A week in Athens with a difference – Gill Greef
“I was struck by the fact that our country is by nature able to bring in very substantial revenues.
To give you proof of this, I will describe the resources of Attica.” In his Poroi, written about the middle of the 4th century BC, Xenophon began with these words. I had always wondered how true they really were so a recent week in Athens provided a group of us with a chance to put some of these words to the test. “There is land which produces nothing when sown”.
A glance at the landscape of Attica and it was easy for us to understand Xenophon’s observation – rocky hillsides abound and there is little sign of cultivation. This year wild fires have added to the sense of desolation in many places, blackened trees and bushes. “but when quarried it can provide for many times more than if it grew corn. The silver below the surface is clearly providential.”
The silver mines at Thorikos not far from Sounion are an open site, so a useful destination on a Tuesday when other places are closed, though probably the theatre is what most people notice and few see the mines and washing table. However, if you travel a little further from the coast towards Agia Triada, a new perspective opens up. At Souriza, there is a valley full of industry with huge cistern after huge cistern and washing table after washing table – and that’s just a small part of the industrial landscape. It’s clear that the hillsides and valleys around were home to many more. “The silver ore has been mined and quarried for years, but see how large the hills of unmined ore still look beside the heaps of waste thrown up by the workings. In fact the silver-bearing area is evidently not being reduced, but continually being extended.”
Nikias may have hired out 1000 slaves to work in the mines but how many more must there have been, not only struggling in the dangerous surroundings of the mines themselves but labouring to move water from the cisterns to the washing tables, bucket after bucket! A channel brought water from the hills to fill those cisterns but how precious that water must have been in the heat of summer.
What Athens did with its silver we discovered on our next visit – to the Naval Museum in Phaleron to glimpse Olympias, the trireme built in 1987, a piece of experimental archaeology testing the efficiency of just one of that fleet prepared to face the Persians in 480BC. We couldn’t get close as she’s at present under repair so that she can be rowed once more (volunteers are being sought for next summer, I believe) but just to see her was a treat, so small beside the WW1 warship Averof. In 483, the Athenians had discovered a particularly rich vein of ore and Themistocles persuaded the citizens in their Assembly to use it to build a fleet of warships. Cunningly he convinced them that the threat came from Aegina just across the gulf not from Persia.
Who would believe that those so completely defeated at Marathon would dream of returning to attack mighty Athens? What foresight Themistocles had! Only three years later, the Greeks faced the might of the Persians and against all the odds defeated them once more at Salamis. To get an idea of the geography of that battle, we ventured by ferry across the straits to the island of Salamis. The island may not feature high on the tourist agenda for a visit and a battle fought on the sea isn’t easy to envisage but on that short journey we enjoyed trying to work out exactly where Xerxes sat on his throne to watch the battle unfold and had a real sense of the narrow space into which the Greeks enticed the Persian fleet to win a famous victory.
“Furthermore, though she is not in fact surrounded by sea, winds from every quarter enable her to import what she needs and export what she wants, as if she were an island.” We saw in the harbour of Zea a wonderful example of the benefits the Athenians had in that natural harbour now full of yachts. That harbour, and the other two at Piraeus, allowed them to import the corn they needed to prosper and
then to survive when the land was devastated by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian wars. After
the Persian wars, the Athenians had a fleet of 200 triremes and needed space to keep them, ready to launch but out of the water. The basement of an apartment block beside the harbour of Zea provided us with exciting evidence – the remains of a pair of ship sheds. If only the Athenians would clean the windows and perhaps open the space for visitors!
Xenophon had it right when he noted “the land has stone in abundance, from which the finest temples and altars are made, and the most beautiful statues for the gods.” As we started our week in Athens, we’d seen evidence of these temples and delighted in the exhibits in the Acropolis museum. We’d looked up to the Acropolis and marvelled at the effort involved in building the walls of the Acropolis to create space for the temples and then, as we climbed to the top, at the effort involved in lifting the stone from the plain.
What about the sources of that marble? A trip to the quarries around the Davelis cave provided ample evidence: the track leading to the cave was bordered with marble, some tiny pieces yet others large blocks. Leading down from the cave was the road created all those years ago to transport the marble, still neatly paved and seemingly ready for the next shipment. We could see Athens in the distance but what a distance! More evidence of the manpower needed to create “the finest temples” and “most beautiful statues”.
Were the words of Xenophon the only focus of our week? Of course not – there was so much else to see, the sanctuaries at Eleusis and Brauron, the monastery at Kaisariani, the Byzantine church of Dafni and those temples and statues, but I, for one, relished the opportunity on this occasion to look from a different perspective at the wonders of Athens in the 5th century BC.
