Ancient Athens was invaded and sacked four times, starting with the Persian invasion in 480 BC and ending with the destruction by the Visigoths in 396 AD.
The glory of Athens and its prominent position among the city-states of Ancient Greece was envied by many, even by other Greeks. Especially in the 5th century BC when the city was at the pinnacle of its grandeur under the rule of Pericles.
First, it was the Persian kings who wanted to expand their empire further West. Then it was the Romans who eventually took the whole of Greece under their control. Finally, when the Roman Empire declined, it was barbaric tribes from the North that descended to southeast Europe to loot.
When the Persians sacked Athens
After the humiliating destruction of the Persian army of King Darius in the first Achaemenid invasion of Greece at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, his son, Xerxes, wanted revenge. In 480 BC, he gathered a huge army numbering hundreds of thousands of men and crossed the Hellespont determined to conquer Greece.
Despite the losses at Thermopylae, the awe-inspiring Persian army forged ahead to Boeotia and Attica without finding any resistance. Parallel to the land forces, the Persian fleet was heading to Piraeus to attack from the sea.
By the time the Persians had crossed into Greece, the evacuation of Athens had already begun. The Oracle of Delphi had advised that Athenians should flee before the massive Persian army reached the city gates and rely on their “wooden wall”, which General Themistocles took to mean the Athenian fleet. Most of the Athenians moved to Troezen in the Peloponnese.
In September 480 BC, the Persian fleet arrived in Faliron Bay. A small number of Greeks who barricaded themselves in the Acropolis were quickly defeated, and Xerxes ordered his men to burn the city. The Acropolis was plundered and destroyed, including the Old Temple of Athena and the Older Parthenon. All Athenians who had stayed in the city were slaughtered.
Immediately after the Persian sack of Athens, the Greek fleet under the command of Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into the Strait of Salamis. The general understood that if they lost here, then all of Greece would be open to invasion. The Greek fleet managed to destroy hundreds of Persian ships with a loss of only 40 of their own 200, forcing the enemy to a humiliating retreat.
Xerxes led the remaining Persian fleet back to Ionia and left his general, Mardonius, to stay in Greece and complete the conquest with an army of an estimated between 70,000 and 120,000 soldiers. The finest units of the Persian army stayed to conquer the rest of Greece.
Meanwhile, the Greeks had fled Athens for the second time and built a defensive wall across the Isthmus of Corinth which separates northern Greece from the Peloponnese, and asked for the help of the Spartans.
Mardonius knew that fighting the Spartans would lose many of his men, so he led his army to Athens again and razed the city completely.
The second Persian sack of Athens made the Spartans realize that it would be to their disadvantage to let the Persians enter the Peloponnese and risk their advance to their homeland, so they decided to ally with the Athenians and other Greeks and meet the Persians north of Attica.
The two armies met at Plataea in Boeotia in the Autumn of 479 BC. The united Greeks crushed the Persian forces, killing Mardonius in the process, and kicking them out of Greece for good. After the victorious battle, the Athenians started to rebuild their city.
The Romans conquer Athens
Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a scrupulous and ruthless warrior who later became a politician, marched to Athens in 87 BC after burning towns and looting valuable votive statuary and other works of art from the sanctuaries at Epidaurus, Olympia, and Delphi.
The assault on Athens and Piraeus, from the fall of 87 BC until the spring of 86 BC, was a demonstration of Roman battle strategy and power. Sulla ordered huge earthworks to cut off the Athenians from the land side. In addition, siege towers, battering rams, and catapults were constructed to breach the city walls. The Romans bombarded the city with siege engines, damaging the Royal Stoa, the Tholos, and especially the southern side in the South Stoa II.
The Athenians responded with flaming arrows, burning many of the Romans’ siege engines. According to Plutarch, Sulla cut down all of the Academy’s sacred olive trees that were dedicated to Athena to gather timber for their replacement. To prevent the Romans from acquiring more timber to besiege the Acropolis, the Athenians themselves burned down the largely wooden Odeion of Pericles on the South Slope.
The siege had cut off supply routes to Athens and the Athenians were starving. They were reduced to boiling down their leather shoes and oil bags and harvesting edible weeds on the slopes of the Acropolis.
Sulla finally broke through the city walls on March 1, 86 BC, somewhere near the Kerameikos. The ruthless general unleashed his army on the helpless Athenians. They massacred the citizens, torched residential areas, and looted the city’s wealth. Plutarch reports that blood flowed in the streets and out the Dipylon Gate. The Acropolis continued to resist for a few more weeks but finally fell as well. The Athens tyrant, Aristion, was captured and executed. After the massacre and the destruction, Athens sank into a period of severe economic decline.
Ancient writers including Plutarch, Appian, Pausanias, and Pliny the Elder report that after conquering Athens, Sulla seized the city’s treasures, statues, paintings, and prized dedicatory shields that adorned the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios in the Agora. He even took down several gigantic marble columns from the unfinished Olympieion and shipped them back to Rome to be used in the Capitoline temple of Jupiter.
The Herulian invasion
In 267 AD, a tribe coming from Germany, the Heruli, moved down to Attica and attacked Athens. The city was recently fortified with a new wall as tribes from the North like the Scythians and the Goths were eyeing Athens.
The Herulians, though, managed to sack Athens and destroy a large part of it, including the wall. Public buildings were destroyed and a large part of the city suffered, especially around the Acropolis. Recent archaeological research found debris in the east outside the 3rd century wall, the so-called ‘Valerian’ wall.
It seems that the residential districts to the north and to the southwest of Athens were not harmed by the Heruli. However, a big part of the Ancient Agora was destroyed. The Kerameikos area suffered great damage as well.
An Athenian historian, Publius Herenius Dexippus (Greek: Δέξιππος) , gathered 2,000 men and managed to drive out the Heruli and take back Athens. It was Dexippus himself who later recounted the events in two of his works that survived only in fragments, Chronicle and Scythian History. It was his works that later historians based their own accounts of the Herulian invasion.
Works of restoration took place after the invasion and by the end of the fourth century, Athens had undergone a transformation, as later excavations suggest.
The Visigoths Sack Athens
Alaric (c. 370-411 AD) was the first king of the Visigoths from 395 to 410 AD. He joined the Roman army under Emperor Theodosius and helped defeat the Franks. He was soon disappointed by his lack of recognition by the Romans.
After the death of Theodosius and the disintegration of the Roman armies in 395, he named himself king of the Visigoths. As the leader of the only effective army remaining in the Balkans, he sought Roman legitimacy, never quite achieving it. So he turned himself against Rome.
Alaric’s forces marched down to Greece along the coast. Alaric sought to force a new peace upon the Romans. In 396 he marched through Thermopylae and finally reached Athens. It was easy for his army to sack Athens. Archaeological evidence shows that the Visigoths caused widespread damage to the city.
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