Athens
Count out 469 silver talents. Each talent is a slab weighing about 57 pounds — heavier than most grown men can carry up a flight of stairs. Stacked together, they make more than thirteen tons of pure silver: the price of one marble temple in Athens. That same pile could have built 500 warships. Yet in 480 BC the Persian army burned Athens to the ground, and the people came home to ash.
Key Terms
- Aristophanes
- A comic poet who joked in 414 BC that Athens’ trusted silver coins would nest in a man’s purse and hatch small change.
- Acropolis
- The high, fortified rock at the center of Athens, left covered in blackened rubble for years after the Persians destroyed its temples.
- Themistoclean Wall
- A defensive ring about 4 miles around, raised so quickly that Sparta could not stop it before it was finished.
- Sparta
- The powerful rival to the south of Athens that did not want a walled, strong Athens standing nearby.
- Laurion
- The hills about 30 miles southeast of Athens where miners struck a rich vein of silver ore in 483 BC.
- Tetradrachm
- A four-drachma silver coin stamped with Athena’s head on one side and her owl on the other, trusted across the Mediterranean for more than 300 years.
- Areopagus
- The old council of nobles that lost most of its power to the citizen assembly in 462 BC.
- Silver Talent
- A slab of silver weighing about 57 pounds, equal to roughly 6,000 days of an ordinary worker’s pay.
- Funeral Oration
- The speech Pericles gave in the winter of 431 BC to honor the war’s first fallen soldiers, declaring that a citizen who takes no part in the life of his city is not just quiet, but useless.
- Ephialtes
- The reformer who, in 462 BC, stripped power from the old noble council and handed it to the ordinary citizen assembly.
- Pericles
- The leader who added paid public service to Athenian government, then led the city into a long war with Sparta.
- Misthophoria
- State pay for public service, such as 2 obols a day for a juror, so a poor craftsman could still afford to help govern.
- Kleroterion
- A carved stone slab with rows of slots and a tube of tumbling black and white dice, used to choose jurors by pure chance.
- Delian League
- An alliance formed in 478 BC on a holy island, where member cities pooled money and ships to guard against Persia’s return.
- Parthenon
- The temple on the Acropolis that cost 469 silver talents and could double as a vault, since its statue’s gold robe was built to come off.
- Chryselephantine
- A style of statue built on a wooden frame and covered in carved ivory and gold, like the Athena that stood inside the Parthenon.
- Phoros
- The yearly cash tribute squeezed out of a league’s member cities, used to fund an empire and its building program.
- Long Walls
- The protected corridors, nearly 4 miles long, joining Athens to its port so supply ships could always get through during a siege.
- Peloponnesian War
- The long-dreaded fight between Athens and Sparta that finally broke out in 431 BC.
- Plague of Athens
- A disease that swept through the overcrowded, walled-in city in 430 BC and killed its greatest leader the following year.