Athens by James H.S. McGregor (review)

This book is a good one to take with you if you plan to visit Athens. It is intended as a narrative history and a guidebook. It would be just right to have at one’s hotel bedside or to enjoy during a long afternoon in a kafeneion. It is less well suited to lugging around under one’s arm to the archeological sites, because its maps and plans are too few and too small.

McGregor is an emeritus professor of comparative literature who has written similar books about Rome (2006), Venice (2008) and Paris (2010). This one, like its predecessors, is not a scholarly book. It is not encumbered by footnotes and its bibliography is a “further reading” list of twenty titles. It is intended for the highbrow visitor to Athens, and as such succeeds admirably.

After an introduction that skates swiftly over 2,500 years of Athenian history, McGregor divides the book into eight chapters. The first five treat the ancient history of the city, from the first settlement of the Acropolis through Roman times. By far the longest chapter, not surprisingly, takes on the fifth and early fourth century bce, when Athens attained its greatest historical significance, as the home of Pericles and an unusually democratic form of governance, of Socrates and Plato, of Aristophanes and Aeschylus, and of architects and sculptors whose work remains influential and admired to this day. These five chapters take up all the standard themes of ancient Athens, its distinctive geography dominated by the Acropolis, its political history and institutions, and its cultural life. It does justice, in short compass, to them all.

McGregor’s method here is to use specific locations as the occasion for a potted treatment of s subject. So the theatre of Dionysos, on the south slope of the Acropolis, serves as the prompt for a discussion of Greek drama, including quick summaries of a few chosen works by the great masters. The caves of the Acropolis provide the opportunity for a brief account of ancient Greek religion. The Agora triggers a treatment of the Athenian constitution. So the organization of the book, while fundamentally chronological, has a thematic sub-structure based on the local geography of the city.

At times McGregor roams further afield. Athens at all times was part of larger worlds, connected to other Greek city-states such as Sparta and Corinth, to the superpower of the fifth century, Achaemenid Persia, and later to Macedonia and Rome. So McGregor must occasionally zoom out for larger perspective. I found these sections a bit thin in comparison to the careful treatment of specific statues, for example. Readers without much background in ancient history will have trouble appreciating the relationship between Athens and Persia, or the significance of a seaborne empire for Athens’ struggle against Sparta. Most readers, I suppose, will not miss such fuller perspective, and will be happy for the treatments of the traces of ancient Athens they can actually see in modern Athens, such as the statutes and the marble monuments.

The final three chapters carry the story from late Antiquity to the present. McGregor gallops from the third century ce to the early nineteenth, taking surviving churches and mosques as the occasion to comment on religious history and Ottoman rule. The next is built around the Greek War of Independence (1821–30), necessarily more a Greek than an Athenian story, but continues into the next several decades, during which Athens became the capital of the independent country of Greece, and host to a Bavarian noble family as the new monarchy of a new country. McGregor dwells on the handful of neo-classical buildings erected in the nineteenth century.

His last chapter takes on the twentieth century, one in which Athens spilled out onto the plain of Attica and up its mountainsides. Almost every building in Athens dates from this period. McGregor provides an account of the turbulent national politics before 1950, which featured involvement in World...