The birthplace of Western civilisation may be in the grip of recession, but there's still a lot to see and do there
In days of yore, Greece was the cradle of Western civilisation: Birthplace of tragedy and comedy, the Olympics, democracy, and Dionysian orgies. Even the ancient Romans came to Athens to pick up culture and, until last year, Greece clocked in an annual 17 million international tourist arrivals. Myself included.
Today the state of Greece is somewhat dishevelled, looking more like the end of Western civilisation rather than its beginning.
It certainly has created doubts around the common European currency, I think, after an instructive visit to the Numismatic Museum, one of the lesser known—but nonetheless worthwhile—historical attractions of Athens. Located on Panepistimiou, the main drag, in the opulent former mansion of archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (famous for excavating Troy), it has a collection of over half-a-million coins, spanning 3,500 years of mercantile history.
The earliest Greek cities, centres of brisk trade, started issuing their own currencies in the 6th Century BC. Within a couple of hundred years, the drachma of Athens became—in the footsteps of Alexander the Great—one of the widest circulated coinages in history, until that great Greek Empire collapsed and was folded into the Roman one, around 31 BC.
Walking about the historical centre of Athens, one comes upon the oldest agora—with monumental public buildings for political, religious, cultural and commercial use, the oldest structures of which may well date to about 600 BC. And then there’s the ‘new’ marketplace, dating from the 1st Century BC, with a more exclusively commercial layout of shops, public toilets and a clock tower. This almost equally ancient shopping mall is commonly known as the Roman agora. With the Romans came another universal currency, the denarius, which held sway for centuries (and travelled as far as to Tamil Nadu, from where precious beryl and other products were exported to Rome).
Here, in this Roman agora, Indian gemstones and aromatic spices would be traded, for the urbanites of antiquity were as fond of imported luxuries as well-off people are today. Eventually the Roman Empire too collapsed, because its vastness was a drain on its financial resources—not just the faraway imports, but the upkeep of armies and borders combined with weak emperors and lack of realistic long-term fiscal planning. At its peak, the Empire simply didn’t generate enough money to pay for its running costs, and the actual moneys, aurei and denarii, were gradually made of cheaper metal mixtures—with less gold and silver respectively—until they practically turned worthless.
Thousands of years later, once Greece gained independence (from Turkey) in the 1830s, the drachma was reinstated as the national currency.
History now seems to be repeating itself, as it so frequently does, with the economies of Greece and other south European countries being far overvalued as compared to the actual money you might raise if you sold off these nations lock, stock and barrel.
One of my favourite quiet places in Athens, when I need to forget that I’m in a big and bustling city, is the forested Hill of the Muses, right west of the Acropolis. There is no entrance fee and one can walk around for half a day, find remnants of the old city wall, the prison where Socrates supposedly was incarcerated, or sit down and picnic at the Pnyx’s antique arena of public assemblies and debates. There are mystical places dedicated to not only the eponymous muses, but also the Nymphs and Pan. Plato and Aristotle, and pretty much the who’s who of Western ideas, would have walked these same paved trails through the quiet woods. It remains a popular place for romance, a kind of Athenian lovers’ lane.
(This story appears in the 17 August, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)