A T H E N S, with its hybris.
Athens, around 460 BC. It is the month of September, and the eighth Olympiad celebrated by Pindar, the great Theban poet, has just concluded in honor of the victory of Alkimedon of Aegina in wrestling. The Athenians, who hated Aegina and its inhabitants, certainly did not rejoice.
The city, by then recovering from the two Persian Wars, had been rebuilt, although the Acropolis and some of the demes still showed the ruins of the second war (480 BC), when the citizens had to be transferred en masse to the island of Salamis and the city was burned and razed to the ground by the Persians of King Xerxes.
The architect of the naval victory, Themistocles (1), had exerted great influence on Athenian politics between the two wars. Even after the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, he continued to direct the city’s political life until the Athenians—who notoriously do not tolerate overly dominant personalities—exiled him through ostracism (1bis). Themistocles first took refuge in Argos (2), then in Magna Graecia, and finally in Magnesia in Asia Minor, where he died in 459 BC, perhaps by suicide (sic transit gloria mundi!).
But for every leader who disappears, another steps forward to become—thanks especially to his eloquence—the undisputed master of Athens for three decades: Pericles (3). To him we owe the reconstruction of the Acropolis and the magnificent Parthenon, built with the gold taken from the Delian League (4) and dedicated to the city’s founding goddess as Parthenos (virgin).
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