Pnyx and Agora

This day was a little rough. First we had the first test, then a lecture covering all of Classical Greek history (Persian wars, Peloponnesian War, Thebes vs. Sparta, Phillip II), which took something like an hour and a half, and then we went over to the Pnyx, a small hill where the Athenian assembly met, and had another lecture on Athenian democracy. After breaking for lunch, I did my site report on the temple (combined with the test, roughly half of my grade for the course was determined this day), then we did the agora and, finally, the agora museum. This was probably the most strenuous day of the trip, mentally if not physically.

Ok, while my photos upload, here are some fun facts about Athenian democracy.
- Athenians were divided into four social classes based on property. They had really cool names. The first class were the pentakosiomedemnoi (literally "five-hundred-bushel-ers"), the second the hippeis ("knights" or maybe just "horse owners"), the third zeugetai (which just sounds cool), and the fourth were the dirt poor thetes, who only ever got political power because they provided all the labor for Athens' navy.
- Under Pericles' 'radical democracy', most officials (including the president-equivalents, but not the generals) were elected by lottery. There was an interview process to screen out the nutters and complete morons, but for the most part anyone from the appropriate class could find themselves in government.
- Juries consisted of between 200-500 men, usually old retirees who took advantage of the pay given to jurors as a form of welfare. The Athenians operated on the principle that you can bribe some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, so they grabbed as many people as possible for juries at the last possible second.
- There was no state prosecution, so the only way anyone was ever tried for something was if another private citizen took them to court over it. Think about that the next time you get a traffic violation.
- If there was a conviction, both parties came up with punishments and the jury voted on one of them. Socrates basically committed state-assisted suicide this way; his opponent suggested that they execute him, while Socrates said his punishment should be public honors and free meals for life in the building they used for entertaining foreign dignitaries.

Ok, here we go. First, a pair of photos that should have gone with the 16th update.
The acropolis from the temple of Hephaistos. Areopagus on the right and the agora on the left.
The stoa of Attalos. The agora is hidden by the trees. The stoa was reconstructed and now houses the agora museum.

The acropolis from the Pnyx.
Athenian sprawl. Can you find the 5th century temple is this photo?
What's left of the older (I think) of the two speaker's podiums.
And the newer (I think) podium.
A room with a mosaic. I'm not sure what this is, but it looks like a dining room. Probably a part of the bouleterion, where the elected legislature (the boule) met.
My temple from the other side of the tracks, right before breaking for lunch.
Pete, Hadrian and Dr. Farney in the agora. The agora is the Greek equivalent of a Roman forum, and during the classical period was both a marketplace and a religious and political center. Later the Hellenistic kings and Romans clutter it up so much that Augustus felt the need to build another, more Romanized, agora for businesses. As for Hadrian, you'll be hearing about him a lot a few weeks down the road. There aren't more pictures of the agora because it's utter chaos. You can't get a sense for what anything looked like because there's no reconstruction, and they can't reconstruct anything without destroying something else.
A necklace in the agora museum. This is from a dark age burial, and is actually mentioned in our archaeology textbook. It's an import from the Near East and was a few hundred years old before it was buried with a Greek woman.
A model of a grainery from the same burial. Five storage containers, so maybe an early nod to what would become the pentakosiomedemnoi class. Those little hatches at the top are required to keep the real containers ventilated, or the gas given off by the grain will make them explode.
The Greeks used broken bits of pottery (potsherds or, in Greek, ostraka) as scratch paper pretty frequently, but the more famous use was political. Every year the Athenians voted to decided if they should have an ostracism or not. If they did, basically the two biggest political heavyweights would duke it out in an election and the loser would be exiled for ten years. It was supposed to keep the state in relative harmony, and is probably why Athens didn't have the developed political parties of Rome or some other Greek cities. These ostraka, made from the bottoms of kylixes (there's on in the top middle) all have "Themistokles, son of whoever, the traitor" written on them in the same handwriting. They were probably prepared in advance by his rival's supporters and distributed to voters, then dumped in the agora somewhere afterwards.
More ostracism votes. Pretty much every significant Athenian politician had at least a few.
"Themistokles the traitor"
A blurry picture of something that's basically blurry in real life: a Spartan shield. A bunch of Spartans got captured by the Athenians after doing something stupid during the Peloponnesian war, and the Athenians mounted a bunch of their shields on the Parthenon. None of them are up there now, but you'll see the holes in the next update.
Kylixes, used for drinking wine. You'd see a red, murky picture in them that got clearer as you drank the wine. Ancient wine also had a lot of dregs in it, and the Greeks would try to hit targets with them as a game at parties. One of these is actually a picture of a guy doing just that.
A closeup.

Next up: a ton of Acropolis pictures.