An engaging, original history of one of the world's oldest cities

CHOOSING Athena as protector instead of the sea god Poseidon was a clever move by the citizens of Athens. The myth holds that the goddess of wisdom won them over by planting an olive tree as a promise of fruitful longevity. She was as good as her word. Three thousand years on, the city remains one of the great and most intriguing capitals of the world.

In this vividly entertaining new history, Bruce Clark shows readers why. In 500 pages, he expertly tells the story of a city that held the stage for a millennium, then retired to the wings, but never lost its capacity to fascinate.

That founding myth, with its message of Athenian exceptionalism, became the subject of one of the Parthenon's pediments in the fifth century BC. The Athenians lived up to it: they trounced two Persian invasions, built beauty on the Acropolis and created a revolutionary form of government that empowered its citizens to do exceptional things. It was an idea so powerful that it survived a disastrous war with Sparta and endured in some form for another 200 years.

During the Roman period, Athens remained the nerve centre for intellectual life, educating the empire's elite and inspiring much new building. Hadrian's Arch, his library and the Temple of Olympian Zeus are all still there today.

As Christianity spread, polytheistic Athens lost much of its importance; the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed its schools of philosophy in the sixth century. But Clark is keen to show that something of its influence survived the Christian takeover.

Readers learn that the Parthenon became a splendid church and place of pilgrimage devoted to the Virgin Mary, and that, in the seventh century, an Archbishop of Canterbury may well have been educated in Athens.

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As Byzantium slowly disintegrated, Athens was fought over by Italians and Spanish until it fell to Ottoman vassalage in 1460. Three centuries on, the Acropolis was home to a Turkish garrison and European travellers were back sketching its ruins, some cynically plundering them for the adornment of their Scottish pile.

After independence in 1832, Athens was bulldozed to create a pastiche of her classical self and the Acropolis was stripped to its classical essentials. But it was capital to a nation of only 800,000 souls that needed more taxpayers to succeed.

So began the Megali Idea of gathering all Greeks into a neo-Byzantine polity with Constantinople as its capital.

Eleftherios Venizelos's "almost infallible political genius" nearly made it happen, but the failure of the irredentist concept led to a vast Greek/Turkish population exchange which Clark describes with feeling: both the experience of individual refugees and the indelible contribution they made to Greece's economic and cultural life.

Greece's problem was great-power interference. Twice in the 20th century, the streets of Athens witnessed fighting between British and Greek forces, and, in the 21st, violent protests against the austerity package which was part of a bailout agreement with the European Union.

Clark deftly guides readers through the effect of the Greek financial crisis on Athens, both its terrible human cost and the extraordinary renewal - cultural, culinary - that has come with recovery.

Throughout the book, Clark summons the marvellous chorus he's assembled to share the tale: Saint Philothei, a 16th-century nun who was martyred by bandits and became the city's patron saint; the nurse Florence Nightingale, who walked the Acropolis by moonlight and brought home a baby owl; the poet George Seferis who dared to speak out against the military junta and whose sublime poetry opened the Olympic games in 2004.

Athens is a muddle of a city, a combination of matchless beauty and downright hideousness, whose eccentricities provoke a love that cannot be uncritical.

Clark's critical esteem shines through every page as he describes the "gimcrack piece of kitsch" that is the cathedral, the steep lanes of Plaka ("one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world") and the endless polykatoikia (apartment buildings) that may hurt the eye but lend themselves to social mixing and family cohesion.

"Athens: City of Wisdom"is a triumph of a book that should be read by those who already know this city's importance and charm and those who want to. It is an extraordinary achievement.©2022 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

Athens: City of Wisdom By Bruce Clark Pegasus; 512 pages; US$35 Head of Zeus; £25

Review by James Heneage James Heneage is a novelist and the author of "The Shortest History of Greece", published in 2021