Athens is well known for its rich history of culture, innovation in art and philosophy, and place in the Ancient World as a thriving, developing, and prominent city-state in Greece.
“For the history of Athens extant information is more plentiful than for that of any other Greek city. A comparatively clear picture can be reconstructed of Athenian behavior in the late fifth and fourth centuries; this is due to the survival of histories, like those of Thucydides and Xenophon, and speeches, such as those of Lysias, Demosthenes and Aeschines, and to the recovery of numerous, though often fragmentary, inscriptions. Unfortunately the institutions of the Athenian state had for the most part reached lasting form before the period for which evidence is relatively plentiful; and so the inquiry into the political forces which shaped those institutions is tantalizing.” (source 5, p. 89)
The city of Athens was the ruling center of territory of Attica, one of the larger areas of land in the Ancient Greek divisions of geography. It’s coastal location and centrality to trade made it a thriving economic center, and the resulting cultures and people passing through Athenian ports added to the city’s bounding source of new ideas, creations, and institutions.
byrneathens 