Athenians

The Athenians

The Athenians will be available to play in the Chronicles: Battle for Greece DLC on November 14, 2024.

By any measure, ancient Athens was a remarkable place. An extraordinary proportion of ancient Greece’s most famous figures dwelt in the city at one point or another: philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; statesmen like Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles; the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; the tragic playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comic playwrights Aristophanes and Menander. 

The cultural life of Athens was inseparable from its civic life, with many of its great intellectual figures also serving as generals, politicians, and priests. It should be noted that the democracy which spawned such a vivid cultural scene was also capable of immense idiocy, most notably when the Athenians voted to execute six of their foremost admirals at the height of the Peloponnesian War (a crushing naval defeat followed shortly after).  

Athenian military power was closely tied to the city’s navy. When a rich vein of silver was struck in 483 BCE, the statesman Themistocles encouraged the Athenians to spend it on a fleet of 200 warships. After using this new armada to help repel a Persian invasion, the Athenians established an empire, in which tribute from their smaller subjects was used to finance the navy that kept them under control. When the Peloponnesian War broke out between Athens and Sparta in 431 BCE, the Athenian strategy was to rely entirely on their navy: they brought their whole population within the city walls, knowing that they could be supplied indefinitely by sea. You can experience many of these events directly in the Battle for Greece campaign!