- 7/5/2025
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00:00The Greeks.
00:11The people glorious and arrogant, valiant and headstrong.
00:21These were the men and women who laid the very foundations of Western civilization.
00:26Their monuments still recall perhaps the most extraordinary two centuries in history.
00:33A time which saw the birth of science and politics, philosophy, literature and drama.
00:44Which saw the creation of art and architecture. We still strive to equal.
00:56And the Greeks achieved all this against a backdrop of war and conflict.
01:08For they would vanquish armies, navies, empires many times their size.
01:15And build an empire of their own which stretched across the Mediterranean.
01:19For one brief moment, the mighty warships of the Greeks ruled the seas.
01:28Their prosperity unequalled.
01:30These achievements, achievements which still shape our world.
01:39Were made not by figures lost to time.
01:42But by men and women whose voices we can still hear.
01:46Whose lives we can still follow.
01:48Men such as Themistatles.
01:54One of the world's greatest military generals.
01:59Pericles.
02:01A politician of vision and genius.
02:04And Socrates.
02:07The most famous philosopher in history.
02:09This is the story of these astonishing individuals.
02:19Of the rise and fall of a civilization that changed the world.
02:23And so they changed the world.
02:47508 BC.
02:48Five centuries before the birth of Christ.
02:56In a town called Athens.
02:58A tiny city in mainland Greece.
03:00Pandemonium ruled the streets.
03:05The ordinary people had turned on their rulers.
03:08Demanding freedom from centuries of oppression.
03:10At this moment, one man looked on.
03:32An Athenian nobleman.
03:35Named Cleisthenes.
03:37Cleisthenes.
03:44Cleisthenes have been brought up from birth to be a ruler.
03:48To look down on these common people with contempt.
03:53But this one night would be a turning point.
03:57In his life.
03:59In the history of Greece.
04:01And in the history of civilization.
04:03In a flash of inspiration.
04:06Cleisthenes would see that these ordinary people.
04:09Should have freedom.
04:11A chance to shape their own destiny.
04:14To govern themselves.
04:20And with this decision.
04:22Cleisthenes would set his fellow Greeks.
04:23On the path to empire.
04:24And with his fellow Greeks.
04:25On the path to empire.
04:42Historians estimate that Cleisthenes was born around 570 BC.
04:46He was hardly the type to become a man of the people.
04:52From his earliest days he had been taught that he was an aristocrat.
04:59Ancient Greek for a member of the ruling class.
05:05In the 6th century BC.
05:08These aristocrats controlled everything that happened in Cleisthenes' hometown.
05:14A small settlement called Athens.
05:25Athens lay in the center of a Mediterranean peninsula.
05:29Which Cleisthenes knew as Hellas.
05:30And which we now call Greece.
05:40In the days of Cleisthenes' youth.
05:42It would have seemed impossible that this city would soon rule an empire.
05:49It certainly is not what we call a city.
05:51Forget Manhattan.
05:53Athens in the center has public buildings.
05:55But otherwise I think one should imagine more village style of accommodation and habitation.
06:08The town was built around the Acropolis.
06:11A steep sided outcrop of bare rock.
06:16A stronghold from which the Athenians could fend off the attacks of their neighbors.
06:21In the narrow streets surrounding the Acropolis.
06:25Huddled the simple homes of farmers and tradesmen.
06:30For these Athenians, reading and writing was a rare skill.
06:35There was nothing that we might call science or medicine.
06:45Life expectancy at birth was less than 15 years.
06:49I think the idea that ancient Greek life was nasty, brutish and short would be entirely accurate.
07:01Certainly, life was extremely tough.
07:03And this was no society of equals.
07:08The common Athenians lived under the rule of the aristocrats.
07:15Men such as Cleisthenes' father.
07:20Athens was, in a sense, turned against itself.
07:24You had one part of the population, the aristocratic elite,
07:29holding power at the expense of the rest of the citizen population.
07:38For the Greek writer Aristotle, this was a world riven by injustice.
07:44The whole country was in the hands of a few people.
07:48The hardest and bitterest thing for the masses was their state of serfdom.
07:52Not that they weren't discontented with anything else.
07:56For to speak generally, they had no part nor share in anything.
08:09Dominated by aristocrats interested only in preserving their own power,
08:14Athens hardly seemed a state on the verge of building a great empire.
08:19But then Greece also seemed an unlikely land to give rise to greatness.
08:27If you look at the physical world of Greece,
08:30it's not the kind of place that you'd immediately expect to produce a great civilization.
08:35Simply too many mountains.
08:37Greece does not have the obvious kind of physical unity
08:41that typically seems to be associated with the really great imperial civilizations of the ancient world.
08:53The great civilizations of Cleisthenes day lay to the south and east, in Egypt and Persia.
09:03They had grown up around rivers and the fertile plains stretching from their banks.
09:07But mainland Greece had no great rivers or open plains.
09:18This was a landscape riven by mountain ranges.
09:24Off her coast lay countless tiny islands.
09:28It was impossible for a single ruler to dominate this fragmented world.
09:32Instead, Greece was divided into countless tiny nations called city-states.
09:41Each fiercely independent, each with its own culture and history.
09:49And Cleisthenes Athens was not nearly the most powerful or important of these tiny nations.
09:54Argos had stood for over a thousand years.
09:59Her citizens were able to trace their history back to the mythical days of the Trojan War.
10:06The Corinthians dominated Greek trade.
10:12Their ships plied the Mediterranean, ferrying goods back and forth from Egypt, Assyria and Italy.
10:18But there was one city-state which had military power, which appeared that it might come to dominate all of Cleisthenes Greece.
10:33In the south of Greece, around the reed beds of the river Eurotas, lay the city-state of Sparta.
10:39The Spartans were brought up from birth to be soldiers.
10:48Raised in the field, separated from their families, their lives structured around discipline and war.
10:57The centre of an average Spartan man's life was his barracks, and he was brought up to be a military man.
11:14The Spartans lived a life stripped of comforts.
11:17With few possessions apart from their weapons and their cloaks, dyed red to conceal their or their victims' blood.
11:29Spartans were brought up to put up with anything, and all sorts of stories,
11:35the best being of a visiting Sybarite, visiting Sparta, eating the local food,
11:41and saying, now he understood why the Spartans were so willing to die,
11:47because death was as nothing to eating their food.
11:54The Spartans were ruthless expansionists.
11:58By Cleisthenes' time, they had conquered all of the surrounding regions,
12:03more than 4,000 square miles.
12:04For the rest of the Greeks, the Spartans were a threat, always on the horizon.
12:21This, then, was the world of Cleisthenes' childhood.
12:28Brought up a member of a self-interest to delete,
12:30in a state that was only a third-rate power.
12:37It was an unlikely beginning for the man who would set Greece on the path to empire.
12:47But then, Cleisthenes had always been a man fired by a dream.
12:55A uniquely Greek vision of the greatness a man could achieve.
12:58If there was one thing that inspired Cleisthenes and his fellow Greeks,
13:15it was their stories, ancient tales and myths.
13:19The country was continually criss-crossed by hundreds of travelling bards,
13:30who recited these tales to whoever would pay.
13:35These travelling bards would have regularly visited the Athens of Cleisthenes' childhood,
13:39and their stories would have influenced and shaped him from his earliest days.
13:51The two most famous tales these singers told are still preserved.
13:55The Iliad and the Odyssey, composed by the legendary poet Homer.
14:02These works tell of mighty battles and epic struggles.
14:07And at their heart lie the heroes.
14:13Mythical figures whose strength had won them power and glory.
14:21and glory.
14:26Heroes, almost by definition, were doers of great deeds.
14:31The more heads you knocked,
14:33and the more young women that you deflowered,
14:37the greater your heroic status.
14:39Heroes were terrific achievers.
14:42Images of heroes are found all over Greek art.
14:52These warlike figures, valiant, beautiful,
14:56determined to seize victory at all costs,
14:59were the Greek ideal.
15:12This, the vision of the hero.
15:16The ideal of the man of action,
15:19was the model that Cleisthenes was brought up to follow.
15:22To pursue a life of greatness and glory.
15:43One through strength and valor.
15:48To seize power and victory for himself,
16:00and himself alone.
16:09To become a real-life hero.
16:18To become a real-life hero.
16:29But Cleisthenes was not the only one
16:31to take the tales of the mythical heroes to heart.
16:41There's a big change in the middle of the 6th century,
16:45when one man seizes control of the government
16:50as what the Greeks called a tyrant.
16:58The story of how this tyrant, or sole ruler, came to power,
17:02has been preserved by the historian Herodotus.
17:04One day, a man of dignified and noble bearing rode into the city of Athens.
17:16Beside him stood a tall and beautiful woman.
17:19A woman he claimed was the patron goddess of Athens, Athena.
17:23This dashing figure demanded that he be given the rule of Athens.
17:30For like one of Homer's heroes, he had the protection of a goddess.
17:34Surprisingly, he was welcomed by the Athenians as their new ruler.
17:40Despite the fact that the goddess was simply a particularly tall girl
17:46from a neighboring village.
17:48And a heroic figure was an ordinary man called Paisistratus.
17:55Cleisthenes' own brother-in-law.
17:59Paisistratus was, I think, an excellent politician.
18:03He was a man, without doubt, with an eye for the main chance.
18:10But as he consolidated his rule,
18:13it became clear that Paisistratus had far greater ambitions
18:17than simply gaining power.
18:21Paisistratus was an extremely intelligent man.
18:24He clearly understood that if he was going to maintain control of Athens,
18:29if he was going to be able to consolidate his rule
18:32and pass it on to his sons, which is clearly his ambition,
18:36he would have to find allies.
18:42Paisistratus took an extraordinary step.
18:45He turned to the common Athenians for support,
18:49undermining the whole hierarchy of aristocrats and commoners
18:55that had endured for centuries.
18:56Paisistratus reduced taxes and introduced free loans
18:59to allow the people to build up their farms.
19:03And by offering the Athenians the chance of prosperity,
19:18Paisistratus began to transform his city.
19:21With the rise of Paisistratus, we start to see the success of agrarianism
19:31accelerated at Athens.
19:33And that's going to be a kernel that's going to grow and grow and grow
19:37in the ensuing two centuries.
19:39And one of the results of that is we see more vines and olives.
19:42Olive trees manifest themselves in every aspect of Greek culture.
19:57Economically, they allow people to have cooking oil,
20:01they allow people to eat olives,
20:02they allow people to use lubricants, soap, fuel,
20:06so it's a very valuable economic commodity.
20:11The land around Athens produced excellent olives,
20:15the best in the Greek world.
20:16And as production soared, the Athenians found a ready market for this oil.
20:29Not only in the other Greek states, but across the sea,
20:33in Egypt and Phoenicia, Persia and Assyria.
20:37Greece is in the middle of an extraordinary grouping of ancient civilizations.
20:47It's bounded on the east by the great Persian Empire,
20:54on the south by the age-old civilization of Egypt,
20:58on the west, the Etruscans and the Romans.
21:03Greeks were scattered.
21:09Plato has a rather nice phrase,
21:12like ants or frogs round a pond.
21:19The eastern Mediterranean was the greatest marketplace of the ancient world.
21:25It seemed that everyone had something to sell.
21:27grain from Scythia, salt fish from the Black Sea,
21:33wine from the great vineyards of the island of Chios,
21:36gold, silver, art and finery from Egypt.
21:40And everyone was willing to trade for Athenian olive oil.
21:45As goods flowed in and out of the Athenian harbor,
21:49the Athenians found their wealth and prosperity on the rise.
21:52But the most astonishing consequence of Athens' sudden expansion
22:05was to be found in the darkest streets of the city.
22:12Athens' first great artistic legacy, the vase.
22:16I think what's fascinating about the pottery is that,
22:28in its own time, it wasn't a big deal artistically.
22:33What was inside the pots was almost invariably worth more than the pot itself.
22:38Here in the area known as the Kerimakos, ancient Athens' red light district,
22:46could also be found the potter's workshops.
22:49These common artisans were amongst the lowest of the low in Athenian society.
22:55If you were a potter in Athenian society,
22:58I won't say you were the scum of the earth,
23:01but you certainly had no special respect.
23:04It was hard, incessant work, unenvied by the citizen population.
23:14Pottery had been a staple across the ancient world for hundreds of years,
23:19used in the kitchen at home and for transporting oils and food.
23:22But it had always been simple in design, using geometric patterns and basic figures,
23:31designs based on Egyptian and Assyrian art.
23:39But Athenian potters, as they decorated their work,
23:42began to develop a whole new style of painting,
23:45a freshness and a naturalism never before seen,
23:50a style still astonishing today.
23:54It's now become almost commonplace for a Greek vase on the modern antiquities market
24:03to fetch millions of dollars or pounds.
24:07And if the makers of those vases had any idea of what we were shelling out for them,
24:13their graves would spin with either resentment or just absolute hilarity.
24:18These Athenian potters seem to have been motivated not by the idea of producing great art for eternity,
24:25but of outdoing each other.
24:27On one particularly fine vase, we find a proud comment,
24:34Euthymides, son of Polyas, drew this.
24:38And then underneath...
24:40And I'll bet Euphronius couldn't have managed it.
24:47For the first time in their history, the ordinary Athenians had tasted freedom,
24:52and they had shown their capacity for extraordinary achievement.
25:16Cleisthenes grew to manhood under Peisistratus rule.
25:19And he saw how Athens changed.
25:27His home had turned from a modest rural settlement into an international economic power.
25:34But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
25:35But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
25:36In the year 527 B.C.
25:37In the year 527 B.C.
25:38He was not to last forever.
25:39But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
25:40In the year 527 B.C.
25:41He died and was laid to rest here, in the Athenian graveyard.
25:43But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
25:47In the year 527 B.C.
25:48He died and was laid to rest here, in the Athenian graveyard.
25:53His son, Hippias, took over.
25:54At first, Hippias followed in his father's footsteps.
25:56But Peisistratus' rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever.
26:01In the year 527 B.C.
26:02He died and was laid to rest here, in the Athenian graveyard.
26:12His son, Hippias, took over.
26:18At first, Hippias followed in his father's footsteps, ruling Athens with a fair hand.
26:29But soon, the Athenians discovered the perilous nature of tyranny.
26:42Historians tell us that in the year 514 B.C., Hippias' brother was murdered.
26:53Aggrieved and bitter, the tyrant's behavior completely changed.
26:59Aggrieved and bitter.
27:02Hippias not only executed the murderers,
27:04but cruelly tortured one of their wives to death as well.
27:18Aristotle described the ruler's slide towards madness.
27:22After this, the tyranny became much, much harsher, for Hippias ordered numerous executions and sentences of exile in revenge for his brother.
27:35And he became embittered and suspicious of everybody.
27:38The freedoms that the common Athenians had gained under Peisistratus were now stripped away.
27:45There was now a real tyranny in the modern sense in Athens.
27:53Peisistratus had come into power for a cause.
27:58His son now had no cause other than self-preservation.
28:02Life for Cleisthenes had now become increasingly dangerous.
28:15For the paranoid dictator knew that it was from here, from the aristocrats, that the greatest threat to his power could come.
28:29And Hippias' fears would be proved right.
28:38With the hardening of the attitude of the tyranny, the time now seemed to be ripe.
28:43Cleisthenes decided to take his first great gamble.
28:56He would try to overthrow Hippias, to gain power for himself and his family.
29:02Cleisthenes' ambition to make his mark upon the scene is something that, of course, would have been impressed on him from a very early age.
29:13From the stories of the heroes that they need to succeed and to strike at the right time.
29:24For Cleisthenes himself, it would be an achievement.
29:32Cleisthenes assembled a conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant.
29:39Hippias was trapped in his stronghold.
29:41Captured and banished from Athens forever.
29:56The year was 510 BC, and Cleisthenes was now one of the most powerful figures in Athens.
30:02He had lived up to the heroic myths he'd been brought up to follow since childhood.
30:15But Greek society was changing.
30:18The heroic urge that drove Cleisthenes was no longer reserved for the elite.
30:22It was now permeating every level of Greek society.
30:27This is Olympia in southern Greece.
30:39Here, once every four years, men from across the Greek world would gather to compete in a vast contest of athletic skill.
30:49This was the ancestor of the modern Olympic Games.
30:56The competitions had been founded in 776 BC, two centuries before Cleisthenes had even been born.
31:10Then they had been an exclusive competition for the wealthiest of the Greeks.
31:18But by Cleisthenes' time, the games had evolved to allow anyone to take part.
31:22A nobleman could now race against a potter, a king against a fishmonger.
31:31The Olympic Games were a chance for any Greeks to display the sort of heroic qualities that the heroes of Homer had displayed.
31:40The competitions had their roots and the skills displayed by the mythical heroes.
31:50Chariot racing.
31:53Running.
31:56Wrestling.
31:58Boxing.
32:00But here there was no real prize, just a wreath of olives and fame throughout Greece.
32:10A competitor would be surrounded by the largest gathering of Greeks in peace that he would ever experience.
32:25Perhaps as many as 40,000 Greeks would gather for the Olympic Games.
32:30Greeks would travel hundreds of miles to attend the Olympics.
32:46And during the festival, the land surrounding the stadiums would be covered with encampments.
32:50But for the Greek man, whatever his original class, to win here would be the highlight of his life.
33:01You had, briefly, a moment of glory, of extreme fame, which was what the competitive culture of the Greeks valued so highly.
33:12Here, the Greeks had perhaps found a civilized way to satisfy the heroic ideal.
33:23They had built a meritocracy based on skill and ability, where anyone could win.
33:28But a world where everyone could seize victory could only make Athens even more unstable.
33:49As soon as Cleisthenes gained power, he found that others were conspiring against him.
33:59Here, heroism still meant one thing.
34:04Seize power whenever and however you can.
34:08The only rule is that you get what you can and that you fight.
34:20You have to go in there and show that you can win.
34:28The most ambitious of those conspiring against Cleisthenes was a man named Isagoras.
34:33Isagoras was another Athenian aristocrat.
34:40He, too, had been brought up to believe that power was his right.
34:47But Isagoras also knew that he could not gain power on his own.
34:58Isagoras took an unprecedented step.
35:00He turned outside Athens for support.
35:06He sent a message to the Spartans, Greece's most feared warriors.
35:17Isagoras was an old friend of the Spartans.
35:20Rumor had it that he had shared his wife with the Spartan king.
35:23The Spartans immediately provided a force of their finest troops to back up Isagoras' bid for power.
35:33To help him betray his city.
35:38Isagoras really was upping the stakes.
35:42He brought in the most powerful state in Greece.
35:44It was pretty clear he was going to turn Athens into a subject state to Sparta.
35:56With his Spartan force, Isagoras staged a coup.
36:01Seizing control of Athens.
36:02He and his troops would rule from the high point of the city.
36:10The stronghold atop the Acropolis.
36:12The first targets of the new tyrant were the other aristocrats.
36:27Cleisthenes, most of all.
36:31Cleisthenes, most of all.
36:46Over 700 households were cast out of Athens.
36:48Including Cleisthenes and his entire family.
37:00Cleisthenes would leave his city living once again under the hand of a despotic dictator.
37:05A dictator who now ruled with the support of the most fearsome power in Greece.
37:10The Spartans.
37:11Cleisthenes.
37:15For Cleisthenes, all his childhood lessons seem betrayed.
37:27He had been brought up to be an aristocrat and a ruler.
37:35To emulate the mythical heroes.
37:37But all this had led to was conflict and feuding.
37:44Death and exile.
37:46Power struggles amongst an aristocratic elite.
37:55How could Athens ever escape from this pointless cycle of violence?
38:06But even as Cleisthenes agonized in exile, Athens was rocked by an extraordinary event.
38:30Like their mythical heroes, the ordinary people of Athens now took their destiny into their own hands.
38:36They rose up in revolution.
38:46They rose up in revolution.
38:49Isagoras and his Spartan allies blockaded themselves atop the Acropolis.
39:03The high point of the city.
39:07But even there, they could not escape the fury of the common Athenians.
39:11For two days and nights, Isagoras held out against this extraordinary uprising.
39:28Until finally, on the morning of the third day, he was forced to surrender.
39:31He was forced to surrender.
39:47The year was 508 BC.
39:48This would be Athens' first step to empire and glory.
39:54For the first time in recorded history, the people had turned on their rulers and seized power for themselves.
40:06Athens, at this point, is in control of the mob, the ordinary people who had risen up without organized leadership.
40:23And then the question is, what happens now?
40:25At this new dawn, the Athenian people now turned to one man.
40:33A figure whose life, whose experiences and disappointments had given him a unique vision.
40:38Cleisthenes was recalled from exile and asked to build a government.
40:50When Cleisthenes returned to Athens after the expulsion of the Spartans, he faced a really remarkable challenge.
40:59There was no possibility for just simply putting back in power a group of aristocrats.
41:08There was no possibility for him to declare himself tyrant.
41:13In a sense, what Cleisthenes had to do is design a revolutionary governmental solution for a revolutionary political situation.
41:24For Cleisthenes, the problem was how to give his fellow Athenians the say in their future that he knew they must now have.
41:42On an Athenian hillside, he had a great meeting place carved out from the bare rock.
41:47Here, in the shadow of the Acropolis, the citizens of Athens could now gather to discuss the future of their state.
42:04On these very steps, rich and poor alike could stand and address their fellow citizens.
42:09This is the ancestor of the British House of Commons, the American Congress of parliaments across the world.
42:24And where government had once been decided by the strength of a sword arm, or the thrust of a sharpened spear,
42:30Cleisthenes instituted the simple vote.
42:35A white pebble for yes, a black pebble for no.
42:42And with this elegant and simple idea, Cleisthenes instituted the rule of the people.
42:50A system of government which we now know as democracy.
42:53The great Athenian assembly would gather every nine days to vote on issues covering the entire administration of the state.
43:08From the raising of taxes to the building of roads.
43:14From the price of figs to the declaration of war.
43:16Athenian democracy is a very different sort of democracy from ours.
43:27One has a sense, as an Athenian citizen, that you really can make a difference.
43:31There is no us and them.
43:33There is no government separate from the ordinary Athenian citizen body.
43:38They are the government.
43:40Democracy represented a sharp break and originally elitist, heroic culture was now turned on its head.
43:52And the idea was that even ordinary Greeks who weren't aristocratic, who were not rich, could be, as it were, heroes in politics.
44:00It was a system of government that would transform this tiny state.
44:11And would set off one of the greatest flowerings of civilization the world had ever seen.
44:16It's not just an accident that you had democracy and you had this tremendous flourishing of culture.
44:30I think that democracy really does, in a very real way, unleash, make possible potentials within human societies that are very unlikely to be unleashed, to be made actual in any other way.
44:44But it would not be Cleisthenes' task to lead Athens onto her greatest days.
44:54For a new generation of Athenians would take up his legacy.
45:08These Athenians would face struggles that would have stunned their ancestors.
45:11For they would have to defend their state from invasion and destruction.
45:23The world's first democracy would now be tested in the crucible of war and conflict.
45:41The world's first centrality fight precisely.
45:42Just an inevitable group.
45:43The heart of war, in a very hospital, didn't kill anyone.
45:45The world is one of the areas of war基iles.
45:46word for us, four Participable in temple.
45:49The world has meant that it wasым a war.
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