Athens

The city that invented democracy and used it to run an empire funded by other people's tribute. Athenian democracy from Cleisthenes' reforms of 508 BCE gave every adult male citizen a vote in an assembly that met around forty times a year, with most offices filled by lot rather than election on the principle that any citizen could serve - excluding women, resident foreigners and a slave population that may have been a third of the whole. The Delian League formed after the Persian wars as a voluntary alliance and became an empire in practice: the treasury was moved to Athens in 454 BCE, members who tried to leave were besieged, and tribute paid for the Parthenon. That period produced Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes performing to citizen audiences, Socrates arguing in the agora, and Thucydides writing a history that treats power rather than gods as the cause of events. Sparta and its allies broke Athenian power in 404 BCE. The democracy executed Socrates five years later. Philip and then Rome ended its independence. The Acropolis is a World Heritage site. Athens is the capital of modern Greece and holds around four million people in its metropolitan area. Its assembly met on the Pnyx hill. Ostracism allowed citizens to exile a prominent figure for ten years by writing his name on a potsherd. The silver mines at Laurion funded the fleet that won Salamis. Attic Greek became the basis of the literary standard. The city was named for Athena after a contest with Poseidon in its foundation myth.

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