• In the 5th century BCE, Athens housed a significant number of geniuses and innovators, such as the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the historians Thucydides and Herodotus, the physician Hippocrates, and philosophers Socrates and Plato.
• Socrates ...

• The city-state of Athens (5th and 4th centuries BCE) valued intellectual pursuits and open inquiry. That lead to the development of philosophy (the love of wisdom).
• The ancient Athenians' focus on understanding themselves and the world around them provided an intellectual ...

Slavery was prevalent throughout the ancient world. Most of the enslaved people in Athens were from abroad, often captured in conflicts from farther north.

Athens was an unusually open society. It was open to foreign goods, foreigners that were able to attain high-status roles, and the exchange of strange ideas.