Primitive Athens as described by Thucydides

by Jane Ellen Harrison

This habit of ‘living in the fields,’ this country life was, Thucydides goes on to explain, no affair of yesterday; it had been so from the earliest times. All through the days of the kingship from Kekrops to Theseus the people had lived scattered about in small communities—‘village communities’ we expect to hear him say, for he is insisting on the habit of country life; but, though he knows the word ‘village’ (κώμη) and employs it in discussing Laconia elsewhere[3], he does not use it here. He says the inhabitants of Athens lived ‘in towns’ (κατὰ πόλεις), or, as it would be safer to translate it, ‘in burghs.’

It is necessary at the outset to understand clearly what the word polis here means. We use the word ‘town’ in contradistinction to country, but from the account of Thucydides it is clear that people could live in a polis and yet lead a country life. Our word city is still less appropriate; ‘city’ to us means a very large town, a place where people live crowded together. A polis, as Thucydides here uses the word, was a community of people living on and immediately about a fortified hill or citadel—a citadel-community. The life lived in such a community was essentially a country life. A polis was a citadel, only that our word ‘citadel’ is over-weighted with military association.

Athens then, in the days of Kekrops and the other kings down to Theseus, was one among many other citadel-communities or burghs. Like the other scattered burghs, like Aphidna, like Thoricus, like Eleusis, it had its own local government, its own council-house, its own magistrates. So independent were these citadel-communities that, Thucydides tells us, on one occasion Eleusis under Eumolpos actually made war on Athens under Erechtheus.

So things went on till the reign of Theseus and his famous Synoikismos, the Dwelling-together or Unification. Theseus, Thucydides says, was a man of ideas and of the force of character necessary to carry them out. He substituted the one for the many; he put an end to the little local councils and council-houses and centralized the government of Attica in Athens. Where the government is, thither naturally population will flock. People began to gather into Athens, and for a certain percentage of the population town-life became fashionable. Then, and not till then, did the city become ‘great,’ and that ‘great’ city Theseus handed down to posterity. ‘And from that time down to the present day the Athenians celebrate to the Goddess at the public expense a festival called the Dwelling-together[4].’

One unified city and one goddess, the goddess who needs no name. Their unity and their greatness the Athenians are not likely to forget, but will they remember the time before the union, when Athens was but Kekropia, but one among the many scattered citadel-communities? Will they remember how small was their own beginning, how limited their burgh, how impossible—for that is the immediate point—that it should have contained in its narrow circuit a large town population? Thucydides clearly is afraid they will not. There was much to prevent accurate realization. The walls of Themistocles, when Thucydides wrote, enclosed a polis that was not very much smaller than the modern town; the walls of the earlier community, the old small burgh, were in part ruined. It was necessary therefore, if the historian would make clear his point, namely, the smallness of the ancient burgh and its inadequacy for town-life, that he should define its limits. This straightway he proceeds to do. Our whole discussion will centre round his definition and description, and at the outset the passage must be given in full. Immediately after his notice of the festival of the ‘Dwelling-together,’ celebrated to ‘the Goddess,’ Thucydides[5] writes as follows:

‘Before this, what is now the citadel was the city, together with what is below it towards about south. The evidence is this. The sanctuaries are in the citadel itself, those of other deities as well[6] (as the Goddess). And those that are outside are placed towards this part of the city more (than elsewhere). Such are the sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, and the Pythion, and the sanctuary of Ge, and that of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes (to whom is celebrated the more ancient Dionysiac Festival on the 12th day in the month Anthesterion, as is also the custom down to the present day with the Ionian descendants of the Athenians); and other ancient sanctuaries also are placed here. And the spring which is now called Nine-Spouts, from the form given it by the despots, but which formerly, when the sources were open, was named Fair-Fount—this spring (I say), being near, they used for the most important purposes, and even now it is still the custom derived from the ancient (habit) to use the water before weddings and for other sacred purposes. Because of the ancient settlement here, the citadel (as well as the present city) is still to this day called by the Athenians the City.’

In spite of certain obscurities, which are mainly due to a characteristically Thucydidean over-condensation of style, the main purport of the argument is clear. Thucydides, it will be remembered, wants to prove that the city before Theseus was, because of its small size, incapable of holding a large town population. This small size not being evident to the contemporaries of Thucydides, he proceeds to define the limits of the ancient city. He makes a statement and supports it by fourfold evidence.

The statement that he makes is that the ancient city comprised the present citadel together with what is below it towards about south. The fourfold evidence is as follows:

1. The sanctuaries are in the citadel itself, those of other deities as well as the Goddess.

2. Those ancient sanctuaries that are outside are placed towards this part of the present city more than elsewhere. Four instances of such outside shrines are adduced.