Remembering and Forgetting the Sack of Athens

What is it about?

The Athenians had a complicated relationship with the sack of their city by the Persians. The Athenians themselves tell us that Athens had been wholly evacuated, and so the Persians sacked an empty city. Material damages were emphasized, but merely to underscore the determination of the Athenians who went on to defeat the Persians at the battle of Salamis. Our non-Athenian sources, however, make clear that some Athenians did remain in the city and died in a failed attempt to defend the Acropolis. None of our many surviving Athenian commemorations of the war ever mentions these few. This essay argues that the Athenians were in fact quite sensitive to the negative implications of their city’s downfall. They had manifestly emerged from the Persian War as both victims and victors, but they had no interest in that kind of story. Their postwar bid for leadership within the Greek world was based, in no small part, on their record of victory against the Persians, and that was the story they told themselves and others.

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