A large Athenian red-figure mixing bowl for wine
Red-figure calyx-krater, ca. 360–350 BCE (4th Century BCE)
Marked The Acropolis

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Classical Athens

For about two hundred years Athens ran itself as a democracy, in which citizen men voted on laws and war in person. The same city held tens of thousands of enslaved people, and its women could not vote.

Place
The Acropolis · The Agora · The Pnyx · PiraeusEurope
Laid out as
A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. ICleisthenes and the first democracy
  2. IIThe Assembly on the Pnyx
  3. IIIThe Parthenon
  4. IVTheatre at the festival of Dionysus
  5. VSocrates on trial
  6. VIWho was left out?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Cleisthenes
  • Pericles
  • Aspasia
  • Socrates
  • Sophocles

Objects

  • Ostraka, voting shards
  • The kleroterion, a lottery machine
  • Parthenon sculptures

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

508 BC to 322 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?