The large archaeological sites in Athens are the result of systematic excavations, while numerous rescue excavations following the pace of modern construction have revealed a wealth of information on all aspects of life in the ancient city. Although rescue excavations are conducted in a piecemeal fashion, they have provided fixed points in the topography of Athens, new finds, and identifications of monuments.

The public, official life of Athens took place mostly in the central square, known as the Agora, described by ancient authors, especially Pausanias, and excavated by the American School of Classical Studies. This chapter explores the buildings that housed the executive (Royal Stoa), legislative (Bouleuterion), and judiciary (law courts, or diskasteria) branches of the Athenian democracy.

Ancient markets and trading activity in the city of Athens are attested not only through literary sources describing where to buy certain goods and what happens when deals fall through, but also through the archaeology of market buildings, the equipment of buying and selling, and the containers for transporting and storing wine, oil, and other commodities.

This chapter studies elite sport in Classical Athens and its relationship to war. It argues that this relationship explains why non-elite citizens support pro-sport policies.

This chapter is about the history, the monuments and the people of Piraeus, the arsenal, and the commercial center of the Athenian empire. The proposed reconstruction of the residential quarters and the harbor installations of this model city designed by Hippodamos, the father of city-planning, is based on recent archaeological research.

The ceramic industry supplied Athenians with a wide variety of products, from fine tableware, utilitarian pottery, lamps, and figurines to water pipes and roof tiles. This chapter reviews the stages of production, from gathering and working the clay through forming and firing the final product and its sale, at home and abroad.

The history of Athens was influenced by the health of her citizens; from birth to old age, disease, injury, and warfare threatened the lives of citizens, or made them unable to participate in the life of the city. The study of skeletal remains from burials in Athens reveals the effect of these threats, and offers new information on historical plagues, attacks on the city, and ordinary events in the lives of Athenians.

This chapter provides an overview of the debate surrounding the population of Athens in the Classical period, and the methodologies used to estimate it. It further summarizes some of the key social, economic, political, and religious groups and divisions in Classical Athenian society and how these interacted with each other and with questions of belonging and identity in the polis.

The food and drink consumed by ancient Athenians and the setting and rules around its consumption reveal a great deal about their society. This study investigates both what they ate and how they ate it; the result provides a lens through which to view their social hierarchies and values.

City streets, fortification walls, and gates were key elements of Athenian topography that structured urban space throughout the history of the city, directing circulation both under urgent circumstances and in everyday life. With their continuous repairs and modifications, they remained a fixed point and the backbone of the urban fabric.

According to a variety of ancient sources (texts, inscriptions, archaeology, visual arts), animals were a common sight in the city of Athens. Their behaviors, characteristics, and relationships to humans revolve around the thematic categories of everyday life, mythology and religion, and performance and competition.

This chapter offers an introduction to Athens’ associations – groups of people who came together for some purpose, but which were neither families nor central state institutions. After broaching some problems of definition, it provides a gazetteer of some of the city’s better-known associations; it then provides a narrative of Athens’ associations over time, and closes with a brief discussion of the question of what relationship these groups had with Athens’ democratic form of government.

The ancient Athenians held two major Panhellenic festivals: the Great Panathenaia in celebration of the goddess Athena and the Great Mysteries in honor of Demeter. This chapter compares and contrasts the rituals of these two festivals in relation to the topography and monuments of Athens, focusing on how the celebrations drew together different parts of the community of Athens.