NARRATOR: Greece,
fifth century BC, over the course of
three decades led by one man, a city and its
people rise to greatness. This is Athens, the
birthplace of democracy, but it is Pericles' city. EDITH HALL: Pericles
decided the best way to leave an indelible
mark on posterity was to completely alter
the skyline and appearance at the center of
his city, Athens. NARRATOR: Pericles builds
impregnable fortifications, the first senate house, a
complex network of pipes to supply his people
with freshwater. He builds the most powerful
navy in the ancient world, and he builds temples. One, the Parthenon,
will be hailed by many as the most perfect
building ever completed. I think he did have a vision
for what Athens should be, and he seemed to follow that
vision for most of his life. NARRATOR: After 2,500 years,
we can show this vision again, recreate this lost world
as Pericles saw it, the greatest city on Earth. [music playing] In the fifth century BC, from
the hundreds of competing states that make
up ancient Greece, one man leads his
city to greatness. The city is Athens, and Pericles
is not a king or prince, but an elected man. His power comes from the people
and from his own single-minded vision. The story goes that when
Pericles' mother was eight months pregnant with him, she
knew that she was going to have an extraordinary son who
was destined for greatness because she had a dream that
she gave birth to a lion, and for the ancient
Greeks, the lion was always a symbol of leadership. STEPHEN TRACEY: To be
a successful politician and statesman in Greece, he
needed to be a military leader, and he needed to be an effective
speaker in the assembly, and he was clearly
both of those. Pericles not only
contributed to Athens becoming a leading power. I think he was the main
creator of that power. NARRATOR: Pericles wants to
send out a message to the world that Athens is supreme, the
capital of a new empire. He will deliver this
message by building. What he intends is the
most costly and ambitious construction campaign
undertaken in the Western world. He needs to fund it. In what some will see as
an act of blatant theft, he raids the Greek treasury. Money which should
have been used to defend all the
city-states in the region is diverted to the
glorification of his own city, and work begins
on the Parthenon. Built to honor the
goddess Athena, it will become the
most imitated building in history, an inspiration
to engineers and architects. It will take eight years to
build, cost the equivalent of $100 million, and
use a staggering 20,000 tons of the finest marble. EDITH HALL: The Parthenon is
arguably the most influential building in world history. You cannot go into any city
in North America or Europe or, indeed, most of the world,
without finding a 19th century bank facade, parliamentary
building facade, or law court building that
isn't in some way influenced by the Parthenon. STEPHEN TRACEY: The Parthenon is
a very special building because of the visual impact
it has on you. When you go up
there, it's, first of all, huge, solid marble. There's not a
straight line in it so that it has a lightness
and a sense of movement. When you stand on the
Acropolis and look at it, it seems almost afloat. NARRATOR: The image of the
Parthenon is familiar to us. But 25 centuries of war,
weather, and history have reduced this building to
a shadow of what it once was. Engineer Ed McCann an architect
Manolis Korres have set themselves the task of
deciphering exactly how it came to be built, what it looked
like during Athens' golden age. Pericles' men cut
marble for the Parthenon from the nearby
mountain of Penteli. The team restoring
the temple today get their marble from
the very same place. What seems laborious, even with
the aid of modern technology, would have taken months
in Pericles' time. First, the marble was chiseled
by hand from the parent rock. It was examined for
faults, and then the business of
transportation began. EDITH HALL: It was
a 10-mile journey, and they bought 20,000
tons of marble blocks with just teams of oxen and
rollers, this incredibly long journey all the way up the
steep Acropolis to get it there. This is an astonishing feat. It would be an astonishing
feat today with proper cars and so on. NARRATOR: The most difficult
part of the journey was the last part, getting the
marble up a 302-foot slope. Ed McCann has discovered
the ingenious technique that the masons
used for lifting. ED MCCANN: They had a very
cunning system for getting the rocks up to the top, and
what they did was they set up-- they had a cart on one
side with a rock on it, and up the top on
the other side, they have another cart full
of stone with a big rope going round and over a
giant pulley wheel, and then they set up the
donkeys and the people all pulling down, and so they pull
down and lift the rock up, and then at the top,
they're able to unload it, and then they bring
their horses up here. They put a rock on that
side, and they bring it back up and down like that. So it's a counterbalance system. NARRATOR: The size
of the challenge becomes even more impressive
when Ed and Manolis calculate the weight of the marble. The individual blocks were vast. ED MCCANN: So they
had eight cranes dotted around the Parthenon too,
and these were timber cranes. Yes. And they lifted these pieces
up into the construction, and the biggest piece
was 13 tons, so about-- Yes, the biggest eight
pieces weighing 13 tons each. NARRATOR: The cranes were
immensely strong, capable of hoisting a 13-ton column. They were also very
simple in design. Two wooden beams were
connected by an iron bracket, and ropes were passed through
a pulley block at one end. 200 men were employed
on the site itself, but around the city, thousands
more labored to support them-- masons, molders, founders,
rope makers, transporters. ED MCCANN: Manolis, are these
the original pick holes? MANOLIS KORRES: Exactly. Second stage after being
the stone from the quarry. It is one of the
preliminary stages. ED MCCANN: But the last time
someone put their finger in there, it might have
been 2,500 years ago. Exactly.
Exactly. ED MCCANN: WIth a a pick. NARRATOR: Once it was in
place, the most skilled masons carved the marble. Ed McCann wants to understand
how they worked by trying it for himself. ED MCCANN: The
key principle that underlies working the stone
is working from rough-- doing rough cuts with the stone
through to gradually getting finer and finer stone cuts, and
that's reflected in the tools that they use. So the tools that they
use for rough cutting was this double pick. It's difficult to lift,
and it's difficult to aim. I'm reliably informed that if
you were any good with this, I could move 200 kilos,
that's about twice as much as I weigh, in an hour's
work with one of these. Now as you got into the
stone, and you needed to get finer and
finer, you needed to use ever-smaller tools,
and I can put them exactly onto the bit of stone I want to
hear to the nearest millimeter. It's much, much easier to
use, and I can't really go too far wrong, but, of
course, I don't get very much off with this. It would take me two
weeks chiseling away, basically reducing
the marble to dust, before I'd move 200 kilograms. NARRATOR: Once the columns
and drums had been finished, they needed to be
fitted together. ED MCCANN: So this is where
the original stones were put together, and
these were iron clamps. MANOLIS KORRES: Exactly. The clamp is missing, but
you see the bed there, the original construction. ED MCCANN: And this would
have been underneath, so you wouldn't see--
MANOLIS KORRES: Yes, always. ED MCCANN: --underneath
the [inaudible].. MANOLIS KORRES: Yes, exactly. Hidden by the next
[inaudible],, yes. ED MCCANN: I see. OK. NARRATOR: Today,
damage from pollution means that the Parthenon
needs extensive restoration. As Ed McCann hunts for clues
about how the stones were originally put together
all those centuries ago, he gets exclusive access to
the work that's being done now. ED MCCANN: This is the modern
restoration work that is going on, and although it's
different to what they did in Periclean times,
there are some similarities. I mean, first of all, the column
drums themselves are the same, and they lift it
up, in this case, by a great big iron
and steel crane. In those days, it would
have been a timber one. And you can see in the
middle there a little metal spigot sticking up. Nowadays, it's made
out of titanium, but in Periclean times
that would have been wood, and that's what helps
you to center this thing. So when you lower it in with a
crane, there's a little hole. You line them up, and then you
know you're exactly centered up. NARRATOR: Each wall,
each column is evidence of extraordinary skill. The stones are
perfectly positioned and seamlessly joined. You see one of the
best-preserved joints in the Parthenon because this
column was never destroyed by any event like
bombardment or earthquake. With these joints, you
couldn't get a piece of paper in there, could you? NARRATOR: The outer
structure required 46 of these 13-ton columns. The result was a building
of unparalleled grandeur. Today it is impressive, but
as it stood in Pericles' time, it would have been breathtaking. Not just the exterior,
but the interior, which has long since vanished. Our investigators will now
concentrate on that interior and try to reveal it as
its builders first saw it because the Parthenon once held
the most spectacular statues ever made. [music playing] What pairwise builds on the
Acropolis is, in its time, revolutionary. It is at the center of his
program to reform, remodel, his city. This program is
startlingly ambitious. It is also hugely successful. Pericles will change his
world and help define ours. EDITH HALL: Pericles managed
to get his dream to come true, which was to build all
those beautiful temples on the Acropolis and to
have his name on our lips 2,500 years later. NARRATOR: And it appears
that in his lifetime, these buildings were even
more impressive, even more beautiful. Ancient writers describe the
Parthenon's interior with awe. What they talk about
is no longer here. In 1687, the Venetian Army
bombarded the city of Athens. The center of the temple was
destroyed by a huge explosion. Now Ed McCann and Manolis
Korres hunt among the ruins to decipher what clues are left. They want to understand what
the Parthenon looked like when it was first built. ED MCCANN: This is where a
Venetian cannon ball smashed into the column, bang, and
the lines of stress fly out and a big chunk of
the marble falls off. And all over here, we
see one there, one there. MANOLIS KORRES: Yes. ED MCCANN: I've noticed that
you've got some Greek vandals. Yes. Because that's
graffiti, isn't it? MANOLIS KORRES: Yes, it is. Yes, one of the 230 graffities
in the Parthenon, many of them of historical value pertaining
to people thanking God for being saved in the sea
after a voyage back to Athens and so on. A Greek sailor would
have gone out in his ship, and if he'd had a
successful voyage-- Yeah, exactly, yes. --he would have come
back to the Parthenon, climbed up here and scribbled
something on the wall. Yes. Saying thank you
very much, God. Exactly, yes.
[laughter] Fantastic. NARRATOR: Amongst the
graffiti and the bomb damage, they spot other markings,
traces of pigment that suggests this
whole structure once looked radically different. The conventional picture
of a Greek temple is one of clean white stone, but
it appears that the Parthenon was once covered in color. So the Parthenon was
actually painted when it was-- Yes, it was painted. It was a principle in
ancient architecture to-- to cover the buildings with
paint even in the marble. NARRATOR: We can now
recreate what it looked like. Gleaming white columns
were topped with gables of blue, red, and gold. In fact, no other Greek temple
was as intricately colored as this one. In addition to the painting,
there were stunning sculptures. There were 92 statues. One frieze carved
into the marble was almost 520-feet long. And the sculptures that adorned
the gables were colossal. STEPHEN TRACEY: I think
the Parthenon is remarkable because if you look
at the sculptures and we can these days
see them from behind and see that they're
beautifully sculpted and around. Yet once up in the building,
they could never be seen. It's hard to explain that
except perhaps the pride of the artists, the sense that
they were doing this in honor of the gods and perhaps
in honor of the city pride of workmanship. NARRATOR: Pericles intends that
anyone entering the building will be intimidated. This is not just a
place of worship. It houses the state treasury
and, also, the ultimate symbol of the city, an enormous statue
of the patron goddess, Athena. Engineer Ed McCann has been
trying to find the place where the statue, long-since
destroyed, once stood. ED MCCANN: And Manolis is a
bit embarrassed to tell me where the statue
was because it's right underneath that rather
horrible crane is where Athena used to stand in all her glory. Will you put Athena back
as part of the restoration? It's impossible because the
whole thing was destroyed, completely destroyed, during the
five and the third century, AD. NARRATOR: Records suggests that
the statue was 30-feet tall. It was clad in gold and
ivory, and because it was inside the
building, it could only be seen from close quarters. Any onlooker would feel dwarfed. EDITH HALL: This statue was
virtually unprecedented. Pericles had it put on a
plate that was 5 foot tall so that when you went in, all
you could see was her feet, and then you gradually
lifted your gaze up and up and up and up, 40 more
feet, until you finally came to her beautiful face,
her helmet, with these horses springing out of it
towards the gods. The statue of Athena in Athens
completely altered the history of temple statuary
in the ancient world and, therefore, probably of
Christian statuary as well. NARRATOR: And the design
of the temple's exterior has proved still
more influential. Throughout the 2,500
years since it was built, engineers all over the world
tried to copy the Parthenon, but they never bettered it. Ed McCann unlocks its secrets. ED MCCANN: One of the
more famous stories about the Parthenon
is how, although it's a very rectangular building
when you look at it, actually, there aren't any straight
lines in it at all and that the people who built it
built it all with gentle curves going upwards to counterbalance
an optical effect that when you look at straight
lines from distance, they don't appear
to be straight, and so everything's curved. And to show that,
what we've done here is we've taken one of the main
steps here on the Parthenon. We've put a string going
from corner to corner, and here I am in the
middle of the Parthenon. We can see that there's maybe
4 or 5 inches here of sag relative to the top of the step. What that means is that the
step is 4 inches higher here than it is on the corners. And this happens all
over the Parthenon. [music playing] NARRATOR: It is now possible
to bring together decades of research and, using the
latest graphic modeling techniques, rebuild
the Parthenon. [music playing] Eight columns at the
front, eight at the back, a row of 15 on either side. Traveling through the temple,
you'd pass through a porch into the 100-foot long
sanctuary of Athena into the treasury at the back
and out through another porch made with six columns. EDITH HALL: The Romans regarded
the miracles of the Acropolis as the models for many
of their buildings, and, of course, they
then affected enormously the sort of buildings that
went up during the European Renaissance. So even if it's via Rome,
the Parthenon's influence always lives on in architecture. NARRATOR: High on the Acropolis
throughout Pericles' time in government, the
Parthenon stands as testament to Athens' status. It is a superpower. STEPHEN TRACEY: Athens
showed her dominance over the rest of the Greek
world mainly through, I think, Pericles' building program. NARRATOR: But his plans
aren't just about showing off to the wider world. Pericles intends to reshape the
lives of ordinary Athenians. [music playing] The focus of his
building work shifts from the religious
sanctuaries to the city below. Like modern-day Athens, it
is a busy center of trade. At its heart is the Agora. JOHN CAMP: The Agora
was extremely important. It's a marketplace. It's a political center. It's a social center. It's basically the middle
of town in all respects. NARRATOR: Today the
Agora lies in ruins. It has in the past been
attacked by barbarian invaders and built on by
private home owners. It is abandoned. But it is possible to
recreate what it looked like in Pericles' time
when these 30 acres were the center of the most
advanced civilization on Earth. John Camp is a world authority
on the building of the Agora. He spent more than three
decades trying to piece together what it looked like. Within this one plot were
busy streets, a collection of temples, a marketplace, and
the first ever senate house. JOHN CAMP: The Agora
in Periclean times would've been quite impressive. It would have been
lined with stoas, which are big long colonnaded
buildings in which you could take shelter from the
sun or from the rain, depending on the weather, and it
will have been full of people. [music playing] NARRATOR: Yet another
stunning temple was built here very
different from the Parthenon. Called the Hephaisteion, it was
dedicated to the craftsmen who made Pericles' vision a reality. By making this gesture, Pericles
was acknowledging the root of his power. It lay in the backing he
received from his people. JOHN CAMP: It's one of
the best-preserved temples in antiquity. So it's a little hard to
see how it goes together. When you come down here, you can
see pieces of its virtual twin, which was set up down
in the lower square, and from this, you can see that
the building is made pretty much all of marble,
no mortar was used. The individual pieces
were held together with iron clamps such as the one
you see here and iron dowels, and you can still see the
piece of iron, a little bit of the lead used to
hold it in place, along with the pry hole used
to get the next big block in place. This here is a step
block, and everything above here in that
direction would have been the second step. So all these marks
would have been covered. NARRATOR: The Hephaisteion
stood on the edge of the Agora, but at its center stood
the council chamber. To build it, workers
leveled ground, created artificial terraces,
and built into the rock. The building techniques
used were tried and tested, but what happened inside the
building was revolutionary. This building was the
birthplace of democracy. These walls here are all
that remain of the old council chamber built in about 500 BC. It was a very simple building
with mud brick walls, a kilometer facade to the south,
and a bunch of wooden seats for the councilors to sit on. NARRATOR: A
rectangular antechamber led to a large main hall. At its center, a timber roof
was supported by five columns. JOHN CAMP: 500 Athenians
would be allotted every year, not elected, just picked out of
a hat to serve as the senators. NARRATOR: The form of democracy
they used was very simple. The council would
present the people with issues for discussion,
litigation, taxation, or whether to go to war. Then the actual decisions
were made by the people. They cast their votes
by dropping a pebble into a terracotta pot. The council chamber can be
compared to the US Senate, but instead of allowing career
politicians to dominate, it was expected that at
some point in his life, every Athenian
citizen would serve. STEPHEN TRACEY: Most
democracies today are representative democracies. Athens was a direct democracy. We can compare it as a
working system of government to something like a New England
town meeting where everybody in the town goes to the meeting
and the decisions are made by everyone. NARRATOR: Pericles'
Athenians also developed a way of preventing any
one individual from gaining too much power. JOHN CAMP: Ostracism is
something we don't use anymore. It was kind of a reverse
election where the Athenians had the opportunity once a year
to vote somebody out of office, and the way they did it was
by writing the name of the man they thought was a
threat to the democracy on a piece of pottery. The Greek word for
that is an ostracon. So it was essentially
being exiled for 10 years by vote of little
bits of pottery. One day, a politician
might be enormously popular with the people. The next, his assets
could be frozen, and he might be banished from
the country for 10 years. It's striking to note that is a
punishment that Pericles never faced despite dominating
politics in Athens for more than three decades,
his power came from the support of the
people, and the humble homes of private individuals
lay nearby right alongside the mighty buildings
and temples of the state. JOHN CAMP: We're at the
remains of a fairly typical Athenian house, this wall here
going back in that direction there. That area is the open courtyard. They're very simple. They're very modest. NARRATOR: The walls
of these houses were made out of mud brick
or field stones reinforced with wood lined with clay. Once finished, the walls
were painted in white, black, yellow, or red. The floors were made out
of simple, packed clay with perhaps a mosaic pattern. Houses were built
to face inwards toward a central
courtyard, and each citizen was expected to connect his
own home to the city's water supply. [music playing] Hundreds of years before
the great building projects of Rome, Pericles' Athenians
developed and built a highly advanced
sewage and water system. John Camp found what was left
of it beneath these ruins. JOHN CAMP: Clean water is
essential for the well-being of the city, of course, and both
Pericles and other statesmen concerned themselves a lot with
making sure the Athenians had enough. You see here a group of
pipelines that have been excavated, many of them used
to bring good fresh water into the city, many others used
to carry the wastewater away, and, literally,
hundreds of meters have been found
crisscrossing the Agora. NARRATOR: Sections were
short, 3 to 4 feet long, because they were made
on a potter's wheel. Around 2 inches thick, they were
made with a special lip at one end to ensure a watertight fit. When a length of
pipe had been laid, the engineers would
test for leaks by pouring through
water stained with ash. Traveling in shallow
trenches beneath the Agora, these pipes carried water from
numerous wells and mountain springs. Pulling all these elements
together, the temples, the houses, the marketplaces,
the civic buildings, and this highly innovative
sanitation system, it's plain to see that
Athens was a model city. Under Pericles, it thrived. The challenge lay in
maintaining the success. As Athens grew in
wealth and power, it drew the jealousy
of its neighbors. Pericles had to
prepare for the day when the city would
come under attack. [music playing] The city of Athens
undergoes a transformation. With their backing,
Pericles leads his people for more than three decades. EDITH HALL: Every year
for over 30 years, he was re-elected head
of the board of generals. Every year, he was
elected like that. He never, ever, ever failed
to get that position. NARRATOR: As Athens
booms, this military side of Pericles' authority
becomes more and more vital. Tension mounts with Sparta, the
only serious rival to the power that Athens holds in Greece. Pericles' realizes that
he needs to prepare his city for the possibility
that war will come. Athens' existing defenses
guard a large wedge of land bounded by
a pair of long walls and 2 miles of shore. It becomes clear that
should Spartans attack, this is simply too
great a line to defend. The Athenian forces would be
overstretched and vulnerable. Though Athens is 5
miles inland, Pericles knows that the sea is
where its power lies. Greece is mountainous. Overland travel is difficult.
Most of the city's trade happens with the island
states of the Aegean. So Pericles focuses attention
on protecting the route to the port at Piraeus. He builds a third wall running
straight to the harbor. This wall creates a
defensible corridor. Though narrow, it means
that whatever happens, Athens is connected to the sea. Even by modern
standards, this would be a major public
building project. Like the construction
of a freeway, the building of the wall forces
its way through private houses and farms. It crosses rivers. It divides communities
and separates people from their land, but to
Pericles, the disruption is a price worth paying. Athens has to be ready to fight. Today nothing remains
of Pericles' wall, but this fortification at
Aigosthena is very similar. It provides investigators
with the best clues to what Athens long walls
would have looked like. STEPHEN TRACEY: The
wall that he built would have been of
smaller stones on this, I imagine, for 4 meters
or so, 12 feet, and then above that, mud brick for
another, say, 3 or 4 meters. NARRATOR: Two externals stone
faces were filled with rubble. Above the foundation lay
lodestone called [inaudible].. On top of that,
there was mud brick. The walls were about 16
feet wide and 30 feet high. They were 8 and 1/2 miles long. It was Pericles' intention that
they would be unbreachable. The key to that lay in
the way they were manned. Weapons expert Mike Loades
has been investigating the way Pericles
policed these defenses. He would rely on
a rapid reaction force of mounted troops
to travel up and down their length. MIKE LOADES: The Athenians
recruited 300 cavalry. Now that's a fascinating
direct link between Pericles' long walls and cavalry. This was the start
of Greek cavalry. NARRATOR: Mounted troops
were a major innovation in ancient Greek warfare. MIKE LOADES: Calvary can
patrol along the walls. Cavalry can be shot
out from postern gates at a moment's notice to go
to the moment of trouble, and cavalry can
patrol the countryside to protect that
agricultural infrastructure. NARRATOR: Postern gates were
located at regular intervals along the walls. High towers and ramparts offered
another level of security. MIKE LOADES: The Athenian police
and watchman were recruited from Scythian arches. The Scythians were these people
from north of the Black Sea, and they had these wonderful,
strong powerful recurve bows made of horn and sinew. I've got a range of
about 250, 300 yards. So anybody trying to
lay any sort of siege work out there, these archers
are going to be picking them off, and they would
stand no chance. [music playing] NARRATOR: It wasn't just arrows
that attackers had to fear. Pericles also stationed
men armed with slingshots along the walls. They were effectively
the snipers of their day. MIKE LOADES: And their
slingshot was cast in lead. So it has weight. It's aerodynamically
shaped like a bullet. This would kill a
man, and, in fact, this is a copy of one that's
in the British Museum, an original Greek slingshot. And it says the words, Dexai,
which means, take that. It's a wonderful millennia-old
bit of soldiers' wit. You simply place the sling
in the basket and hurl it. NARRATOR: Built before the
development of siege warfare, these walls were never
breached in Pericles' time. No army had the technical
or logistical skill to bring them down. It meant that Pericles
could confidently try to seize the advantage. He could take his
country to war. STEPHEN TRACEY: The
war began because there were two main cities in
Greece, Athens and Sparta. Both were ambitious to be the
leaders of the Greek world, and it was a case of two
big kids on the block, and there was only room for one. So war was inevitable. [music playing] NARRATOR: 431 BC, as Pericles
predicts, the forces of Sparta invade Athenian territory, and
Pericles responds in a way that shocks his own people. Having strengthened the
city's fortifications, he now puts all
his faith in them. He orders the people
of the countryside to abandon their
homes and take refuge behind the walls of Athens. Many see it as cowardice,
and so the Athenians watch as 60,000 Spartans
rampage and destroy. Pericles' reasoning is that
the Spartan Army is too strong. To take them on on
land would be to lose. Instead, he will carry
the battle to the sea, passing troops down the narrow,
protected corridor that links Athens to the harbor at Piraeus,
he will attack Sparta using a fleet of highly advanced
deadly warships, his triremes. BORIS RANKOV: Certainly, we can
say that Athens had the best navy in the Mediterranean
in the fifth century BC. One reason for this was because
Athens' income from empire allowed her to pay her crews
to train longer and harder than anybody else's cruise. NARRATOR: No
archaeologist has ever found remains of a trireme, but
our investigators have pieced together the story
of what must have been an awesome feat of marine
and military engineering. The tri in trireme refers
to the key innovation that set these ships apart. Three banks of oars,
one on top of another, gave it massive power. BORIS RANKOV: Earlier board
warships had rows at two different, but adding a
third level of rowers, you got half as much power again
within the same length of hull. So maybe the ship is faster
and more maneuverable. NARRATOR: From ancient
drawings of the triremes, the designers'
intention is clear. They wanted to use this
extra power to brutal affect. Boris Rankov believes that
the front of each ship was reinforced to make a ram. BORIS RANKOV: The ram was
essentially a projection of the bow of a ship and
sheathed in bronze with cutting edges on, and this was used
to ram into other ships and knock holes in their hulls. NARRATOR: So the trireme was
basically a guided missile. The idea was that it would
penetrate the hull of an enemy ship, cause maximum
damage, and then move off. Success was dependent on
the skill of the person at the helm. To work effectively, the ram
had to impact at a speed of 10 knots, and if it was
too late or too early, the trireme's vulnerable
sides would be exposed. Boris Rankov believes that
the ships must have been built from an extremely light woods. Flat out, they could
probably manage something like between 9 and 10 knots. A ship of 50 tons with
200 men on board traveling at nearly 10 knots is
really quite impressive. NARRATOR: Only by
investigating the remains of ancient boathouses
can experts estimate the size of triremes. They may have been as
much as 120 feet long. Boris's reconstructions
make it clear that their deployment required
a massive amount of muscle, 170 men in three files, each man
wielding an oar up to 13 feet long. Pericles' fleet was vast. Accounts from the beginning
of the war with Sparta, suggests that he had 300
ships at his disposal. With around 200
sailors per ship, that's a navy of 60,000 men, and
there were other people onboard each ship. Each one also transported
soldiers called hoplites. Disembarking at
strategic locations deep in Spartan territory, they
would have quickly done damage to their enemy then sailed away. [music playing] Weapons expert Mike Loades
reveals the kind of tactic the hoplites used in battle. You would have vast
phalanxes of hoplites, infantry, armed with
a spear and a shield would charge each other, meeting
with an explosive energy, shoving and pushing and jabbing
and stabbing their spears deep into the enemy ranks. It was a war of attrition. Imagine that behind Richard,
there are 600 hoplites, 8 to 12 rows deep, and the first
two or three ranks are going to be able to reach with their
spears into the enemy lines, but behind that, the men
are muscle and weight. NARRATOR: With these highly
skilled troops and the power of the triremes behind
them, it appears that Pericles has the means
to snatch a quick victory over the Spartans, but
that victory doesn't come. The Spartans invade and
attack the walls of Athens five times in 10 years. Each time, they are forced to
pull back, but keep returning. Gradually, the
Athenians are worn down and then Pericles' people
come under attack in a way that they could never have
foreseen because their ships, their greatest strength, return
from foreign ports carrying disease. Thousands of people are
crowded behind the city walls, and in these cramped conditions,
an unnamed plague wreaks havoc. A quarter of the
population dies. EDITH HALL: The Athenians, for
the first time in 50 years, lost all hope. The number of them
that died seems to have been extraordinary. The physical suffering
that went on, people didn't die for a week or
10 days, bits of their bodies rotted and fell off. They coughed their lungs up. They were covered in
disgusting rashes, and there was probably an
absolutely appalling smell of putrefying corpses on top
of the smell of the foul water which had happened because
of so many people confined within the long
walls and the sewage. NARRATOR: Pericles
did not escape. The man who had
built the Parthenon, nursed democracy through its
infancy, fortified his city and led it for decades
with vision and daring, was as vulnerable
as anyone else. He died. No one has ever been able to
put a name to the disease which caused so much destruction,
but recent findings suggest that all these
people were probably killed by typhoid. GORDON DOUGAN: Typhoid can
be a very nasty disease. It can cause rising fever. You can become unconscious,
delirious, and get perforation of the bowel, blood
uncontrollably coming out of your intestines. EDITH HALL: When Pericles
died in the plague, it left a huge hole in
Athenian political life. This left a power vacuum that
all kinds of probably less able people strove to fill. NARRATOR: Athens was physically
and psychologically beaten. Finally, in 404 BC, after
vicious internal fighting and a series of
military disasters, the city was forced to
surrender to the Spartans. Though the defenses
that Pericles built had never been
overcome, his city was humbled by its
bitterest enemy. It had taken 30 years to build. Within one generation, it was
brought low by war and disease, and yet this doesn't detract
from what Pericles achieved. The city he built
set a blueprint for Western civilization. Its influence can still be felt.
Its legacy does not diminish. [music playing]
