The Aristocrats in ancient Greece

Athens lay in the center of a Mediterranean peninsula which Cleisthenes knew as Hellas, and which we now call Greece. In the days of Cleisthenes' youth, it would have seemed impossible that this city would soon rule an empire. It certainly is not what we'd call a city. Forget Manhattan. Athens in the center has public buildings, but otherwise I think one should imagine more village style of accommodation and habitation. The town was built around the Acropolis, a steep-sided outcrop of bare rock, a stronghold from which the Athenians could fend off the attacks of their neighbors. In the narrow streets surrounding the Acropolis huddled the simple homes of farmers and tradesmen. For these Athenians, reading and writing was a rare skill. There was nothing that we might call science or medicine. Life expectancy at birth was less than 15 years. I think the idea that ancient Greek life was nasty, brutish, and short would be entirely accurate. Certainly, life was extremely tough. And this was no society of equals. The common Athenians lived under the rule of the aristocrats, men such as Cleisthenes' father. Athens was in a sense turned against itself. You had one part of the population, the aristocratic elite, holding power at the expense of the rest of the citizen population. For the Greek writer Aristotle, this was a world riven by injustice. The whole country was in the hands of a few people. The hardest and bitterest thing for the masses was their state of serfdom. Not that they weren't discontented with anything else. For to speak generally, they had no part nor share in anything. Dominated by aristocrats interested only in preserving their own power, Athens hardly seemed a state on the verge of building a great empire. But then Greece also seemed an unlikely land to give rise to greatness. If you look at the physical world of Greece, it's not the kind of place that you'd immediately expect to produce a great civilization. Simply too many mountains. Greece does not have the obvious kind of physical unity that typically seems to be associated with the really great imperial civilizations of the ancient world.