) Given the exclusionary and ancestral conception of citizenship held by Greek city-states, a relatively large portion of the population took part in the government of Athens and of other radical democracies like it.

This led to the first of a number of periods in which an outside power controlled Athens ; Often the outside power set up a local agent as political boss in Athens ; but when Athens was independent, it operated under its traditional form of government ; even the bosses, like Demetrius of Phalerum, kept the traditional institutions in formal existence.

Women in art were covered in clothing from the neck down, including female goddesses like Athena, the patron of Athens who represented heroic endeavor.

They sent gifts to Greek cultural sites like Delphi, Delos, and Athens.

Pope John VIII: John, of English extraction, was born at Mentz ( Mainz ) and is said to have arrived at Popedom by evil art ; for disguising herself like a man, whereas she was a woman, she went when young with her paramour, a learned man, to Athens, and made such progress in learning under the professors there that, coming to Rome, she met with few that could equal, much less go beyond her, even in the knowledge of the scriptures ; and by her learned and ingenious readings and disputations, she acquired so great respect and authority that upon the death of Pope Leo IV ( as Martin says ) by common consent she was chosen Pope in his room.

After eight years of political struggle, the plebeian social class convinced the patricians to send a delegation to Athens, to copy the Laws of Solon ; they also dispatched delegations to other Greek cities for like reason.

One will sometimes find the claim that Socrates described himself as the " gadfly " of Athens which, like a sluggish horse, needed to be aroused by his " stinging ".

The new system of government in Athens opened up a wealth of opportunity for men like Themistocles, who previously would have had no access to power.

However, Persian scholars dispute this view as pan-Hellenic propaganda, arguing that Sparta, not Athens, was Xerxes's main foe in his Greek campaigns, and that Xerxes would have had nothing to gain by destroying a major center of trade and commerce like Athens once he had already captured it.

* First Cemetery of Athens-Cemetery in Central Athens, including the graves of many famous Greek politicians and celebrities like Melina Mercouri, Andreas Papandreou, George Papandreou, George Seferis, Manos Hadjidakis.

Dionysus was angry and punished Athens with a plague, inflicting insanity on all the unmarried women, who all hanged themselves like Erigone did.

In the 5th century BC, Sicyon, like Corinth, suffered from the commercial rivalry of Athens in the western seas, and was repeatedly harassed by squadrons of Athenian ships.

In modern historiography " polis " is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as " city-state.

There are also some cities with recurring independence like Samos, Priene, Miletus and Athens.

* Acropolis (" high city "), Athens, Greece ( this is the most well-known example of acropolis ; in fact an acropolis area was part of almost every ancient Greek polis and it was more like a function-part of an ancient polis ( like e. g. agora, walls, etc.

Metics remained citizens of their cities of birth, which, like Athens, had the exclusionary ancestral view of citizenship common to ancient Greek cities.

Slaves, like women, were not eligible for full citizenship in ancient Athens, though in rare circumstances they could become citizens if freed.

There is an allusion to her famous saying that Athens would ride the sea like a wine skin and never sink but the receptacle is misrepresented by Cleon as a pan-molgos ( 963 ). The oracle and her sanctuary are mentioned in a variety of contexts in other plays.

Athens was a center of learning, with sophists and philosophers traveling from across Greece to teach rhetoric, astronomy, cosmology, geometry, and the like.

The second attack on Melos occurred five years after Athens and Sparta had signed a peace agreement and some historians like Bosworth believe that Athens ' campaign against Melos in 416 BCE was motivated by imperial expansion.

If the death of Epaminondas in 362 BC freed Athens from fear of Thebes, it appears at the same time to have exposed it to further aggression from Alexander of Pherae, who made a piratical raid on Tinos and other cities of the Cyclades, plundering them, and making slaves of the inhabitants.

He was a pupil of Proclus in Athens, and taught at Alexandria for most of his life, writing commentaries on Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers.

He was the first of its rulers to have relations with other countries ; he entered into an alliance with Hippias of Athens, and when Hippias was driven out of Athens he offered him the territory of Anthemus on the Thermaic Gulf.

In 371 BC at a Panhellenic congress of the Lacedaemonian allies, he voted in support of the Athenians ' claim and joined other Greeks in voting to help Athens to recover possession of Amphipolis.

* Slavery was more widespread at Athens than in other Greek cities.

Although there are many other acropoleis in Greece, the significance of the Acropolis of Athens is such that it is commonly known as " The Acropolis " without qualification.

This tactic succeeded, but the Spartan King, Cleomenes I, returned at the request of Isagoras and so the Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonids and other prominent Athenian families were exiled from Athens.

Still further, defeat at Marathon would mean the complete defeat of Athens, since no other Athenian army existed.

Plutarch mentions that the Athenians saw the phantom of King Theseus, the mythical hero of Athens, leading the army in full battle gear in the charge against the Persians, and indeed he was depicted in the mural of the Stoa Poikile fighting for the Athenians, along with the twelve Olympian gods and other heroes.

Euripides () ( c. 480 – 406 BC ) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Heraclitus ( figured by Michelangelo ) sits apart from the other philosophers in Raphael Sanzio | Raphael's School of Athens

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.

The Pompeion and many other buildings in the vicinity of the Sacred Gate were razed to the ground by the marauding army of the Roman dictator Sulla, during his sacking of Athens in 86 BC ; an episode that Plutarch described as a bloodbath.

As the fledgling Athens ( and probably other continental Greek cities ) was under tribute to Crete, it can be assumed that such tribute included young men and women for sacrifice.

* Tomkinson, John L., Haunted Greece: Nymphs, Vampires and other Exotika, Anagnosis, Athens, 2004, ISBN 960-88087-0-7

He was a focus of religious activity mainly at Athens, where he was linked to Athena and Hephaestus, other Greek deities of creative skills and technology.

For the Panathenaic festival, arguably the most important civic festival at Athens, a torch race began at the altar, which was located outside the sacred boundary of the city, and passed through the Kerameikos, the district inhabited by potters and other artisans who regarded Prometheus and Hephaestus as patrons.

The war also wrought subtler changes to Greek society ; the conflict between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta, each of which supported friendly political factions within other states, made civil war a common occurrence in the Greek world.

After a time, though, Athens ' influence began to dominate the other city-states.

Athens sent out a sizable contingent ( 4, 000 hoplites ), but upon its arrival, this force was dismissed by the Spartans, while those of all the other allies were permitted to remain.

A fifteen year conflict, commonly known as the First Peloponnesian War, ensued, in which Athens fought intermittently against Sparta, Corinth, Aegina, and a number of other states.

After Persian Wars the League was expanded into the Hellenic League, including Athens and other states.