was forced to surrender.
The year was 508 B.
C.
This would be Athens' first step to empire and glory.
For the first time in recorded history the people had turned on their rulers and seized power forthem selves.
Athens, at this point is in control of the mob the ordinary people who had risen up, with out organized leadership, and then the question is, what happens now? At this new dawn the Athenian people now turned to one man a figure whose life, whose experiences and disappointments had given him a unique vision.
Cleisthenes was recalled from exile and asked to build a government.
When Cleisthenes returned to Athens after the expulsion of the Spartans he faced a really remarkable challenge.
There was no possibility for just simply putting back in power a group of aristocrats.
There was no possibility for him to declare himself tyrant.
In a sense, what Cleisthenes had to do is design a revolutionary governmental solution for a revolutionary political situation.
For Cleisthenes the problem was how to give his fellow Athenians the say in their future that he knew they must now have.
On an Athenian hillside he had a great meeting place carved out from the bare rock.
Here, in the shadow of the Acropolis the citizens of Athens could now gather to discuss the future of their state.
On these very steps, rich and poor a like could stand and address their fellow citizen s.
This is the ancestor of the British House of Commons the American Congress, of parliaments across the world.
And where government had once been decided by the strength of a swordarm or the thrust of a sharpened spear.
Cleisthenes instituted the simple vote: a white pebble for yes, a black pebble for no.
And with this elegant and simple idea Cleisthenes instituted the rule of the people, a system of government which we now know as democracy.
The great Athenian assembly would gather every nine days to vote on issues covering the entire administration of the state.
From the raising of taxes to the building of roads from the price of figs to the declaration of war.
Athenian democracy is a very different sort of democracy from ours.
One has a sense, as an Athenian citizen that you really can make a difference.
There is no "us and them.
" There is no government separate from the ordinary Athenian citizen body.
They are the government.
Democracy represented a sharp break.
An originally elitist, heroic culture was now turned on its head, and the idea was that even ordinary Greeks who weren't aristocratic, who were not rich could be, as it were, heroes in politics.
It was a system of government that would transform this tiny state, and would set off one of the greatest flowerings of civilization the world had ever seen.
It's not just an accident that you had democracy and you had this tremendous flourishing of culture.
I think that democracy really does, in a very real way unleash, make possible potentials within human societies that are very unlikely to be unleashed, to be made actual in any other way.
But it would not be Cleisthenes task to lead Athens on to her greatest days.
For a new generation of Athenians would take up his legacy.
These Athenians would face struggles that would have stunned their ancestors for they would have to defend their state from invasion and destruction.
The world's first democracy would now be tested in the crucible of war and conflict.
Created, Adapted and syncronyzed by @Goanzaloo.
with some of the most important individuals with whom he talked.
There's jokes that suggest that Aspasia actually was the person what o wrote Pericles' speeches.
Pericles and his circle were to become one of the most famous and influential groups in Western history.
But in fifth-century Athens the highest achievements of art and culture were not restricted to the elite.
Here in the shadow of the Acropolis sits the world's first theater.
Twice a year the Athenian population would gather here to watch a great festival a festival of drama.
Television, cinema, theater all owe their existence to this place.
For here is the home of popular entertainment.
There's one huge difference between the ancient theater and our own and that is that it was incredibly noisy.
We hear stories of how when they didn't like a play the audience booed and they hissed and they actually got actors driven off the stage.
But there's other stories that showed that when they were going with the story and deeply involved in it they actually all collectively burst into tears.
The favorite tales of the Greek stage were called tragedies.
These were stories as shocking as a contemporary horror movie.
The tragedies told stories of great men falling from their heights, losing everything they owned.
Greek tragedy shows human beings however able, however brilliant, however intelligent quite unable to alter the destinies which have been decreed forthem.
These tragedies have fascinated audiences ever since.
This 19th century painting shows the story of the mythical ruler Agamemnon, who was murdered by his own wife.
Another tragedy told of King Oedipus who gouged out his eyes when he discovered that he had married h is own mother.
These Athenians, natives of the greatest city in the ancient world seemed to revel in seeing how frail greatness could really be.
I don't think we can use Greek tragedy to tell us exactly what happened in reality.
It's not a document of Athenian social life.
But what it does do is take us directly and immediately into the psychological heart of those Athenian men.
Th e kin d of dreams an d fantasies an d fears and imaginary scenarios that they came up with in the theater have to tell us just as much about them as any document of everyday reality could.
Theaters were built in every major Greek city in Sparta, Corinth, on the island of Delos, here in Delphi.
Athens was the heart of a cultural revolution that would spread across the Mediterranean and echo around the world.
Pericles an Athens seems to me to belong in a smallish collection of cities where truly great moments in the human experience took place.
Culture, in the broadest sense, reaches a peak.
But after 20 years of building the cultural capital of the Western world, Pericles and his fellow Athenians would now find that their theater and their tragedies would hold a bitter sting.
It is possible to think of Pericles, indeed, I think of him.
As a man with atragic flaw as the sort of man whose greatest qualities the ones that make him most admirable and successful turn out to be the seeds of his own destruction.
Pericles began to plan a grand new venture a venture even more ambitious than the Parthenon.
He wanted to make Athens the undisputed leader of the Mediterranean.
Little did Pericles know that he would now bring Athens not glory, but death, destruction and the loss of her empire.
- Created, synced and