The Acropolis had been scheduled for the treatment too, but apparently it was to take place at the time of the full moon when the Athenians themselves, out of respect for the natural beauty of the occasion, were wont to forgo their own usual nocturnal illumination.

Many illustrious Athenians, including Cimon, Miltiades, Alcibiades and the historian Thucydides, traced their descent from Ajax.

The identification of Ajax with the family of Aeacus was chiefly a matter which concerned the Athenians, after Salamis had come into their possession, on which occasion Solon is said to have inserted a line in the Iliad ( 2. 557 – 558 ), for the purpose of supporting the Athenian claim to the island.

Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias, was killed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who were subsequently honored by the Athenians for their alleged restoration of Athenian freedom.

* In 406 BC, after years of defeats in the wake of the annihilation of their vast invasion force in Sicily, the Athenians at last won a naval victory at Arginusae over the Spartans.

It does seem clear that possession of slaves allowed even poorer Athenians — owning a few slaves was by no means equated with wealth — to devote more of their time to political life.

The victorious Roman general, Publius Cornelius Sulla, left the Athenians their lives and did not sell them into slavery ; he also restored the previous government, in 86 BC.

In some other respects the Athenians were not the old popular rulers they had been at first ; and if they had more than their fair share of service, it was correspondingly easy for them to reduce any that tried to leave the confederacy.

The Athenians also arranged for the other members of the league to pay its share of the expense in money instead of in ships and men, and for this the subject city-states had themselves to blame, their wish to get out of giving service making most leave their homes.

Around the same time, due to encouragement from influential speaker Themistocles, the Athenians also constructed the Long Walls connecting their city to the Piraeus, its port, making it effectively invulnerable to attack by land.

In fact, according to Isocrates, the Athenians and their allies lost some 20, 000 men in the expedition.

This was the Athenians ' main ( public ) reason for moving the treasury of the League from Delos to Athens, further consolidating their control over the League.

However, an understanding was definitely reached, enabling the Athenians to focus their attention on events in Greece proper.

The Athenians were preparing to make reprisals, in spite of the advice of the Delphic oracle that they should desist from attacking Aegina for thirty years, and content themselves meanwhile with dedicating a precinct to Aeacus, when their projects were interrupted by the Spartan intrigues for the restoration of Hippias.

According to accounts which vary in some of the details, in 340 BC the Byzantines and their allies the Athenians were under siege by the troops of Philip of Macedon.

Despite the fact that their actions were ultimately fruitless, the Eretrians and in particular the Athenians had earned Darius's lasting enmity, and he vowed to punish both cities.

Herodotus implies the Athenians ran the whole distance to the Persian lines, shouting their ululating war cry, " Ελελευ!

All this was evidently much to the surprise of the Persians ; "... in their minds they charged the Athenians with madness which must be fatal, seeing that they were few and yet were pressing forwards at a run, having neither cavalry nor archers ".

Indeed, based on their previous experience of the Greeks, the Persians might be excused for this ; Herodotus tells us that the Athenians at Marathon were " first to endure looking at Median dress and men wearing it, for up until then just hearing the name of the Medes caused the Hellenes to panic ".

The enemy directly in their path ... realised to their horror that Athenians, far from providing the easy pickings for their bowmen, as they had first imagined, were not going to be halted ...

The Athenians had honed their style of fighting in combat with other phalanxes, wooden shields smashing against wooden shields, iron spear tips clattering against breastplates of bronze ... in those first terrible seconds of collision, there was nothing but a pulverizing crash of metal into flesh and bone ; then the rolling of the Athenian tide over men wearing, at most, quilted jerkins for protection, and armed, perhaps, with nothing more than bows or slings.

The Athenians pursued the Persians back to their ships, and managed to capture seven ships, though the majority were able to launch successfully.

It was said to have been named after the Greek town of Aegae, or after Aegea, a queen of the Amazons who died in the sea, or Aigaion, the " sea goat ", another name of Briareus, one of the archaic Hecatonchires, or, especially among the Athenians, Aegeus, the father of Theseus, who drowned himself in the sea when he thought his son had died.

Many Athenians prominent earlier in the century would have lost citizenship, had this law applied to them: Cleisthenes, the founder of democracy, had a non-Athenian mother, and the mothers of Cimon and Themistocles were not Greek at all, but Thracian.

This marked the point at which the leadership of the Greek alliance effectively passed to the Athenians.

Herodotus records that when heralds of the Persian king Darius the Great demanded " earth and water " ( i. e., symbols of submission ) of various Greek cities, the Athenians threw them into a pit and the Spartans threw them down a well for the purpose of suggesting they would find both earth and water at the bottom, these often being mentioned by the messenger as a threat of siege.

Further, the elite Athenians who suffered ostracism were rich or noble men who had connections or xenoi in the wider Greek world and who, unlike genuine exiles, were able to access their income in Attica from abroad.

For a time during this conflict, Athens controlled not only Megara but also Boeotia ; at its end, however, in the face of a massive Spartan invasion of Attica, the Athenians ceded the lands they had won on the Greek mainland, and Athens and Sparta recognized each other's right to control their respective alliance systems.

Themistocles seems to have realised that for the Greeks to survive the coming onslaught required there to be a Greek navy which could hope to face up to the Persian navy, and he therefore attempted to persuade the Athenians to build such a fleet.

However, in his Histories, ix. 120 – 122, the Greek writer Herodotus describes the execution of a Persian general at the hands of Athenians in about 479 BC: " They nailed him to a plank and hung him up ... this Artayctes who suffered death by crucifixion.

Darius died while in the process of preparing a second army to invade the Greek mainland, leaving to his son the task of punishing the Athenians, Naxians, and Eretrians for their interference in the Ionian Revolt, the burning of Sardis and their victory over the Persians at Marathon.

However, the Athenians did not have the manpower to fight on land and sea ; and therefore combatting the Persians would require an alliance of Greek city states.

His ability to compose tastefully and poignantly on military themes put him in great demand among Greek states after their defeat of the second Persian invasion, when he is known to have composed epitaphs for Athenians, Spartans and Corinthians, a commemorative song for Leonidas and his men, a dedicatory epigram for Pausanias, and poems on the battles of Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea.

# all other Greek cities — so far they were not under Persian rule — were to be independent, except Lemnos, Imbros and Scyros, which were to belong, as formerly, to the Athenians.

King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in Asia should belong to him, as well as Clazomenae and Cyprus among the islands, and that the other Greek cities, both small and great, should be left independent, except Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros ; and these should belong, as of old, to the Athenians.

In order to redirect the Spartans attention to Greek affairs, Artaxerxes subsidized their enemies: in particular the Athenians, Thebans and Corinthians.

The Greeks of this period considered there to be three major divisions of all the Greek people — Dorians, Aeolians and Ionians ( including Athenians ), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects.

Additionally, the defeat of the Athenians and the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War in 431-404 BCE resulted in a short-lived Spartan dominance of the Greek world from 404 to 371 BCE.

Ancient Athenians considered the dialect of the inhabitants of their colony Soli in Cilicia to be a corrupted form of their own pure Attic dialect, full of " solecisms " ( Greek: σολοικισμοί, soloikismoí ; Sing.

After a protracted siege, Sestos fell to the Athenians, marking the beginning of a new phase in the Greco-Persian Wars, the Greek counterattack.

Classical Greek and Roman cultures also developed calendars ; the ancient Athenians, for one, had a lunisolar calendar that lasted 364 days, with an intercalary month added every other year.

Certainly, the Athenians, and Greeks in general, seem to have been impressed by the power of Persian cavalry, with the Greek armies displaying considerable caution during the following campaigns when confronted by the Persian cavalry.

Shortly after this, the Athenians initiated the Common Peace of 375 BC ( Κοινὴ Εἰρήνη, Koine Eirene ) among Greek city-states.

This marks the point at which the leadership of the Greek Alliance effectively passed to the Athenians.

However, the Athenians did not have the manpower to fight on land and sea ; and therefore combating the Persians would require an alliance of Greek city states.

He subdued Macedon, ruled at that time by King Alexander I, but Alexander himself gave valuable information about Mardonius ' plans to the Athenians, saying that, as a Greek, he could not bear to see Greece defeated.