4 Athens:The Struggle for Democracy

        Athens' history before 600 is almost a blank ; but this does not mean that she was a negligible quantity. Her art - her Geometric pottery and, later, her first monumental sculpture - was already the best in all Greece. the fact was simply that she did not colonize and had no revolution. With a thousand square miles of territory, much more of a `country` than that of most Greek states, her population had not yet reached saturation-point. Down to 600 she was still exporting grain. 

        But that critical point was now being reached, and with the coming of coined money and the facilitation thereby of usury and debt, there was, here too, a formidable social crisis. More and more of the poorer farmers fell into debt to the rich nobles; and unpaid debt meant that, in the last resort, not only  the debtor's land but his body and those of his family belonged to the creditor. His usual fate, rather than to be kept as a resentful servant, was to be sold overseas, e.t. to the slave- economy of Aegina, a fate from which even Sparta's helots were exempt. There was bitter discontent, and while the rich, with the best arms, could probably have crushed any revolt, they could also see that the elimination of the middling peasantry, or their depression into the ranks of those who could not afford armour, weakened the whole state.

        Assyria, exhausted by her own conquests, had perished; Nineveh fell to the Medes, who had learned the art of war from Assyria herself, in 612 BC; and the empire was divided between the Medes and the Chaldeans, a people of the Arabian desert-edge who had gained power in Babylon (Nebuchadnezzar, 605-562). But in 550 Cyrus, King of Persians, a vassal people akin to the Medes, overthrew his overlord and made his own nation dominant. The Greeks saw little difference between them, and often called Persians Medes.

        Cyrus was a man of genius. Braving a late autumn campaign in Anatolia, he conquered Croesus of Lydia in 547, and his general soon subdued Ionia; aided by disaffection within (the 'second Isaiah' hails him as the Lord's Anointed),  he took Babylon in 539; he had added the whole of Iran before he was killed fighting in central Asia in 530.