Why Athens?

When asked to write about an area of the world I wondered why it was inhabited, I thought quickly to Athens, Greece. Having been in Greece this summer and seeing multiple cities, I always wondered why Athens was chosen as the main city. I spent a good amount of time in Corinth, which is another large city, but not as large in scale as Athens. Corinth had a mountain on one side and and sea on the other, with fertile land in between. What was the appeal of Athens over a place like that?




My personal picture of the "Acrocorinth", with its fortress on the top.

After visiting Athens on my trip, I started to realize why it became such a hotbed from its earliest beginnings until now. Athens has been inhabited for at least 7,000 years and can be considered the foundations of western civilization. It first became inhabited during the Neolithic period. The main reason historians have found for this is because of the "Acropolis."
 
 The Acropolis

A natural defense settlement, historians believe that this was one of the main reasons people began to settle in Athens, along with being only twelve miles inland from the Saronic Gulf, a fertile valley area surrounded by rivers. Ancient Athens took up much less space than the modern metropolis that spans through the land now. It was only a mile long from start to finish. Next to come to help people settle in the area was the "Agora." This was the commercial and and social center of the city. As more merchants and traders began to use the Agora, the more the city grew in size and in reputation. As Greece itself started to populate through Mycenaean rule, Athens became the center of the civilization's government through its buildings in the Acropolis and its culture, through the Agora. While a multitude of other cities began to pop up and spread through the lands of Greece, Athens continued to thrive as its main city.


Athens today