Athens: A Cultural and Literary History

Modern Athens is a bustling, overgrown city, continually coming to terms with its illustrious past. Dominated by the Parthenon, the world-famous symbol of classical antiquity, it has been touched by every aspect of Greece's turbulent history, suffering invasions and occupations, sieges, division and dictatorship, and has grown dramatically into a metropolis of four million people. Mixing old and new, the Greek capital is a treasure house of eastern Orthodox and western culture, rich in the visual arts, architecture and poetry. - THE CITY OF VISITORS: treasure hunters and Philhellenes; Byron and Chateaubriand; Thackeray and Mark Twain; Freud, Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill. -THE CITY OF OLYMPIANS: host of the first modern Games of 1896 and the Olympiad of 2004; the revival of the Olympic idea. -THE CITY OF ATHENIANS: classical soldiers and thinkers; poets, politicians and princes; migrants and refugees from Greece and beyond.