Athens

Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning around 3,400 years, and the earliest human presence around the 11th–7th millennium BC. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state that emerged in conjunction with the seagoing development of the port of Piraeus. A centre for the arts, learning and philosophy, home of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, it is widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy, largely because of its cultural and political impact on the European continent and in particular the Romans. In modern times, Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political and cultural life in Greece.

The Acropolis

William Page, View of Athens (1820)

Quotes

• From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone - Greece with its immortal glories - is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation.
  • Winston Churchill, speaking in 1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, United States
  • Sinews of Peace. (2009, July 29). In Wikisource, The Free Library.

• A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, as quoted in Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, by Tristram Hunt. Page IX. Editor Hachette UK, 2010. ISBN 0297865943.

• While many of the world's richest people live in London, four of its boroughs rank among the twenty poorest in England, and 27 percent of the city's population live in poverty. London's polarized economic landscape is typical of "superstar" cities. Other leading cities of Europe—Oslo, Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, Madrid, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna, Vilnius—also suffer widening gaps between the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy.
  • Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020), p. 133

• Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
  and eloquence, native to famous wits.
  • John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671), IV. 240–241

• How they love freedom on this soil!
  • Rita Boumy Pappas in the poem "Athens"

• Let there be light! Said Liberty, And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas

See also

• Sparta