Greece
Who ruled Athens?
Athens dates from about 1400 BCE. On our historical maps, the ground it stands on has been drawn inside 14 different states, empires and peoples. Read the history of Greece.
The history of Athens
Athens lies in the plain of Attica, ringed by mountains and a few kilometres from the sea at Piraeus, with the flat-topped rock of the Acropolis rising from its centre. The rock offered a natural fortress and a spring, the plain could grow olives and grain, and the harbours opened the Aegean. In the fifth century BCE this mid-sized Greek city-state produced democracy, drama, philosophy and monuments that later ages treated as models, and after a long eclipse it was revived in 1834 as the capital of modern Greece.
People lived around the Acropolis from Neolithic times, and in the late Bronze Age it carried a fortified palace of Mycenaean Greece. Athens seems to have avoided the violent destruction that ended many other palaces around 1200 BCE, and in the following centuries the villages of Attica were drawn together into a single state. Solon's reforms of 594 BCE eased the burden of debt, and in 508 BCE Cleisthenes reorganised the citizen body into the institutions of democracy.
Athens helped defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BCE, but in 480 the army of Xerxes sacked the evacuated city and burned the temples on the Acropolis before the Greek victory at Salamis. Victory in the Greco-Persian Wars made Athens the leader of a naval alliance that turned into an empire. Under Pericles its tribute paid for the Parthenon and the other new temples of the Acropolis, while the theatre of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the arguments of Socrates made the city the intellectual centre of Greece. The Peloponnesian War with Sparta, from 431 to 404 BCE, ended in defeat, plague and a brief oligarchy.
Athens recovered its democracy and remained a centre of learning, where Plato founded his Academy and Aristotle his Lyceum, but after the Macedonian victory at Chaeronea in 338 BCE it was no longer a great power. The Roman general Sulla stormed it in 86 BCE. Under Rome it was a revered university town; Hadrian completed the vast temple of Olympian Zeus and added a new quarter. Germanic Heruli sacked it in 267 CE, and the closing of the pagan philosophical schools by Justinian in 529 is often taken as the end of ancient Athens.
Byzantines, Franks and Ottomans
Under Byzantine rule Athens became a provincial town, the Parthenon serving as a church of the Virgin. After the Fourth Crusade it was ruled from 1204 by Frankish dukes, then by Catalan mercenaries from 1311 and by the Florentine Acciaiuoli family from 1388. The Ottoman Empire took the town in 1456 and the Acropolis in 1458; the Parthenon became a mosque. During a siege by the Republic of Venice in 1687, a Venetian shell set off Ottoman gunpowder stored in the Parthenon and blew out its centre. Lord Elgin's agents removed many of its sculptures in the early 1800s.
Capital of Greece
Athens was fought over repeatedly in the War of Independence, and the Acropolis fell to Ottoman forces again in 1827. Greece's first capital was Nafplio, but in 1834 the young King Otto moved the government to Athens, then a town of only a few thousand. Planners laid out a neoclassical capital of squares, a palace and a university. The city hosted the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 and swelled after 1923, when refugees from Asia Minor arrived in the population exchange with Turkey. German occupation from 1941 to 1944 brought a deadly famine, and the military junta of 1967 to 1974 was shaken by the student uprising at the Polytechnic in November 1973. Athens hosted the Olympics again in 2004 and bore the brunt of the debt crisis of the 2010s.
Greater Athens is home to more than three and a half million people, over a third of the population of Greece.
In pictures
2 images · scroll →Timeline
17 periods- 123,000 BCE – 10,000 BCENeanderthalMap of 123,000 BCE →
- 10,000 BCE – 5000 BCENo state drawn here on the mapMap of 10,000 BCE →
- 5000 BCE – 4000 BCEDiminiMap of 5000 BCE →
- 4000 BCE – 1500 BCENo state drawn here on the mapMap of 4000 BCE →
- 1500 BCE – 1000 BCEGreek city-statesMap of 1500 BCE →
- 1000 BCE – 323 BCEGreek city-statesMap of 1000 BCE →
- 323 BCE – 300 BCEEmpire of AlexanderMap of 323 BCE →
- 300 BCE – 200 BCEKingdom of AntigonusMap of 300 BCE →
- 200 BCE – 100 BCEMacedon and Hellenic LeagueMap of 200 BCE →
- 100 BCE – 1 BCERoman RepublicMap of 100 BCE →
- 1 BCE – 300 CERoman EmpireMap of 1 BCE →
- 300 CE – 400 CERome (Galerius)Map of 300 CE →
- 400 CE – 800 CEEastern Roman EmpireMap of 400 CE →
- 800 CE – 1279 CEByzantine EmpireMap of 800 CE →
- 1279 CE – 1492 CEDuchy of AthensMap of 1279 CE →
- 1492 CE – 1878 CEOttoman EmpireMap of 1492 CE →
- 1878 CE – todayGreeceMap of 1878 CE →
Quick answers
- Who rules Athens today?
- On the latest map, Athens is in Greece.
- Who ruled Athens the longest?
- On our maps, the Byzantine Empire, for about 479 years (800 CE to 1279 CE).
- How many times has Athens changed hands?
- Our maps show it passing to a new ruler 4 times since 1 CE.
- Who ruled Athens in 1 CE, 1000, 1500 and 1900?
- In 1 CE: Roman Empire. In 1000: Byzantine Empire. In 1500: Ottoman Empire. In 1900: Greece.
Dates are the years of our map snapshots, which are decades or centuries apart, so a change shown between two years happened at some point in that gap. The borders come from the historical-basemaps project and are approximate, especially for the ancient world and for peoples without fixed frontiers.
Athens on this site
- Born in Athens
- Themistocles (524–459 BCE), Pericles (494–429 BCE), Socrates (470–399 BCE) and Plato (427–347 BCE)
- Died in Athens
- Pericles (494–429 BCE), Socrates (470–399 BCE), Thucydides (460–395 BCE), Plato (427–347 BCE), Epicurus (342–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (334–263 BCE)
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