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338-86 B.C.
THE CITY
During
the hellenistic period Athens is found under the
Macedonians. With the death of Alexander the Great in
323 B.C., many cities in
Greece, including Athens, rebelled
against the Macedonians. Later however,
after military defeats, they surrender.
When Alexander the Great
died, his successors began
to fight for the control of the empire.
The Athenians had to chose one of
them. Thus, they chose
Kassandros, who had earlier
occupied Aegina and Salamina. The
Athenians sent the philosopher Demetrius
Phalereus to negotiate with
Kassandros, who named him
governor of Athens in 317 B.C. Demetrius
realised a lot of important work for his city. One of them
was the census that he
made, which showed that Athens had a population
of 21.000 citizens (men older than
21 years), 10.000 foreign
residents and 400.000 slaves.
In 307 B.C. the son of
Antigonus, Demetrius
the Besieger, occupied Athens and exiled Dimitrios Phalereus.
Demetrius
the Besieger resided in the
opisthodomus of the Parthenon from
where he ruled
in a tyrannic
way. In 301 B.C. Lacharis accomplished
to overthrow Demetrius.
However Demetrius
beseiged the city from Piraeus. Lacharis was forced to remove
the gold from the statue of Athena in the
Parthenon in order to pay his
soldiers. The city however did surrender shortly after.
Athens changed many hands
and finally, from the beginning of
the 2nd century B.C. acquired some freedom.
The city maintained her fame and her philosophical
schools and became the artistic and philosophical
centre of continental Greece. Many hellenistic
souvereigns studied there and when
they rised in power they gave to
the city lots of buildings and sculptures.
The most characteristic examples
are Attalos II (159-138) and the
Eumenes II (197-159) of
Pergamon that built the homonymous
stoas and Ariarathis V (162-130)
who built the
Middle Stoa in the Agora.
Also the king of Cappadocia Antiochus
IV ordered the construction
of the temple of Zeus Olympios (Olympieion)
that had remained unfinished from the era of
Peisistratos. The architect was the
Roman Cossutius. The work had advanced enough
but with the death of Antiochos, in
163 B.C. it stopped. The
columns that today stand in the southeast part of the Olympieion are
dated from that very period.
In 146 B.C. the Romans
defeated the Achaic Legue
and begun to involve
into the political matters of Greek cities.
In 88 B.C. the Athenians
followed Mithridates VI of Pontus
to a rebellion against the Romans. A two year siege
of the city followed, commanded by the Roman general
Sylla, who occupied and destroyed
the city in 86 B.C.
For the monuments of
Hellenistic Athens click below:
THE
ACROPOLIS & SOUTH SLOPE OF ACROPOLIS
THE AGORA
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