ancient cities

Parthenon at the Acropolis in Athens
Source: Vasilis Gavrilis.
between Occident and Orient and is considered a
“theatre of memory,” combining ancient and modern,
original and copy, informal and postmodern,
tourism and romantic traveling, and involving personalities
from Gustav Flaubert and Sigmund Freud
to Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Derrida.
However, between today’s city of 3,187,734 inhabitants
(Greater Athens 2001, 29 percent of the
Greek population) or 3,761,810 if the broader
Attica region is included, and the ancient city-state
of the fourth century BC, there is a series of major
discontinuities and interesting contrasts. As
expected, there are certain constants in the landscape
of cities in the same location: The multinucleated
urban geography is centered on Athens and its
port, Piraeus, and connected by Long Walls and
then the railway, enclosed in the basin (lekanopedio)
bounded by the Hymettus, Pendeli, Parnitha,
and Aigaleo mountains and interspersed by seven
hills, encircled by a multitude of other towns in the
Attica region, Demoi, already since antiq uity.
These were all gradually connected and merged into
one single agglomeration by the fast urbanization
Athens, Greece
45
waves of the twentieth century. Given the discontinuity
of urban history, this entry uses a snapshot
approach to the several metamorphoses of the city
by “visiting” briefly four important periods during
which Athens has become a prototype for urban
geography: the ancient city-state, the artificial
nineteenth-century capital city, the interwar prototype
of Mediterranean fast urbanization, and the
post-Olympic entrepreneurial city.
Classical Athens, Acropolis, and Agora
The first traces of life in Athens date from the
fourth millennium BC, the late Neolithic period,
but the cultural density of ancient or classical
Athens has never been paralleled. The celebrated
myth of the contest between the goddess Athena
and god Poseidon for the patronage of the city, had
Athena win and give the city-state her name and
the sacred olive as a symbol. The Parthenon temple
on the sacred rock of the Acropolis was dedicated
to Athena, goddess of wisdom, with her large central
statue inside and the evocative representations