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00:08The Greeks.
00:11The people glorious and arrogant, valiant and headstrong.
00:20These were the men and women who laid the very foundations of Western civilization.
00:27Their monuments still recall perhaps the most extraordinary two centuries in history.
00:34A time which saw the birth of science and politics, philosophy, literature and drama.
00:43Which saw the creation of art and architecture.
00:47We still strive to equal.
01:00And the Greeks achieved all this against a backdrop of war and conflict.
01:06For they would vanquish armies, navies, empires many times their size.
01:12And build an empire of their own which stretched across the Mediterranean.
01:18For one brief moment, the mighty warships of the Greeks ruled the seas.
01:25Their prosperity unequaled.
01:30These achievements, achievements which still shape our world.
01:34Were made not by figures lost to time.
01:38But by men and women whose voices we can still hear.
01:42Whose lives we can still follow.
01:46Men such as Themistatles.
01:49One of the world's greatest military generals.
01:54Pericles.
01:56A politician of vision and genius.
01:59And Socrates.
02:01The most famous philosopher in history.
02:09This is the story of these astonishing individuals.
02:13Of the rise and fall of a civilization that changed the world.
02:17This is the overgrowth of the advantage of the world.
02:19That is a pue book.
02:30This is the material世界 where the world is on the way.
02:30Can he become a man.
02:37What didφοeth heeeth.
02:39Four decades later himself.
02:40508 BC.
02:42Five centuries before the birth of Christ.
02:48In a town called Athens, a tiny city in mainland Greece, Pandemonium ruled the streets.
02:57The ordinary people had turned on their rulers, demanding freedom from centuries of oppression.
03:19At this moment, one man looked on, an Athenian nobleman, named Cleisthenes.
03:34Cleisthenes had been brought up from birth to be a ruler, to look down on these common people with contempt.
03:42But this one night would be a turning point.
03:46In his life, in the history of Greece, and in the history of civilization.
03:53In a flash of inspiration, Cleisthenes would see that these ordinary people should have freedom.
03:59A chance to shape their own destiny, to govern themselves.
04:08And with this decision, Cleisthenes would set his fellow Greeks on the path to empire.
04:15Cleisthenes
04:16The End
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04:51The End
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04:56Cleisthenes' family were called the Alchemyonids.
05:00They were a wealthy and long-established political dynasty.
05:07He grew up in a world of great privilege, a world in which men of an elite background would expect
05:17to have certain privileges just given to them.
05:22The origin of Cleisthenes' family fortune is a tale typical of ancient Greece, a curious story lost half in myth.
05:34The first Greek historian, Herodotus, claims that Cleisthenes' grandfather once performed a favor for a great king named Croesus, a
05:46king of immeasurable wealth.
05:51In return, he was told he could take a gift of gold dust from Croesus' treasury.
05:59But according to Herodotus, Cleisthenes' ancestor couldn't restrain himself just to loading up his pockets.
06:06He stuffed every orifice of his body, his ears and his mouth, with shimmering gold dust, and then poured more
06:13over his head and hair.
06:16And Herodotus writes that King Croesus was so amused by this bravado, that he let him take all the gold
06:22he was carrying, and as much again.
06:29But whatever the source of Cleisthenes' family wealth, there is no doubt that they had used it effectively.
06:36To gain power.
06:46From his earliest days, the young Cleisthenes was taught that he was an aristocrat.
06:53Ancient Greek for a member of the ruling class.
06:56In the sixth century BC, these aristocrats controlled everything that happened in Cleisthenes' hometown.
07:05A small settlement called Athens.
07:13Athens lay in the center of a Mediterranean peninsula which Cleisthenes knew as Hellas,
07:20and which we now call Greece.
07:27In the days of Cleisthenes' youth, it would have seemed impossible that this city would soon rule an empire.
07:36It certainly is not what we call a city. Forget Manhattan.
07:41Athens in the center has public buildings.
07:44But otherwise, I think one should imagine more village style of accommodation and habitation.
07:54The town was built around the Acropolis, a steep-sided outcrop of bare rock.
08:02A stronghold from which the Athenians could fend off the attacks of their neighbors.
08:11In the narrow streets surrounding the Acropolis huddled the simple homes of farmers and tradesmen.
08:23Most of the houses, perhaps mud brick, there was no sewage, there was no waste collection.
08:29We would find it very much like wandering through a third world village.
08:33You would certainly be able to smell Athens as you approached it.
08:40For men, life was past working in the fields on basic crafts.
08:48Women spent their days cloistered in the home, cooking, spinning, weaving.
08:54For these Athenians, reading and writing was a rare skill.
08:59There was nothing that we might call science or medicine.
09:03Life expectancy at birth was less than 15 years.
09:10I think the idea that ancient Greek life was nasty, brutish and short would be entirely accurate.
09:18Certainly, life was extremely tough.
09:27This was no society of equals.
09:31The common Athenians lived under the yoke of the aristocrats.
09:35Men such as Cleisthenes' father.
09:40The traditional political milieu from which Cleisthenes arose was one in which all effective political power was being dominated by
09:51a relative handful of people.
09:53The possibility that the ordinary people of Athens would actually matter was the furthest thing from the mind of the
10:03traditional Greek elites.
10:07For the Greek writer Aristotle, this was a world riven by injustice.
10:12The whole country was in the hands of a few people.
10:15The hardest and bitterest thing for the masses was their state of serfdom.
10:21Not that they weren't discontented with anything else.
10:24For to speak generally, they had no part nor share in anything.
10:32Athens was in a sense turned against itself.
10:36You had one part of the population, the aristocratic elite, holding power at the expense of the rest of the
10:46citizen population.
10:52Dominated by aristocrats interested only in preserving their own power, Athens hardly seemed a state on the verge of building
11:00a great empire.
11:04But then Greece also seemed an unlikely land to give rise to greatness.
11:10If you look at the physical world of Greece, it's not the kind of place that you'd immediately expect to
11:15produce a great civilization.
11:17Simply too many mountains.
11:18Greece does not have the obvious kind of physical unity that typically seems to be associated with the really great
11:27imperial civilizations of the ancient world.
11:33The great civilizations of Cleisthenes day had grown up around rivers and the fertile plains stretching from their banks.
11:41To the south of Greece lay Egypt.
11:46Where the regular flooding of the Nile sustained a civilization already 2,000 years old.
11:55And to the east lay the Persians.
12:02At the heart of their empire lay the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
12:09This was the very birthplace of civilization.
12:15The home of the world's first cities.
12:24But mainland Greece had no great open plains.
12:28This was a landscape riven by mountain ranges.
12:36Off her coast lay countless tiny islands.
12:40It seemed impossible for a single ruler to dominate this fragmented world.
12:50Instead, Greece was divided into countless tiny nations called city-states.
12:55Each fiercely independent.
12:58Each with its own culture and history.
13:03In Cleisthenes time, there were over a thousand of these city-states.
13:08Jostling with each other for land and power.
13:12They never were politically unified.
13:15Or at least in the classical period, never politically unified.
13:18And indeed, each individual Greek city-state, each polis,
13:23sought to maintain its own independence.
13:26Sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully.
13:30In the early 6th century,
13:32Athens was not nearly the most powerful or important of these tiny nations.
13:39Argos had stood for over a thousand years.
13:42Those citizens were able to trace their history back to the mythical days of the Trojan War.
13:52The Corinthians dominated Greek trade.
13:55Their ships plied the Mediterranean,
13:58ferrying goods back and forth from Egypt, Assyria and Italy.
14:06But there was one city-state which had military power,
14:10which appeared that it might come to dominate all of Cleisthenes Greece.
14:17In the south of Greece, around the reed beds of the river Eurotas,
14:21lay the city-state of Sparta.
14:28The Spartans were brought up from birth to be soldiers.
14:34Raised in the field, separated from their families,
14:37their lives structured around discipline and war.
14:48The centre of an average Spartan man's life was his barracks,
14:52and he was brought up to be a military man.
14:56The Spartans lived a life stripped of comforts.
15:01With few possessions apart from their weapons,
15:03and their cloaks, dyed red to conceal their or their victims' blood.
15:10The Spartans were brought up to put up with anything,
15:14and all sorts of stories,
15:16the best being of a visiting Sybarite,
15:19visiting Sparta, eating the local food,
15:22and saying, now he understood why the Spartans were so willing to die,
15:27because death was as nothing to eating their food.
15:33The Spartans were ruthless expansionists.
15:37By Cleisthenes time, they had conquered all of the surrounding regions,
15:41more than 4,000 square miles.
15:46And they had reduced these conquered populations to a slave class known as the helots.
15:54The helots were forced to work in the fields for their Spartan overlords,
15:59and they were ruled with an iron fist.
16:04The Spartans, every year, declared war on the helots,
16:08and the point of this was partly, of course,
16:10to reinforce their sense of identity as a warrior community,
16:14but also, rather calculatingly, to make it legitimate to kill a helot.
16:20And helot culling, as opposed to killing, was a regular practice.
16:29If there was any part of Cleisthenes Greece that looked like it might build an empire,
16:34it was Sparta.
16:36For the rest of the Greeks, they were a threat always on the horizon.
16:55This was the world of Cleisthenes childhood,
16:59brought up a member of a self-interested elite,
17:03in a state that was only a third-rate power.
17:11It was an unlikely beginning for the man who would set Greece on the path to empire.
17:21But then Cleisthenes had always been a man fired by a dream.
17:29A uniquely Greek vision of the greatness a man could achieve.
17:45If there was one thing that inspired Cleisthenes and his fellow Greeks,
17:49it was their stories, ancient tales and myths.
17:58The country was continually criss-crossed by hundreds of travelling bards,
18:03who recited these stories to whoever would pay.
18:09These were people who, in an age without writing,
18:12had memorised over a million lines of poetry.
18:16It's very easy to underestimate the power of the human memory
18:20when we live in a culture like ours,
18:22which has so many means for recording things.
18:24Before the Greeks got the alphabet,
18:26they seemed to have been able to remember vast tracts of poetry
18:31and pass it on over the generations in a quite remarkable way.
18:37These travelling bards would have regularly visited the Athens of Cleisthenes childhood.
18:43and their stories would have influenced and shaped him from his earliest days.
18:54The two most famous tales these singers told are still preserved.
18:58The Iliad and the Odyssey, composed by the legendary poet Homer.
19:06These works tell of mighty battles and epic struggles.
19:13And at their heart lie the heroes.
19:18Mythical figures whose strength had won them power and glory.
19:27Heroes, almost by definition, were doers of great deeds.
19:32The more heads you knocked,
19:33and the more young women that you deflowered,
19:37the greater your heroic status.
19:41Images of heroes are found all over Greek art.
19:46These warlike figures, valiant, beautiful,
19:49determined to seize victory at all costs, were the Greek ideal.
19:54The heroic ideal was absolutely central for the whole world of Greek culture.
20:00Heroes were terrific achievers,
20:03and one might hope to achieve heroic status by modelling oneself on the deeds of, for example, Achilles.
20:14Achilles was the archetypal Greek hero.
20:20As a child, he had been offered the choice between a long, ordinary life,
20:24or a brief burst of glory in the battlefield.
20:31Achilles' choice had been an early death,
20:34and eternal fame.
20:47This, the vision of the hero,
20:51the ideal of the man of action,
20:54was the model that Cleisthenes was brought up to follow.
21:13To pursue a life of greatness and glory,
21:20won through strength and valor.
21:28To seize power and victory for himself,
21:33and himself alone.
21:40To become a real-life hero.
22:00But Cleisthenes was not the only one to take the tales of the mythical heroes to heart.
22:11There's a big change in the middle of the sixth century,
22:16when one man seizes control of the government as what the Greeks called a tyrant.
22:28The story of how this tyrant, or sole ruler, came to power, has been preserved by the historian Herodotus.
22:37One day, a man of dignified and noble bearing rode into the city of Athens.
22:45Poseidon stood a tall and beautiful woman.
22:48A woman he claimed was the patron goddess of Athens, Athena.
22:55This dashing figure demanded that he be given the rule of Athens.
22:59For like one of Homer's heroes, he had the protection of a goddess.
23:05Surprisingly, he was welcomed by the Athenians as their new ruler.
23:10Despite the fact that the goddess was simply a particularly tall girl from a neighboring village.
23:16And the heroic figure was an ordinary man called Pysistratus.
23:22Cleisthenes' own brother-in-law.
23:27Pysistratus was, I think, an excellent politician.
23:31He was a man, without doubt, with an eye for the main chance.
23:37But as he consolidated his rule, it became clear that Pysistratus had far greater ambitions than simply gaining power.
23:47Pysistratus was an extremely intelligent man.
23:50He clearly understood that if he was going to maintain control of Athens,
23:55if he was going to be able to consolidate his rule and pass it on to his sons,
24:00which is clearly his ambition, he would have to find allies.
24:08Pysistratus took an extraordinary step.
24:11He turned to the common Athenians for support.
24:16Pysistratus, undermining the whole hierarchy of aristocrats and commoners that had endured for centuries.
24:27Pysistratus reduced taxes and introduced free loans to allow the people to build up their farms.
24:38And by offering the Athenians the chance of prosperity, Pysistratus began to transform his city.
24:49With the rise of Pysistratus, we start to see the success of agrarianism accelerated at Athens.
24:55And that's going to be a kernel that's going to grow and grow and grow in the ensuing two centuries.
25:01And one of the results of that is we see more vines and olives.
25:14Olive trees manifest themselves in every aspect of Greek culture.
25:20Economically, they allow people to have cooking oil, they allow people to eat olives,
25:24they allow people to use lubricants, soap, fuel.
25:27So it's a very valuable economic commodity.
25:32The land around Athens produced excellent olives, the best in the Greek world.
25:38And as production soared, the Athenians found a ready market for this oil.
25:50Not only in the other Greek states, but across the sea.
25:53In Egypt, in Phoenicia, Persia and Assyria.
25:59For Athens was ideally situated to export to the entire eastern Mediterranean.
26:07Greece is in the middle of an extraordinary grouping of ancient civilizations.
26:16It's bounded on the east by the great Persian Empire.
26:20On the south by the age-old civilization of Egypt.
26:25On the west, the Etruscans and the Romans.
26:33Greeks were scattered.
26:35Plato has a rather nice phrase, like ants or frogs round a pond.
26:44The eastern Mediterranean was the greatest marketplace of the ancient world.
26:50It seemed that everyone had something to sell.
26:54Grain from Scythia.
26:55Salt fish from the Black Sea.
26:58Wine from the great vineyards of the island of Chios.
27:01Gold, silver, art and finery from Egypt.
27:05And everyone was willing to trade for Athenian olive oil.
27:10As goods flowed in and out of the Athenian harbour,
27:13the Athenians found their wealth and prosperity on the rise.
27:24But the most astonishing consequence of Athens' sudden expansion
27:27was to be found in the darkest streets of the city.
27:35Athens' first great artistic legacy.
27:38The vase.
27:46I think what's fascinating about the pottery is that, in its own time,
27:51it wasn't a big deal artistically.
27:54What was inside the pots was almost invariably worth more than the pot itself.
28:03Here in the area known as the Keremachos, ancient Athens' red light district,
28:08could also be found the potter's workshops.
28:11These common artisans were amongst the lowest of the low in Athenian society.
28:17If you were a potter in Athenian society, I won't say you were the scum of the earth,
28:22but you certainly had no special respect.
28:26It was hard, incessant work, unenvied by the citizen population.
28:34Pottery had been a staple across the ancient world for hundreds of years,
28:38used in the kitchen at home and for transporting oils and food.
28:45But it had always been simple in design, using geometric patterns and basic figures,
28:50designs based on Egyptian and Assyrian art.
28:57But Athenian potters, as they decorated their work,
29:01began to develop a whole new style of painting.
29:04A freshness and a naturalism never before seen.
29:09A style still astonishing today.
29:15It's now become almost commonplace for a Greek vase
29:19on the modern antiquities market to fetch millions of dollars or pounds.
29:25And if the makers of those vases had any idea of what we were shelling out for them,
29:30their graves would spin with either resentment or just absolute hilarity.
29:35These Athenian potters seem to have been motivated not by the idea of producing great art for eternity,
29:41but of outdoing each other.
29:46On one particularly fine vase, we find the proud comment,
29:51Euthymides, son of Polyas, drew this.
29:54And then underneath...
29:56And I'll bet Euphronius couldn't have managed it.
30:03For the first time in their history, the ordinary Athenians had tasted freedom.
30:10And they had shown their capacity for extraordinary achievement.
30:30Cleisthenes grew to manhood under Peisistratus' rule.
30:38And he saw how Athens changed.
30:43His home had turned from a modest rural settlement
30:46into an international economic power.
31:08But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
31:15In the year 527 BC, he died and was laid to rest here in the Athenian graveyard.
31:25His son Hippias took over.
31:30At first Hippias followed in his father's footsteps, ruling Athens with a fair hand.
31:39But soon, the Athenians discovered the perilous nature of tyranny.
31:52Historians tell us that in the year 514 BC, Hippias' brother was murdered.
32:03Aggrieved and bitter, the tyrant's behavior completely changed.
32:10Hippias not only executed the murderers,
32:13but cruelly tortured one of their wives to death as well.
32:26Aristotle described the rulers' sly towards madness.
32:31After this, the tyranny became much, much harsher.
32:35For Hippias ordered numerous executions and sentences of exile
32:40in revenge for his brother.
32:42Then he became embittered and suspicious of everybody.
32:48The freedoms that the common Athenians had gained under Peisistratus
32:52were now stripped away.
32:56There was now a real tyranny in the modern sense in Athens.
33:02Peisistratus had come into power for a cause.
33:04His son now had no cause other than self-preservation.
33:17Life for Cleisthenes had now become increasingly dangerous.
33:26For the paranoid dictator knew that it was from here,
33:30from the aristocrats, that the greatest threat to his power could come.
33:37And Hippias' fears would be proved right.
33:42With the hardening of the attitude of the tyranny,
33:45the time now seemed to be ripe.
33:56Cleisthenes decided to take his first great gamble.
34:00He would try to overthrow Hippias,
34:02to gain power for himself and his family.
34:06Cleisthenes' ambition to make his mark upon the scene
34:09is something that, of course, would have been impressed on him
34:12from a very early age.
34:17from the stories of the heroes that they need to succeed
34:21and to strike at the right time.
34:26For Cleisthenes himself, it would be an achievement.
34:34Cleisthenes assembled a conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant.
34:41Cleisthenes was trapped in his stronghold,
34:44captured and banished from Athens forever.
34:57The year was 510 BC,
34:59and Cleisthenes was now one of the most powerful figures in Athens.
35:05He had lived up to the heroic myths he had been brought up to follow since childhood.
35:15But Greek society was changing.
35:17The heroic urge that drove Cleisthenes was no longer reserved for the elite.
35:24It was now permeating every level of Greek society.
35:36This is Olympia in southern Greece.
35:41Here, once every four years, men from across the Greek world would gather
35:45to compete in a vast contest of athletic skill.
35:51This was the ancestor of the modern Olympic Games.
36:00For the ancient travel writer Pausanias,
36:03the Olympics were the highlight of any visit to Greece.
36:06Many other sights to be seen in Greece,
36:09and many other wonders to be heard.
36:11But on nothing does heaven bestow more care than the Olympic Games.
36:20The Olympic Games were founded in 776 BC,
36:25two centuries before Cleisthenes had even been born.
36:30Then they had been an exclusive competition for the wealthiest of the Greeks.
36:35But by Cleisthenes' time, the games had evolved to allow anyone to take part.
36:41A nobleman could now race against a potter,
36:44a king against a fishmonger.
36:46The Olympic Games were a chance for any Greeks
36:50to display the sort of heroic qualities that the heroes of Homer had displayed.
36:58The competitions had their roots
36:59and the skills required on the ancient battlefield.
37:05chariot racing,
37:08running,
37:11wrestling,
37:12boxing.
37:14But here there was no real prize,
37:17just a wreath of olives,
37:18and fame throughout Greece.
37:30A competitor would be surrounded by the largest gathering of Greeks in peace that he would ever experience.
37:38Perhaps as many as 40,000 Greeks would gather for the Olympic Games.
37:54Greeks would travel hundreds of miles to attend the Olympics.
37:58And during the festival, the land surrounding the stadiums would be covered with encampments.
38:08But the games were very much a male experience.
38:11Women were prohibited from entering the competitions, or even the stadium.
38:20But for the Greek man, whatever his origin or class, to win here would be the highlight of his life.
38:27You had briefly a moment of glory, of extreme fame, which was what the competitive culture of the Greeks valued
38:36so highly.
38:39Here the Greeks had perhaps found a civilized way to satisfy the heroic ideal.
38:48They had built a meritocracy based on skill and ability, where anyone could win.
39:09But a world where everyone could seize victory could only make Athens even more unstable.
39:16As soon as Cleisthenes gained power, he found that others were conspiring against him.
39:23Here, heroism still meant one thing.
39:28Seize power whenever and however you can.
39:33The only rule is that you get what you can, and that you fight.
39:42You have to go in there and show that you can win.
39:49The most ambitious of those conspiring against Cleisthenes was a man named Isagoras.
39:56Isagoras was another Athenian aristocrat.
40:01He too had been brought up to believe that power was his right.
40:07But Isagoras also knew that he could not gain power on his own.
40:18Isagoras took an unprecedented step.
40:20He turned outside Athens for support.
40:25He sent a message to the Spartans, Greece's most feared warriors.
40:36Isagoras was an old friend of the Spartans.
40:39Rumor had it that he had shared his wife with the Spartan king.
40:45The Spartans immediately provided a force of their finest troops to back up Isagoras's bid for power.
40:53To help him betray his city.
40:57Isagoras really was upping the stakes.
41:00He brought in the most powerful state in Greece.
41:03It was pretty clear he was going to turn Athens into a subject state to Sparta.
41:13With his Spartan force, Isagoras staged a coup.
41:18Seizing control of Athens.
41:23He and his troops would rule from the high point of the city.
41:27The stronghold atop the Acropolis.
41:40The first targets of the new tyrant were the other aristocrats.
41:46Cleisthenes, most of all.
42:00Over 700 households were cast out of Athens, including Cleisthenes and his entire family.
42:14Cleisthenes would leave his city living once again under the hand of a despotic dictator.
42:19A dictator who now ruled with the support of the most fearsome power in Greece, the Spartans.
42:28For Cleisthenes, all his childhood lessons seemed betrayed.
42:39He had been brought up to be an aristocrat and a ruler.
42:47To emulate the mythical heroes.
42:52But all this had led to was conflict and feuding, death and exile.
42:58Power struggles amongst an aristocratic elite.
43:07How could Athens ever escape from this pointless cycle of violence?
43:21But even as Cleisthenes agonized in exile, Athens was rocked by an extraordinary event.
43:39Like their mythical heroes, the ordinary people of Athens now took their destiny into their own hands.
43:55They rose up in revolution.
44:10Isagoras and his Spartan allies blockaded themselves atop the Acropolis.
44:14The high point of the city.
44:19But even there, they could not escape the fury of the common Athenians.
44:28For two days and nights, Isagoras held out against this extraordinary uprising.
44:35Until finally, on the morning of the third day, he was forced to surrender.
44:52The year was 508 BC.
44:58This would be Athens' first step to empire and glory.
45:05For the first time in recorded history, the people had turned on their rulers and seized power for themselves.
45:17Athens at this point is in control of the mob.
45:22The ordinary people who had risen up without organized leadership.
45:27And then the question is, what happens now?
45:31At this new dawn, the Athenian people now turned to one man.
45:37A figure whose life, whose experiences and disappointments had given him a unique vision.
45:44Cleisthenes was recalled from exile and asked to build a government.
45:53When Cleisthenes returned to Athens after the expulsion of the Spartans, he faced a really remarkable challenge.
46:03There was no possibility for just simply putting back in power a group of aristocrats.
46:10There was no possibility for him to declare himself tyrant.
46:14In a sense, what Cleisthenes had to do is design a revolutionary governmental solution for a revolutionary political situation.
46:30For Cleisthenes, the problem was how to give his fellow Athenians the say in their future that he knew they
46:36must now have.
46:42On an Athenian hillside, he had a great meeting place carved out from the bare rock.
46:51Here, in the shadow of the Acropolis, the citizens of Athens could now gather to discuss the future of their
46:58state.
47:03On these very steps, rich and poor alike could stand and address their fellow citizens.
47:14This is the ancestor of the British House of Commons, the American Congress of parliaments across the world.
47:23And where government had once been decided by the strength of a sword arm, or the thrust of a sharpened
47:28spear,
47:30Cleisthenes instituted the simple vote.
47:33A white pebble for yes, a black pebble for no.
47:40And with this elegant and simple idea, Cleisthenes instituted the rule of the people.
47:47A system of government which we now know as democracy.
47:56The great Athenian assembly would gather every nine days to vote on issues covering the entire administration of the state.
48:04From the raising of taxes to the building of roads.
48:10From the price of figs to the declaration of war.
48:19Athenian democracy is a very different sort of democracy from ours.
48:22One has a sense, as an Athenian citizen, that you really can make a difference.
48:26There is no us and them. There is no government separate from the ordinary Athenian citizen body.
48:33They are the government.
48:38Democracy represented a sharp break.
48:41An originally elitist, heroic culture was now turned on its head.
48:47And the idea was that even ordinary Greeks, who weren't aristocratic, who were not rich, could be, as it were,
48:53heroes in politics.
49:01It was a system of government that would transform this tiny state.
49:05And would set up one of the greatest flowerings of civilization the world had ever seen.
49:15It's not just an accident that you had democracy and you had this tremendous flourishing of culture.
49:22I think that democracy really does, in a very real way, unleash, make possible potentials within human societies that are
49:34very unlikely to be unleashed, to be made actual in any other way.
49:39The Athenians would take what had been the greatest achievements of the ancient world and transform them.
49:46They would take the monumental pyramids and temples of the Egyptian pharaohs and with them build an architecture of grace
49:53and splendor.
49:56They would take the myths and tales of the traveling bards and transform them into theater, entertainment for a whole
50:02city.
50:06And the great stone sculptures of Assyria and Egypt would be remade with an intimacy and emotion that still touches
50:13us today.
50:32But just as Cleisthenese democracy was gaining strength, a new threat was gathering in the east, the mighty Persian Empire.
50:43The Persians were the greatest power of the day.
50:46They ruled an empire that stretched from India to the Mediterranean.
50:53But as Athens had grown in power and confidence, the Persians realized that this tiny state on their eastern border
51:00might soon pose a threat.
51:07They mobilized a force of 30,000 men to invade Greece immediately.
51:19Cleisthenese democracy, hardly born, was now to face its greatest test.
51:27Cleisthenese democracy, hardly born, was now to face its greatest.
51:54Cleisthenese democracy, hardly%r
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