(dramatic music)
- [Voiceover] Ancient Greece.
The birthplace of Western civilization.
For over 1,000 years this strong and charismatic people
devised the most advanced technological feats
the world had ever seen.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] Feats of engineering so amazing
the ancients believed they had been built by the gods.
- One thing that we should really wonder
is how on Earth these people managed
to lift these truly huge, gigantic stones.
- [Voiceover] These technological wonders
were fueled by leaders,
whose thirst for greatness united a people
and launched them to the heights of empire.
(dramatic music)
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.
(dramatic music)
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.
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.
- [Barry] Persia was the world's superpower of it's day.
Enormously wealthy, enormously self-confident.
The greatest multi-ethnic, multi-cultural empire
the world had seen.
- [Voiceover] A Persian invasion force
of epic proportions is on the horizon.
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.
- When going up against Persia,
the world's greatest superpower of the time
would be no day at the beach for Themistocles.
Hello, I'm Peter Weller.
First of all, the Greek naval fleet
was outnumbered two to one.
Second of all, Themistocles faced 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.
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, worshiped 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.
- [Voiceover] 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] 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.
- [Voiceover] Themistocles was no stranger
to facing the Persians in battle.
Ten 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.
- He understood that water was not the Persian's
natural element.
Persia was a land power,
in fact, Persian religion considered salt water
to be demonic.
- [Voiceover] Themistocles wanted the Greeks
to build a navy unlike any the world had ever seen.
Immediately, work began at break-neck speed
to build a fleet of 200 triremes,
the deadliest ship in the ancient world.
- [Barry] 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.
Might think of the trireme, actually,
as a guided missile.
- [Voiceover] 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 their oar ports were just 18 inches
above the water line.
- So you have a ship, a wooden ship,
that is powered from the oars.
It can go up to eight knots,
but nine knots was an amazing speed for the ancient world.
And it can attack like a missile.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] Themistocles' fleet of triremes
was finished in just a few years
and in the nick of time.
In the spring of 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.
So he devised a simple yet cunning plan
to keep the Greeks together and level the odds.
- [George] He had to turn a disadvantage into an advantage,
the fact that he had fewer ships than the Persians.
So he had to lure the Persians, if you like,
into such a battleground that they could not
advance the whole ranks.
So he can actually concentrate their power
and strike it.
So the best place that he could do that
was the strait of Salamis.
- [Voiceover] Themistocles would devise a ruse
to lure the Persian fleet into the narrows
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 traitors.
- [Voiceover] 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,
and if the Persians sent their ships in the night
they could surprise the Greek navy in the morning.
The Persians took the bait.
- So at dawn, the Persians discovered to their shock,
that the Greek fleet, instead of being about to flee,
was getting into battle formation
and that they, the Persians, would have to fight.
So it was a perfect setup of a battle by Themistocles.
- [Voiceover] 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.
The attacks raged all day long
as the Greek triremes encircled the Persian ships,
then pounded them with their forward rams.
- The Persian officers died in unusually high proportions.
- [Voiceover] 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.
Some historical sources claim the Persians lost
as many as 200 ships to the Greeks 40.
Any Persians that didn't drown
were slaughtered by Greek soldiers waiting onshore.
- [George] Had the Greeks not won the battle of Salamis
the Greek civilization, or Ancient Greece,
it's values that we all share in today's world,
may never been there.
- [Voiceover] After the stunning victory at Salamis,
Themistocles was hailed as a hero,
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.
- Athens at this time had a practice called ostracism,
an annual un-popularity 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 ten years.
- [Voiceover] In 471 BC, Themistocles was ostracized,
in a stunning irony he was forced to embrace the enemy
he had fought so hard to defeat.
He would never see Athens again.
- Amazingly he was forced to flee to Persia itself.
Where he found refuge and he ended his life
speaking Persian, working as an adminstrator
for the Persian king,
helping the Persians govern western Asia Minor.
- [Voiceover] Themistocles had played his part
in an epic story of Greek power and achievement
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.
In the Greek city-state of Sparta,
boys began their military training at age seven.
By 1300 BC, a people speaking an early form
of the Greek language
had inhabited large portions of mainland Greece.
They were known as the Mycenaeans,
and for years their wars and scandals,
exploits and achievements,
became the stuff of legend
and laid the foundation of Greek civilization.
Their capital city of Mycenae
was surrounded by a massive citadel
built over the course of 150 years.
According to myth, it was from this city
that the Mycenaeans 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.
- So, The Iliad was something like the Bible
for Ancient Greeks.
It contains a moral story.
It told you how you should live.
It described gods, it described religion,
but also described people.
It described situations.
It gave ideals that you should look upon.
- [Voiceover] The tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey
had become some of the most famous in history.
The abduction of Helen by Paris,
Agamemnon's ten year siege of Troy,
and the giant wooden horse
which the Greeks used to enter Troy and destroy the city.
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.
- Scholars have debated for centuries
whether or not Homer actually penned
The Iliad and The Odyssey,
or whether he just collected the folktales of song,
or whether he had anything 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.
Home was an historian,
and these legends weren't the bedtime stories
to be whispered to the kiddies
before the oil lamps were blown out.
These were accountable facts.
(dramatic music)
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.
- As you approach Mycenae, first thing,
of course that you will see is the fortification walls.
Which are very impressive,
and immediately you have this feeling of awesome.
- [Voiceover] The citadel walls of Mycenae
are buttressed by stone blocks
which weigh up to ten tons a piece.
They were engineered with such precision
that each stone fit perfectly in place
to its adjacent block.
But for awe inspiring visuals,
nothing in Mycenae comes closer
than the colossal main entrance to the citadel,
the Lion's Gate.
- This is the Lion's Gate.
The main gate to the citadel of Mycenae.
It is one of the most stunning structures
of all of 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.
Anybody approaching this gate would know
that Mycenae stood for one thing,
power.
Structurally the gate looks to be a standard
engineering practice of post and lintel construction.
These vertical elements here are 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 live
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 that we call
the corebelled arch.
- Suppose you have these four stones,
and instead of piling them up,
you try to create an opening from the outside
and you steal a little bit of space
by putting them this way.
This is corbeling.
If we are little bit more ambitious
because this is not sufficiently large,
and we try to displace further these stones,
still in corbeling,
then we are running this risk that this is falling down.
So what is the little trick?
It's simple.
You start putting counter weights
behind each of these corbelstones.
- [Clairy] Now this triangle,
first of all we should say that this is a true
Mycenaean innovation,
this is something that we see for the first time,
it was probably worldwide.
So in that sense we are looking at something
that's very innovative, very new.
- [Voiceover] The Mycenaean engineers
took the corbelled arch one step further.
They applied the idea to create
a revolutionary interior space,
called a corbelled dome.
The dome was used in only one kind of construction,
a tomb.
Like the Egyptians,
the Mycenaeans built incredible structures
to house their leaders in the afterlife.
These tombs are called tholos.
Their construction departed from anything
the Mycenaean engineers had ever done before.
- The circular form, it's completely absent
in the architectural minds of the Mycenaeans.
The Mycenaeans work with straight lines and right angles.
So the circle is just for this kind of structure.
So that makes the impression and the symbolism
of the circle as related to death, even stronger.
- [Voiceover] Building a tholos was a giant engineering feat
The first step would have been to hollow out
the side of a hill.
- 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 linked wise and edgewise.
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 site,
this massive doorway.
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.
Each one of these massive stones is two and a half 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 corbelled style.
Then they're shaved down to make it all very smooth.
- [Clairy] In order for this structure to be stable,
you need a constant pressure
from outwards, inwards.
Very much like a barrel,
where you 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.
- [Voiceover] Around 1,100 BC,
this early Greek civilization suddenly and mysteriously
disintegrated and disappeared.
- [George] There's a lot 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 fall.
- [Voiceover] With the fall of Mycenaea,
Greece entered a dark age.
Over four centuries, it's culture fell into a deep slumber.
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.
- [Voiceover] The Ancient Greeks believed that Homer,
the 8th century poet who wrote The Iliad and Odyssey,
was actually blind.
(dramatic music)
- [Voiceover] 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 Mycenaean 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 Eastern Aegean Sea.
- He was quite a player on the international scene.
He made tactical alliances, not just with the Persians,
but also, for example, with the Egyptians.
He was an ambitious figure.
- [Voiceover] 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 passed through the surrounding waters.
- Under Polycrates Samos, his home island,
became the dominant sea power,
and that was the basis of his wealth and power.
- [Voiceover] 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.
- Samos was a very, very important and powerful city
They were needing a lot of water,
and they were short of water.
- [Voiceover] There was a plentiful spring available,
but it was separated from the city
by the 900 foot high Mt. Castro.
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.
- 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,
with your wonderful new walls,
and you're drying out.
- [Voiceover] A 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. Castro.
It would be a huge project, and a lengthy one.
- [Theodosios] The time needed for such tunneling
should be enormous, therefore,
the decision was taken to drive
tunnels from both sides.
This is a mathematical and a technical problem.
- [Voiceover] 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.
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.
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.
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] Once 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.
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 line straight.
- [Voiceover] 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 1/8th of a percent
of the tunnel's 3,500 foot length.
This stunning engineering acheivement
may have been the shining moment
of Polycrates reign.
But his political fortunes would not prove so bright.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] 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.
An amazing piece of precision engineering
call the Parthenon.
- [Voiceover] The word encyclopedia comes from
two Greek words meaning "a circle of learning."
- [Voiceover] In 480 BC, when Themistocles defeated
the Persians at the Battle of Salamis,
he saved not only Athens,
but also it's 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.
But Pericles would also expand Athenian power
through any means, including threats, bribery,
and naked force.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] His rise to power began
when he was elected as a young man
to the position of strategos,
one of ten 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 statesmen.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] Pericles became leader of Athens
in 461 BC.
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.
- By 450 BC Athens has become the undisputed leader
of the Delian 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.
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 a 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.
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.
- [Voiceover] 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 craftsman
to create this magnificent temple.
And it would cost more than any building
the Greeks had ever engineered.
30 million dracmas.
In our terms, billions of dollars.
- That's an amazing amount,
but keep in mind that was a huge state enterprise.
- [Voiceover] Construction on the gargantuan
building project began in 447 BC.
The Parthenon was to be about 2/3rds the length
of a football field,
it's outer dimensions, 228 feet long,
by 101 feet wide.
The first challenge was to cleave the marble
from a mountain quarry ten 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.
- The first step is to locate this crux
and calculate if this piece of marble
is sufficient for my specific purpose.
The second step is to put within these cracks,
those 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.
- [Voiceover] Once the giant slabs were ready,
gangs of men used levers, ropes, and pulleys,
to maneuver the marble and prepare the stone
for transportation to the Acropolis.
But accidents often happened.
- It was an enormous risk
that this big block
would slide further down
killing people underneath.
- [Voiceover] 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 ten ton marble behemoths
and erect the greatest temple the world had ever seen.
- [Voiceover] No medals were awarded in the ancient Olympics
A winner received an olive wreath on his head.
- [Voiceover] 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.
- It was a statement,
We are the most powerful city.
We are the cauldron of democracy and freethinking.
We have the best people, we have the best army,
the best navy, we are the leaders.
- [Voiceover] The Parthenon would differ
from most temples of the day
which consisted of a hexistyle construction,
featuring six columns on one end
and 13 on the side.
The Parthenon would be a larger octistyle,
with 8 by 17 columns.
- That makes the building very different
because they basically have all the same proportions.
When you make them larger you simply scale up everything.
To make it wider was to give it an extra dimension.
- [Voiceover] The columns provide the main support
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 grit needed
to interlock with the next drum.
In the center of each drum
masons cut a rectangular notch
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,
which, as we know, just give you the possibility
of taking up a weight of say,
ten tons by pulling down only 100 kilos.
- [Voiceover] Engineers attached 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.
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,
the bosses used to lift them were chipped off
and smoothed over.
- There's a saying that there are no straight lines
in the Parthenon.
Now what's meant by this is 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,
a closer look they bow in the center
and they go back down at the end.
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 column sort of ungulate
as you look around it.
Then the column bows out in the center
and bows back up at the top.
This is a process called entasis.
- [Clairy] Such long lines, which are more or less
at the level of your horizon,
tend to curve.
So in order to extinguish this effect,
they curve them the other way
so the result, again, is more harmonious and you
see it as being straight,
because if it was all straight, perfect right angles,
then you will see it like that.
- [Voiceover] The Parthenon's main function
was to provide shelter for the monumental statue
of Athena.
- 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.
- Athena's statue was about 10, 11 meters high,
it means 30 to 35 feet or so.
And it was of the materials gold and ivory.
- [Voiceover] Hundreds of sculptures
created lifelike figures that proved that craftsmanship
wasn't simply in the engineering.
The most famous carving in the decoration
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,
and depicts the panathenia,
a celebration to the goddess Athena
held in Athens every four years.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] But not every citizen was enthralled
by the Parthenon.
Some saw Pericles' pet project
as an Athenian eyesore
and simply a monument to his own glory.
- 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, when they saw in their
holiest of holies, if you like,
those new buildings coming up,
buildings that had incorporated novelties,
buildings that were making a break from the tide.
- [Voiceover] The whispers of discontent in Athens
weren't limited to the Parthenon.
As Pericles continued to expand Athens domination
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.
- [Voiceover] In classical Athens,
a woman's role lay under the dominion of men,
but Aspasia 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.
- [Voiceover] 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 long time enemy, Sparta
was on the rise.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] 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.
- 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.
- [Voiceover] 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.
(somber music)
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.
- 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 classical age of Athens,
were not Athenians at all.
The names of these two men would be synonymous
not only with conquest, but with Helenism,
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 Phillip 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,
that student of Aristotle,
and self-proclaimed god,
Alexander the Great.
I'm Peter Weller for the History Channel.
(dramatic music)