Athens Begins its Era “Under the Shade” - A Few Perspectives on the Opportunities, Traumas and Successes that Changed an Ancient (Authentic) Polis into an (Ancient) “Destination City”

The re-invention (sometimes the evolution or devolution) of the schools of Athens as it internationalized in the late Roman Republic assumed beneath it the story of the re-invention of the town – in the case of Athens the ‘definitive’ town in a culture where ‘town’ (polis) meant something far more radically independent and hyper-competitive (both inside and outside the walls) than anything we normally mean be such a term today. An authentic, aboriginal, organic “polis” should not have been able to contemplate, much less do, the “destination city” thing. Both the idea of a ‘service city’ for passers-through and that of a ‘destination city’ – an urban community aimed beyond its locals so it might survive in part by tourists, students, ‘satellite’ working groups and families of distant businesses, localized ex-patriates of other cultures, and simply as a seller of ‘culture’ in some way. These were foreign, even as yet un-invented ideas (though Alexandria, Pergamon, Antioch and even Naples would eventually compete in the same field). Some aspects of Athens’ re-invention I have pursued in the “schools” articles in the ATINER journals (see bibliography, and on ResearchGate), and in the article on the ‘leveraging’ of Philip V to pull the western power into the East (and hopefully, at the time, to tell it what to do). The study here adds some notes, stories of focus, and some perspective to those works in this particular aspect. DPW, 2024.