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0:02
NARRATOR: Ancient Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization. For over 1000 years, this strong and charismatic people devised the most advanced technological feats the world had ever seen. GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: So you have the appearance of a new generation of thinkers. And you have a reason to build things, to understand nature, to create technology. NARRATOR: Feats of engineering so amazing the ancients believed they had been built by the gods.
0:33
CLAIRY PALYVOU: One thing that we should really wonder is how on earth these people managed to lift these truly huge, gigantic stones. NARRATOR: These technological wonders were fueled by leaders whose thirst for greatness united a people and launched them to the heights of empire.
0:57
But this brilliant burst of culture and creativity would fall victim to savage battles that pitted brother against brother. A duel to the death that would lead to the end of a golden age.
1:15
[music playing]
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NARRATOR: September 480 BC, morning breaks over the Island of Salamis and the thin mile-wide strait that separates it from mainland Greece. The calm sea provides no hint of the great battle that is about to begin here. By day's end, the Mediterranean will be flowing red with blood.
1:50
At stake is nothing less than the future and independence of Greece, a country of islands and city-states which lie just outside the reach of the greatest empire in the known world, Persia.
2:06
BARRY STRAUSS: Persia was the world's superpower of its day, enormously wealthy enormously self-confident. The greatest multi-ethnic, multicultural empire of the world had seen. NARRATOR: A Persian invasion force of epic proportions is on the horizon.
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As many as 700 ships carrying 150,000 warriors determined to add Greece to their empire. But one Greek is poised and ready for battle. His name is Themistocles, an Athenian admiral and statesman who has been preparing for this moment for years.
2:50
But going up against Persia, the world's greatest superpower of the time, would be no day at the beach with Themistocles. Hello, I'm Peter Weller. First of all, the Greek naval fleet was out number two to one. Second of all, Themistocles face the almost insurmountable problem of trying to unite a completely disparate and contentious group of warriors into one command. You see, the good news about the civic development of ancient Greece was the city-state.
3:15
Each of these city-states was sort of a self-contained, self-reliant mini country within Greece. The bad news about the civic development of ancient Greece was the city-state. Because in as much as each of these city-states sort of spoke the same lingo, worshipped the same gods, there was really no sense of a national unity. And their only priority was their own particular regional and cultural agenda. At best, they didn't get along. At worst, they were violently at each other's throats.
3:43
NARRATOR: If there was someone who could pull the Athenians together, it was Themistocles, a man who didn't come from the aristocratic ranks and wasn't ashamed to let his fellow Athenians know it. BARRY STRAUSS: He was always an outsider and he saw himself as an outsider. And he prided himself on his lack of polish. He said that he might not know how to tune a lyre or to sing well, but he knew all you needed to know to make a city great and free.
4:13
NARRATOR: Themistocles was no stranger to facing the Persians in battle. 10 years earlier, a smaller Persian force had invaded Greece for the first time and fought the Athenians and her allies at Marathon. Now Themistocles would bring that experience to Salamis, and focus his strategy on a fatal flaw he detected in the Persian war machine, their navy. BARRY STRAUSS: He understood that the water was not the Persian's natural element.
4:41
Persia was a land power. In fact, Persian religion considered salt water to be demonic. NARRATOR: Themistocles wanted the Greeks to build a navy unlike any the world had ever seen. Immediately, work began at breakneck speed to build a fleet of 200 triremes, the deadliest ship in the ancient world. BARRY STRAUSS: Trireme's about 130 feet long. It's light and sleek and it's tipped with a wooden ram covered in bronze at the water level. And that is the offensive weapon of the trireme.
5:17
I think of the trireme, actually, as a guided missile. NARRATOR: The trireme consisted of 170 rowers on three separate levels. 62 on the top level, 54 in the middle, and 54 on the bottom. On the lowest level, rowers were seated so deep in the ship that there oar ports were just 18 inches above the waterline. GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: So you have a ship, a wooden ship, that is powered from the oars. It can go up to eight knots or nine knots, it was an amazing speed for the ancient world.
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And you can attack like a missile.
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And the rowers, of course, have to learn how to work as a team. They have to learn to row together in unison, which is an easy thing to begin to do, but a very difficult thing to master. NARRATOR: Themistocles's fleet of triremes was finished in just a few years and in the nick of time. In the spring 480 BC, Persia launched a massive invasion of Greece. Themistocles knew that the Persian fleet outnumbered the combined Greek fleet by almost two to one.
6:27
So he devised a simple yet cunning plan to keep the Greeks together and level the odds. GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: He had to turn a disadvantage into an advantage, the fact that he had fewer ships than the Persians. So he had to know that Persians, if you like, into such a battleground that they could not advance their whole ranks. So he can actually concentrate their power and strike. So the best place that he could do that was at the straits of Salamis. NARRATOR: Themistocles would devise a ruse
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to lure the Persian fleet into the narrow straits of Salamis. Themistocles was a very cunning man, a great trickster. Themistocles knew that the Persians preferred to win battles through diplomacy, through intimidation, and through buying traders. NARRATOR: On the eve of the battle, Themistocles sent a trusted servant across the straits to the Persian camp. The servant played the role of a traitor, telling the Persian King the Greeks were in disarray.
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And if the Persians sent their ships in the night, they could surprise the Greek navy in the morning. The Persians took the bait.
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BARRY STRAUSS: So at dawn, the Persians discovered, to their shock, that the Greek fleet, instead of being about to flee, was getting into battle formation. On that day, the Persians would have to fight. So it was a perfect setup of a battle by Themistocles. Now 200 triremes, powered by 34,000 Greek rowers, formed into a line. There was no room for the Persians to maneuver in the narrow straits. Themistocles had sprung the perfect trap.
8:15
The attacks raged all day long as the Greek triremes encircled the Persian ships then pounded them with their forward rams. BARRY STRAUSS: And the Persian officers died in unusually high proportions. NARRATOR: The battle was so confused, chaotic, and unnerving, that at the end of the day, the Greeks weren't even sure that they had won. But thousands of lifeless enemy bodies on the shores of Salamis revealed a decisive Greek victory.
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Some historical sources claim the Persians lost as many as 200 ships to the Greek's 40. Any Persians that didn't drown were slaughtered by Greek soldiers waiting on shore. GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: Had the Greeks not won the battle of Salamis, the Greek civilization or ancient Greece is values that we all share in today's world, may never been there. NARRATOR: After the stunning victory at Salamis, Themistocles was hailed as a hero.
9:11
But his personal ambitions and greed began to add to his many political enemies. It was only a matter of time before the rage of the assembly boiled over. BARRY STRAUSS: Athens, at this time, had a practice called ostracism, an annual unpopularity contest in which the people would vote for the politician who they felt was most disruptive, most dangerous to the political process. And they would exile him for 10 years. NARRATOR: In 471 BC, Themistocles was ostracized.
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In a stunning irony, he was forced to embrace the enemy he had fought so hard to defeat. He would never see Athens again. BARRY STRAUSS: Amazingly, he was forced to flee to Persia itself, where he found refuge and he ended his life speaking Persian, working as an administrator for the Persian King, helping the Persians govern Western Asia Minor. NARRATOR: Themistocles had played his part in an epic story of great power and achievement
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that looked to a glorious past for inspiration. The legendary tales of the gods and heroes told in epics like the Iliad and The Odyssey. The stories may be myth, but the engineering achievements of these Greek ancestors were very real and still stand today.
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In the Greek city-state of Sparta, boys began their military training at age 7.
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NARRATOR: By 1300 BC, a people speaking an early form of the Greek language had inhabited large portions of mainland Greece.
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They were known as the Myceneans. And for years, their wars and scandals, exploits and achievements became the stuff of legend and laid the foundation of Greek civilization.
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Their capital city of Mycenae was surrounded by a massive citadel built over the course of 150 years.
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According to myth, it was from this city that the Myceneans were led by a King named Agamemnon, whose epic struggles were written down by the 8th century BC poet homer in two of history's most famous tales, the Iliad and The Odyssey.
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GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: So the Iliad was something like the Bible for ancient Greeks. It contained a moral story. It told you how you should live. It described gods, it describe religion, but also described people and described situations. It gave ideals that you should look upon. NARRATOR: The tales of the Iliad and The Odyssey have become some of the most famous in history. The abduction of Helen by Paris, Agamemnon's 10-year siege
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of Troy, and the giant wooden horse which the Greeks used to enter Troy and destroy the city.
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Although Agamemnon's exploits during the Trojan War may have been heroic, his return home to Mycenae was far from a hero's welcome. He was murdered by his own wife.
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Scholars have debated for centuries whether or not Homer actually penned the Iliad and The Odyssey or whether he just collected the folk tales of song or whether he had anything to do with them at all. But if the ancient Greeks came back today, they'd scoff at this pithy harangue. Because of the ancient Greeks, Homer wasn't just some top '40s folk singer, nor was he the best selling hack writer of some piece of pulp fiction, Homer was a historian. And these legends weren't the bedtime stories
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to be whispered to the kiddies before the oil lamps were blown out. These were accountable facts.
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This is what is left of Mycenae, the capital city of which Homer writes and where many, including me, would like to believe that Agamemnon really ruled. These ruins show us that, not only were these early Greeks master builders, but they were capable of some amazing engineering feats. CLAIRY PALYVOU: As you approach Mycenae, first thing, of course, that you will see is the fortification walls, which are very impressive.
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And immediately you have this feeling of awesome. NARRATOR: The citadel walls of my CMA are buttressed by stone blocks which weigh up to 10 tons apiece. They were engineered with such precision that each stone fit perfectly in place to its adjacent block.
14:20
But for awe inspiring visuals, nothing in Mycenae comes closer than the colossal main entrance to the citadel, the Lion's Gate. PETER WELLER: This is the Lion's Gate, the main gate to the citadel of Mycenae. It is one of the more stunning structures of all early antiquity. It is an imposing piece of symbolism. It is an imposing piece of engineering. Two lions standing fully upright, their paws on the base of a column. Their heads, which are missing, would be turning outward.
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Anybody approaching this gate would know that Mycenae stood for one thing, power.
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Structurally, the gate looks to be a standard engineering practice of post and lintel construction. These vertical elements here, these massive piers, are the posts supporting the lintel, the horizontal element, which weighs about 12 tons. But it is above the gate where the lions lived that the engineers took it one step further. If you look at this triangle of indented stones right by the lions, it develops an element
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that we call the corbelled arch. THEODOSIOS TASSIOS: Suppose you have these four stones, and instead of piling them up, you try to create a new opening from that side. And you steal a little bit of space by putting them this way. This is corbeling. If we are a little bit more ambitious because this is not sufficiently large and we tried to displace further these stones, still in carbeling, then we are running this risk that this is falling down. So what is the little trick?
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It's simple, you start putting counter-weight behind each of these corbelled stairs.
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CLAIRY PALYVOU: Now this triangle, first of all, we should say that this is a true Mycenean innovation. This is something that we see for the first time, most probably worldwide. So in that sense, we are looking at something that's very innovative, very new. NARRATOR: The Mycenean engineers took the corbelled arch one step further. They applied the idea to create a revolutionary interior space called a corbel dome. The dome was used in only one kind of construction, a tomb.
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Like the Egyptians, the Myceneas built incredible structures to house their leaders in the afterlife. These tombs are called tholos. Their construction departed from anything the Mycenean engineers had ever done before. CLAIRY PALYVOU: And with the circular form, it's completely absent in the architectural minds of the Myceneans. The Myceneans worked with straight lines and right angles. So the circle is just for this kind of structure.
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So that makes the impression and the symbolism of the circle as related to death even stronger. NARRATOR: Building a tholos was a giant engineering feat. The first step would have been to hollow out the side of a hill. PETER WELLER: So they dug this trench. And this trench would form the dromos, which means in Greek, road or way. In this case, it's a walkway to the tomb. And it's flanked on each side by these beautiful almond stones set in lengthwise and edgewise.
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Now 3,200 years ago in 1200 BC, a visitor approaching would walk down this dromos and then he would be confronted by an unbelievably magnificent and stunning sight, this massive doorway.
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The doorway would be flanked by two fantastic columns carved out of solid green marble with zigzag and spiral designs going all the way up.
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Each one of these massive stones is 2 and 1/2 feet tall. And there are 33 rings of these stones laid out in a conical shape. Now each layer of stone is laid over the lower one in a sort of protruding fashion. That's what we mean by the corbel style. And then they're shaved down to make it all very smooth. CLAIRY PALYVOU: In order for this structure to be stable, you need a constant pressure from outwards inwards. Very much like a burrow where you
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need this band, this metallic band, around to keep the rings together. This pressure comes from the addition of earth. As they build, they add earth from around. And quite a lot of earth. And there comes a point when they have finished the beehive structure inside. At the same, time they have built a whole earthen mound on top.
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NARRATOR: Around 1100 BC, this early Greek civilization suddenly and mysteriously disintegrated and disappeared.
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GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: There's lots of theories about that. I think the most dominant one is new tribes, new barbarian tribes, came from the steps and they attacked the civilizations of Egypt, they attacked the civilization of Mesopotamia causing disruption in the trade routes. But that became their fault. NARRATOR: With the fall of Mycenae, Greece entered a dark age. Over 4 centuries, its culture fell into a deep slumber.
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Then in the 8th century BC, individual city-states began to develop and flourish. Each one forging its own identity. Competing for economic, military, and engineering prominence. One Greek island in particular, Samos, would see the construction of one of the most amazing engineering feats seen in the ancient world, moving mountains to bring water to the people.
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The ancient Greeks believed Homer, the 8th century poet who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey was actually blind.
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Sparta, Athens, Corinth, Thebes, these are just a few of the more than 100 city-states that emerged all around Greece 400 years after the disappearance of the Mycenean civilization. Before the advent of democracy in Greece, many of these city-states were led by a single ruler called a tyrant in ancient Greek. Around 540 BC, a tyrant named Polycrates came to rule over the island city-state of Samos in the Aegean sea. CHRISTOHPER RATTE: He was quite a player on the international scene.
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He made tactical alliances, not just with the Persians, but also, for example, with the Egyptians. He was an ambitious figure. NARRATOR: Polycrates saw that the path to power for an island like Samos lay through the sea. He built a fleet of 100 triremes, terrorizing neighboring city-states and taxing ships that pass through the surrounding waters.
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RICHARD BILLOWS: Under Polycrates, Samosm his home island, became the dominant sea power. And that was the basis of his wealth and power. NARRATOR: With his newly found riches, Polycrates built up defensive walls around his capital city and set about to solve a problem that plagued many cities in the arid Mediterranean climate, drinking water. THEODOSIOS TASSIOS: Samos was a very, very important and powerful city. They were needing a lot of water. And they were short of water.
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NARRATOR: There was a plentiful spring available. But it was separated from the city by the 900-foot high Mt. Kastro. Somehow, Polycrates and his engineers had to figure out how to connect the city and the spring. Running an aqueduct around the mountain was not an option. LOTHAR HASELBERGER: You could construct a water supply system around the mountain. But the first thing a besieging enemy would do to cut off that water line. And there you are with your wonderful fortification,
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with your wonderful new walls, and you're drying out. NARRATOR: The solution required thinking outside the box. Polycrates turned to an engineer named Eupalinos. Eupalinos came up with a solution that literally meant moving a mountain, a tunnel running straight through Mt. Kastro. It would be a huge project and a lengthy one. THEODOSIOS TASSIOS: The time needed for such tunneling should be enormous. Therefore, the decision was taken to drive tunnels from both sides.
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This is a mathematical and a technical problem. NARRATOR: Like the engineers of the modern day Chunnel under the English Channel, Eupalinos dug tunnels from each side of the mountain until they met in the middle. To succeed, Eupalinos would have to be sure that each tunnel started at the same vertical height on opposite sides of the mountain. The tunnels also had to match up on a horizontal plane. Otherwise, they would pass each other like ships in the night.
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Without sophisticated surveying equipment, it was a remarkable challenge for an engineer to take on. One theory involves a short walk around a large mountain. By forging a path from the spring to the city in short perpendicular lines, Eupalinos could measure each small length in order to calculate two sides of a right triangle. With two known sides of the triangle, the hypotenuse became the path of the tunnel through the mountain.
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What made this prodigious feat of engineering even more amazing is that it involved not one tunnel, but two. The main tunnel was dug at a height and length of about six feet by six feet, but was only used as a workspace to dig a second tunnel adjacent and below the main one, that would serve as the actual aqueduct. While the work tunnel was dug on a straight plane, the aqueduct tunnel was dug along the side and below.
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This second tunnel needed to be angled on a slight gradient to allow the water to flow gently downward toward the city. It was a matter of life and death in the dark and dangerous bowels of the mountain. LOTHAR HASELBERGER: Once the they were in the mountains, the difficulties must have been paramount because rock may be moving in unpredictable ways. Water may all of a sudden splash up and cause havoc. This was probably a constant danger.
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Apart from that, it was dark and needed to be illuminated. And you needed to constantly know where you are in order to keep your lines straight. NARRATOR: After slight adjustments, the two crews met in the middle almost exactly where Eupalinos had originally determined. The floors of each tunnel connected with only 24 inches difference between them. A discrepancy of less than 1/8 of a percent of the tunnel's 3,500 foot length. This stunning engineering achievement
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may have been the shining moment of Polycrates's reign. But his political fortunes would not prove so bright. RICHARD BILLOWS: The Persian governor on the coast of Asia Minor decided that that degree of autonomy that Polycrates enjoyed was unsuitable to the development of Persian power. And he was arrested and brutally tortured and crucified.
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NARRATOR: Polycrates was just one tyrant among many who ruled the city-states of ancient Greece between 800 BC and 500 BC. The rule of the few over the many was the only form of government humans had ever known. But that was about to change. The city-state of Athens was going to change the course of world history. The visionary leader who would make it happen was named Pericles. His legacy would be an everlasting monument on the Athenian Acropolis that rose above the clouds.
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An amazing piece of precision engineering called the Parthenon.
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The word encyclopedia comes from two Greek words meaning a circle of learning.
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In 480 BC, when Themistocles defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis, he saved, not only Athens, but also its young democracy, which had been born about 25 years earlier. For Athens, the age of the single ruler was over. Athens was rich in military might, treasure, technology, and ideas. She was poised for her golden age. And one man would take her there. His name was Pericles, a democrat and enlightened intellectual who encouraged the arts.
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But Pericles would also expand Athenian power through any means, including threats, bribery, and naked force. RICHARD BILLOWS: Pericles came from one of the old aristocratic families of Athens. So he came from the kind of family background in which a career of political and military leadership was expected.
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NARRATOR: His rise to power began when he was elected as a young man to the position of strategos, one of 10 such men who commanded the army and set foreign policy. A natural at politics and a gifted orator, Pericles was soon Athens' most influential and powerful statesman. Pericles was the typical political animal, if you like. This guy was a politician. He was able to speak and convince. He was completely dedicated to what he did. NARRATOR: Pericles became leader of Athens in 461 BC.
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Thanks to the fleet of triremes Themistocles had built, the Athenian navy held unrivaled power in the eastern Mediterranean. But despite the defeat of the Persian empire at Salamis, the threat of another invasion was always looming. In 478 BC, Athens, together with the city-states of the Aegean, formed a mutual defense alliance called the Delian League, the ancient world's version of NATO.
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PETER WELLER: By 450 BC, Athens has become the undisputed leader of the Delina League, which is nothing more than a money faucet for the city-state. But Pericles, as undisputed leader of Athens, finds ways to put this money to the best possible use by building massive public structures that best reflect the grandeur and magnificence of Athens.
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Now legend has it that Poseidon, god of the sea, and Athena, goddess of wisdom, each came to the Acropolis to compete for the patronage of the city. The outcome to be decided by the inhabitants. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and up popped the spring. Athena struck the ground with her spear and up came an olive tree, which, not only suggested sustenance for the Greeks, but a possible outlet for commercial venue. Thus Athena became the patron goddess of the city.
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Over the centuries, there were several temples to Athena, most of them destroyed. But we leave it to Pericles to give the world the most remarkable piece of architecture in all of Greek antiquity, the Parthenon.
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NARRATOR: Pericles decided to rebuild the Parthenon on the Acropolis using the crumbling foundations of an older Athenian temple. It would take thousands of laborers and skilled craftsmen to create this magnificent temple. And it would cost more than any building the Greeks had ever engineered, 30 million drachmas. In our terms, billions of dollars. LOTHAR HASELBERGER: That's an amazing, an amazing amount. But keep in mind that was a huge state enterprise.
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NARRATOR: Construction on the gargantuan building project began in 447 BC. The Parthenon was to be about 2/3 the length of a football field. Its outer dimensions, 228 feet long by 101 feet wide. The first challenge was to cleave the marble from a mountain quarry 10 miles away. In all, about 30,000 tons of the fine white stone would be needed. In the quarry, workers used the natural cracks of the stone to separate giant marble slabs from the mountainside.
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THEODOSIOS TASSIOS: The first step is to locate these cracks and calculate if this piece of marble is sufficient for my specific purpose. The second step is to put within these cracks, both horizontal cracks and vertical cracks, wedges, iron wedges. Why? Because an enormous energy was given by hammering all these wedges simultaneously. So that the brittleness of the material makes further cracking. NARRATOR: Once the giant slabs were ready, gangs of men
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used levers, ropes, and pulleys to maneuver the marble and prepare the stone for transportation to the Acropolis. But accidents often happened. THEODOSIOS TASSIOS: There was an enormous risk that this big block would slide further down, killing people underneath.
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NARRATOR: But cutting and transporting the marble from the side of the mountain was only half the battle in the construction of the Parthenon. Engineers now had to answer the question of how to lift these 10-ton marble behemoths and erect the greatest temple the world had ever seen.
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No medals were awarded in the ancient Olympics. A winner received an olive wreath on his head.
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July 447 BC, construction began on a magnificent temple on the Athenian Acropolis. The Parthenon was the vision of Pericles, a dynamic and ambitious leader who would take Athens into a golden age never before seen in ancient Greece. GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: It was a statement. We are the most powerful city. We are the caldron of democracy and free thinking. We have the best people. We have the best army, the best navy. We are the leaders. NARRATOR: The Parthenon would differ from most temples
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of the day, which consisted of a hexa-style construction. Featuring six columns on one end and 13 on the side. The Parthenon would be a larger octa-style, with 8 by 17 columns. CHRISTOHPER RATTE: That makes the building very different because they all have basically the same proportions. When you make them larger, you simply scale up everything. To make it wider was to give it an extra dimension. NARRATOR: The columns provide the main support
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for the structure. Each column consisted of 11 separate drums stacked one on top of the other like checkers. They were carved so that they would perfectly fit when laid together in a column. To do this, the top of each drum was divided into four concentric circles, with each ring either smoothed or roughed out, depending on the amount of grip needed to interlock with the next drum. In the center of each drum, masons cut a rectangular notch
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measuring about four to six inches square and three to four inches deep. Carpenters then inserted wooden plugs into the notches, which served to align and center each drum with the one above it. The next challenge was in lifting the enormously heavy drums, especially those for the upper sections of the columns. A single column of the Parthenon could weigh between 63 and 119 tons. A crane is an extremely simple device. You have just the boom and then you have a series of pulleys,
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which, as we know, just give you the possibility of taking up a weight of, say, 10 tonS by pulling down only 100 kilos. NARRATOR: Engineers attach the stone to the crane in one of several ways. The method most often used was to tie the end of the rope to the top part of a metal S hook, fasten shorter ropes to the bottom of the hook, and then loop these around small protruding knobs called bosses that had been left uncut from the marble for this very purpose.
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Typically, four bosses would be left surrounding the drum or stone block, evenly distributing the force needed to hoist the object. The walls enclosing interior spaces had to be laid down with extreme precision since the builders did not use mortar. To hold the ends of each block together, builders hollowed out the ends in a double T design. Then iron rods were inserted to clamp them together. After the columns and blocks were put in place,
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the bosses used to lift them were chipped off and smoothed over.
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There's a saying that there are no straight lines in the Parthenon. Now what's meant by this is that the architects incorporated a series of sort of optical illusions when they built it. It starts with the stairs, goes up to the columns, all the way up to the top of the building, the pediment, that triangular element at the top. So let's take a look at the stairs. They seem to be straight, but no. Closer look, they bow in the center and they go back down at the end.
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Now this conceit, if you will, continues right up to the columns. This column is of the doric order, there's no base. It seems to grow right up out of the stone. Each column has 20 flutes, which makes the columns sort of undulate as you look around it. And then the column bows out in the center and bows back up at the top. This is a process called entasis. CLAIRY PALYVOU: Such long lines which are, more or less, at the level of your horizon, tend to curve. So in order to extinguish this effect,
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they curved them the other way. So the result, again, is more harmonious than you see just being straight. Because if it was all straight, perfect, right angles, then you will see it like that. NARRATOR: The Parthenon's main function was to provide shelter for the monumental statue of Athena. CHRISTOHPER RATTE: Parthenon was an extremely expensive building. But the statue inside of it was almost equal in cost to the building itself, if not even more expensive.
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LOTHAR HASELBERGER: Athena's statue was about 10, 11 meters high. That means 30 to 35 feet or so. And it was of the materials gold and ivory. NARRATOR: Hundreds of sculptors created lifelike figures that proved the craftsmanship wasn't simply in the engineering. The most famous carving in the declaration of the temple is the frieze running on the interior walls of the Parthenon. It was carved in a low relief just inches off the stone
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and depicts the Panathenaia, a celebration to the goddess Athena held in Athens every four years. CHRISTOHPER RATTE: What survives on the side of the Parthenon today are the white marble remains of the building. In antiquity, not only the sculptures, but also many other parts of the building were richly decorated with paint. NARRATOR: But not every citizen was enthralled by the Parthenon. Some saw Pericles's pet project as an Athenian eyesore and simply a monument to his own glory.
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GEORGE ZARKADAKIS: Now many athenians hated the Parthenon, the temples. They thought it was disgusting. They thought it was terrible. Plato didn't like it at all. For many Athenians, what they saw in their holiest of holies, if you like, those new buildings coming up. Buildings that had incorporated novelties. Buildings that were making the break from the past. NARRATOR: The whispers of discontent in Athens weren't limited to the Parthenon. As Pericles continued to expand Athens's domination,
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his rivals began to conspire against him. Soon, they lashed out and attacked his close associates. At the top of the list was an elegant and educated woman named Aspasia, a member of the elite hetaerae social caste and Pericles' consort. Hetaerae were high class courtesans, often compared for example to geishas in Japanese culture. Hetaerae moved in the top circles in Athenian and Greek cultural life. NARRATOR: In classical Athens, a woman's role lay under the dominion of men, but as Aspasia
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was the exception to the rule. Pericles treated Aspasia as an equal, and his consort quickly became part of the Athenian elite. But they became a well known couple, and to the sort of astonishment and some scandal of the Athenian people, Pericles was even to be seen actually kissing Aspasia publicly. And of course, public displays of affection were not anything that one expected to see in classical Athens.
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NARRATOR: By 432, after nearly 15 years of construction, the Parthenon was completed. This temple to Athena did just what Pericles wanted. It advertised the power of Athens to the world. Ironically, the supremacy the Parthenon symbolized was already waning, and Athens' longtime enemy Sparta was on the rise.
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Once Athens had established this great alliance system, or as some people put it, this Athenian Empire, and arguably that's what it became, the Spartans began more and more to look askance, as it were, at the Athenians, and eventually, by the 430s, to feel threatened by the Athenians. NARRATOR: In 431 BC, Sparta moved on Athens. For two long years, Athens held out against the Spartan siege, but Pericles' shining city was about to come under attack by an invisible enemy.
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After a couple of years, because of the overcrowding in the city of Athens, disease that seems to have come originally from the Near East attacked the Athenian people. It's known as the Great Athenian plague. Large numbers of Athenians died in this plague. NARRATOR: Pericles, now in his early 60s, survived the plague, but was physically weakened and bore the brunt of the blame for the city's misfortune. In 429, with plague and war overshadowing his beloved city, Pericles died.
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The bloody and brutal conflict between Athens and Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War continued for another 25 years, until finally, in 404 BC, Athens fell.
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With the end of the Peloponnesian War, the time of Pericles and the dominance of Athens was over. Great marvels of Greek culture and Greek engineering would live on, and the irony was that the two men, the two purveyors of the fantastic legacy of the Classical Age of Athens, were not Athenians at all.
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The names of these two men would be synonymous not only with conquest but with Hellenism, the spreading of the Greek ideal of culture and value throughout the world right on up to our own modern day. These two men were Philip II of Macedonia and his son, a man who would be the envy of every single general and emperor from Julius Caesar and Napoleon to George Patton, a man who would traverse most of his known world in his short 33 years,
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that student of Aristotle and self-proclaimed god, Alexander the Great. I'm Peter Weller for the History Channel.
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