The failure of Greece to reach the imperial destiny that Periclean Athens had seemed to promise was almost directly attributable to her physical conformation.

By 335 BC he had returned to Athens, establishing his own school there known as the Lyceum.

* In Oropus, north of Athens, the oracle Amphiaraus, was said to be the son of Apollo ; Oropus also had a sacred spring.

Ajax then became an Attic hero ; he was worshiped at Athens, where he had a statue in the market-place, and the tribe Aiantis was named after him.

Pausanias indicated that an altar to Alcmene had been built in the Cynosarges in Athens, alongside altars to Heracles, Hebe, and Iolaus.

From a modern perspective these figures may seem small, but in the world of Greek city-states Athens was huge: most of the thousand or so Greek cities could only muster 1000 – 1500 adult male citizens and Corinth, a major power, had at most 15, 000 but in some very seldom cases more.

Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens.

Athens had an elaborate legal system centered on full citizen rights ( see atimia ).

Working for wages was clearly regarded as subjection to the will of another, but at least debt servitude had been abolished at Athens ( under the reforms of Solon at the start of the 6th century BC ).

An independent Athens was a minor power in the Hellenistic age ; it rarely had much in the way of foreign policy ; it generally remained at peace, allied either with the Ptolemaic dynasty, or later, with Rome ; when it went to war, the result ( as in the Lamian, Chremonidean, and Mithridatic War ) was usually disastrous.

The mines of Thasos were also turned over to Athens, and they had to pay yearly tribute and fines.

The temple to Ares in the agora of Athens that Pausanias saw in the second century AD had only been moved and rededicated there during the time of Augustus ; in essence it was a Roman temple to the Augustan Mars Ultor.

Aeacus had sanctuaries both at Athens and in Aegina, and the Aeginetans regarded him as the tutelary deity of their island.

During the Acropolis excavations in Athens, which terminated in 1888, many potsherds of the Mycenaean style were found ; but Olympia had yielded either none, or such as had not been recognized before being thrown away, and the temple site at Delphi produced nothing distinctively Aegean ( in dating ).

Upon the death of the king his father, Pandion II, Aegeus and his three brothers, Pallas, Nisos, and Lykos, took control of Athens from Metion, who had seized the throne from Pandion.

Upon his return to Athens, Aegeus married Medea, who had fled from Corinth and the wrath of Jason.

Theseus decided to go to Athens and had the choice of going by sea, which was the safe way, or by land, following a dangerous path with thieves and bandits all the way.

When Aegeus saw the black sails coming into Athens, he jumped into the sea and drowned, mistaken in his belief that his son had been slain.

At Athens, the traveller Pausanias was informed in the second-century CE that the cult of Aphrodite Urania above the Kerameikos was so ancient that it had been established by Aegeus, whose sisters were barren, and he still childless himself.

That Athens had the worst of it in this war is certain.

It is probable that the power of Aegina had steadily declined during the twenty years after Salamis, and that it had declined absolutely, as well as relatively, to that of Athens.

According to the 12th-century bishop of Athens, Michael Choniates, by his time the island had become a base for pirates.

His relations with Athens were already strained when he returned to Babylon in 324 BC ; after his death, Athens and Sparta led several Greek states to war with Macedon and lost.

In the Plague of Athens, the city lost possibly one third of its population, including Pericles.

Most accounts incorrectly attribute this story to Herodotus ; actually, the story first appears in Plutarch's On the Glory of Athens in the 1st century AD, who quotes from Heracleides of Pontus's lost work, giving the runner's name as either Thersipus of Erchius or Eucles.

On the other hand, centers of learning as the Platonic Academy in Athens and the famous law school of Beirut lost their importance during his reign.

There is a Homeric hymn to Poseidon, who was the protector of many Hellenic cities, although he lost the contest for Athens to Athena.

In Athens itself, he lost favour by building a sanctuary of Artemis, with the epithet Aristoboulë (" of good counsel ") near his home, a blatant reference to his own role in delivering Greece from the Persian invasion.

Lycomedes of the island of Skyros threw Theseus off a cliff after he had lost popularity in Athens.

The island was nearly lost to Athens by two attempts of the oligarchic faction to effect a revolution ; on each occasion the popular party ultimately won the day and took a most bloody revenge on its opponents ( 427 BC and 425 BC ). The lion of Menekrates at the Archaeological Museum of CorfuDuring the Sicilian campaigns of Athens Corcyra served as a supply base ; after a third abortive rising of the oligarchs in 410 BC it practically withdrew from the war.

Caria and Lycia came to the attention of Athens, most powerful state remaining in Greece, which also had lost its central government ruling from Mycenae, now burned and nearly vacant.

The account of the run near Marathon to Athens first appears in Plutarch's On the Glory of Athens in the 1st century AD, which quotes from Heraclides Ponticus ' lost work, giving the runner's name as either Thersipus of Erchius or Eucles.

This development had a direct effect on the sculptural decoration of temples, as many of the greatest extant works of Ancient Greek sculpture once adorned temples, and many of the largest recorded statues of the age, such as the lost chryselephantine statues of Zeus at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and Athena at the Parthenon, Athens, both over 40 feet high, were once housed in them.

Both cities gradually lost influence to Athens, which saw Euboea as a strategic territory.

It is called « Lycian » not after Lycia itself, but after its identification with a lost work described by Lucian as being on show in the Lykeion, one of the gymnasia of Athens.

He died while he was still young, after he lost a war with the king of Athens, Pandion, over their borders.

Minotaur, from a fountain in Athens, part of Myron's lost group of Theseus and the Minotaur ( National Archaeological Museum of Athens )

Eleusis lost the battle with Athens but the Eumolpides and Kerykes, two families of priests to Demeter, continued the Eleusinian mysteries.

After the decisive defeat at Crannon ( 322 BCE ) in which Athens and her allies lost their independence, Hypereides and the other orators, were condemned to death by the Athenian supporters of Macedon.

During 1388-90, John gradually lost all lands of the Duchies of Athens and Neopatras in Greece.

* Pericles: The dominant politician in pre-war Athens who once famously bribed a Spartan general to avoid battle and subsequently accounted for the bribe as " lost according to need ".

* Cleonymus: A conspicuous figure in Athens, he had recently lost his shield in the retreat from Delium.