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.

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.

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.

To the Athenians it seems what had to be guarded against was not incompetence but any tendency to use office as a way of accumulating ongoing power.

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.

Xanthippus, the Athenian commander at Mycale, had furiously rejected this ; the Ionian cities were originally Athenian colonies, and the Athenians, if no-one else, would protect the Ionians.

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.

After the Persian crisis had subsided, the Athenians incorporated many of the unfinished temple's architectural members ( unfluted column drums, triglyphs, metopes, etc.

Herodotus had no Athenian victories to record after the initial success, and the fact that Themistocles was able to carry his proposal to devote the surplus funds of the state to the building of so large a fleet seems to imply that the Athenians were themselves convinced that a supreme effort was necessary.

In 1693 Morosini resumed command, but his only acts were to refortify the castle of Aegina, which he had demolished during the Cretan war in 1655, the cost of upkeep being paid as long as the war lasted, by the Athenians, and to place it and Salamis under Malipiero as Governor.

The Athenians and Eretrians had succeeded in capturing and burning Sardis, but were then forced to retreat with heavy losses.

A stalemate ensued for five days, before the Athenians decided to attack the Persians because, under the cover of night, some of the Persian fleet had set sail for Athens.

Cleomenes's attempts to restore Isagoras to Athens ended in a debacle, but fearing the worst, the Athenians had by this point already sent an embassy to Artaphernes in Sardis, to request aid from the Persian Empire.

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.

This passage is undoubtedly problematic ; the Athenians had little to gain by attacking before the Spartans arrived, and there is no real evidence of this rotating generalship.

When Datis surrendered and was ready for retreat, the Ionians climbed the trees and gave the Athenians the signal that the cavalry had left.

From a strategic point of view, the Athenians had some disadvantages at Marathon.

In order to face the Persians in battle, the Athenians had had to summon all available hoplites ; and even then they were still probably outnumbered at least 2 to 1.

The Athenians initially had no need to seek battle, since they had managed to confine the Persians to the plain of Marathon.

Tactically, hoplites were vulnerable to attacks by cavalry, and since the Persians had substantial numbers of cavalry, this made any offensive maneuver by the Athenians even more of a risk, and thus reinforced the defensive strategy of the Athenians.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The origins of this sport is claimed to be derived from the Athenians when Themistocles, marching his army against the Persians, chanced upon two cocks fighting and charged his army saying “ Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other .” Inspired, his army defeated the Persians and after ordained by law, cockfighting was annually practiced as " an institution partly religious and partly political at Athens, and continued there for the purpose of improving the seeds of valour in the minds of the Athenian youth ".

Mindarus was forced to flee to a nearby beach, and vicious fighting ensued on land as the Athenians attempted to drag off the Spartan ships.

When the Athenians returned to their camp, the sailors scattered to forage for food ; Lysander's fleet then sailed across from Abydos and captured most of the ships on the beach, with no sea fighting at all.

When the Athenians ordered the two sides to stop fighting and submit the case to arbitration at Athens, the Samians refused.

The Persian troops under Pharnabazus, however, entered the fighting on the shore and began to drive the Athenians, who were outnumbered and fighting against opponents on firmer ground, into the sea.

A massive reinforcing armada from Athens briefly gave the Athenians the upper hand once more, but a disastrous failed assault on a strategic high point and several crippling naval defeats damaged the besiegers ' fighting capacity and morale, and the Athenians were eventually forced to attempt a desperate overland escape from the city they had hoped to conquer.

Many Athenians were trampled to death and others were killed while fighting with fellow Athenians.

Meanwhile, the Boeotian right wing was also victorious, and the Athenians fighting there fled ; when the Athenian centre saw that their two wings had been defeated they also fled.

The narrowness of the straits, which ensured that the Peloponnesians had only a short way to go to safety, limited the damage the Athenians could inflict, but by day's end they had captured 21 Spartan ships to the 15 of theirs that the Spartans had taken in the early fighting.

* Scione: A city on the promontory of Chalcidice, it revolted against Athenian rule two days after the Athenian truce with Sparta and it was now under siege ; this was the only fighting Athenians were engaged in at this time.

The fighting was evenly contested for a great length of time, but towards evening the arrival of Alcibiades with Athenian reinforcements tipped the balance in favor of the Athenians, and the Peloponnesians were forced to flee back to their base at Abydos, suffering heavy losses along the way.