Original subtitles

[music playing]

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's city.

EDITH HALL: Pericles decided that 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 fresh water.

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.

[theme music]

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.

EDITH HALL: The story goes that when Pericles's 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.

To be a successful politician and statesman in Greece,

he needed to be a military leader,

and he needed to be an effective speaker of 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 V. 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 to float.

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 and architect Manolis Korres

have set themselves the task of deciphering exactly how it came

to be built, what it looked like during Athens's 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's 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 brought 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 have been 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 had a cart on one side

with a rock on it.

And up the top on the other side,

they have another car full of stone with a big rope going

round and over 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 the 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, and these were timber cranes.

And they lifted these pieces up into the construction.

And the biggest piece was 13 tons, so about--

Yes, the biggest eight pieces weighed 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.

EDITH HALL: Manolis, are these the original pick holes?

MANOLIS KORRES: Exactly.

Second stage after bringing the stone from the quarry.

It is one of the preliminary stages.

ED MCCANN: The last time someone put their finger in there might

have been 2,500 years ago--

Exactly.

Exactly.

ED MCCANN: --with 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 doing rough cuts with the stone

through gradually getting finer and finer stone cuts,

and that's reflected in the tools that they used.

So the tool that they used 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 hit

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 band

of the original construction.

ED MCCANN: And this would have been underneath so you wouldn't

have seen. MANOLIS KORRES: Yes, always.

ED MCCANN: So it was underneath the bottom of the column

MANOLIS KORRES: Yes exactly hidden by the next.

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're lifted 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

these things so when you lower it in with a crane,

there's a little hole.

And 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.

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's 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 because the Parthenon once held the most

spectacular statues ever made.

What Pericles 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 these 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 they're all over here.

We see one there, one there.

I've noticed that you've got some Greek vandals

because that's graffiti, isn't it?

MANOLIS KORRES: Yes, it is.

Yes, one of the 230 graffitis in the Parthenon,

many of them of historical value.

They're pertaining to people thanking god

for being saved in the sea after 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--

Exactly, yes.

--he would have come back to the Parthenon, climbed up here,

and scribbled something on the wall saying,

thank you very much, God.

Yes, exactly.

Yes.

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.

ED MCCANN: So the Parthenon was actually

painted when it was new?

Yes, it was painted.

It was a principle in ancient architecture

to cover the buildings with paint, even in 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 Pericles carved into the marble

was almost 520-feet long, and the sculptures that adorned

the gables were colossal.

STEPHEN V. TRACEY: And I think the Parthenon is remarkable

because if you look at these sculptures,

and we can, these days, see them from behind

and see that they're beautifully sculpted in the round.

Yet once upon a building, they could never be seen.

and 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: 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 fire in 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 plinth that was five 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 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,

and 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 four or five inches here of sag

relative to the top of the step.

What that means is that the step is four inches higher here

than it is on the corners.

And this happens all over the Parthenon.

NARRATOR: It is now possible to bring together decades

of research, and using the latest graphic modeling

techniques, rebuild the Parthenon.

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: This one building alone

would have been enough to guarantee Pericles's place

in history, but he will do more.

He is bringing a radical, fundamental change to Athens.

A new set of buildings will transform the whole city

and its people.

Pericles will build democracy.

High on the Acropolis throughout Pericles's time in government,

the Parthenon stands as testament to Athens status.

It is a superpower.

STEPHEN V. TRACEY: Athens showed her dominance

over the rest of the Greek world,

mainly, through, I think, Pericles's 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.

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 M. CAMP: The Agora is 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's 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 M. CAMP: The Agora, in Periclean times,

would've been quite impressive.

It would have been lined with stoas, which

are big, long columnated 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.

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's 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 M. 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

and 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,

columnar 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 M. 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 V. 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's Athenians also developed

a way of preventing any one individual from gaining

too much power.

JOHN M. 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.

NARRATOR: 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 M. CAMP: We're at the remains of a fairly typical

Athenian house, with 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.

Hundreds of years before the great building projects

of Rome, Pericles's Athenians developed and built

a highly advanced sewage and water system.

John Camp found what was left of it beneath these ruins.

JOHN M. 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.

But 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 criss

crossing the Agora.

NARRATOR: Sections were short, three to four feet long,

because they were made on a potter's wheel.

Around two inches thick, they were

made with a special lip at one end to ensure a watertight fit.

When a length of pipette 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.

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's 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 two 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 five 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 his 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 Pericles, the disruption is a price worth paying.

Athens has to be ready to fight.

Today, nothing remains of Pericles's wall,

but this fortification at Aigosthena is very similar.

It provides investigators with the best clues

to what Athens's long walls would have looked like.

STEPHEN V. TRACEY: The wall that that he built would have been

of smaller stones than this, I imagine,

for four meters or so, 12 feet.

And then above that, mud-brick for another,

say, three or four meters.

NARRATOR: Two external stone faces were filled with rubble.

Above the foundation lay low stone called sockel.

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's 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's

long walls and cavalry.

This was the start of Greek cavalry.

NARRATOR: Mounted troops were a major innovation

in ancient Greek warfare.

MIKE LOADES: Cavalry 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 watchmen were recruited

from Scythian arches.

The Scythians were this people from north of the Black Sea.

And they had these wonderful, strong, powerful recurve bows

made of horn and sinew.

It's 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.

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 DEXA, which means take that.

It's a wonderful millennia-old bit of soldiers wit.

And 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's 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 V. 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.

NARRATOR: The Golden Age of Athens

was about to come to a dramatic end.

Pericles plans to gamble everything

he has built, everything his people have worked

for on the strength of his mighty navy.

We will uncover the lost world of the Greek war ship.

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 crews.

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 oared warships

had rows at two different levels.

By adding a third level of rowers,

you got half as much power again within the same length of hull.

So it made the ships faster and more maneuverable.

NARRATOR: From ancient drawings of the triremes, the designer's

intention is clear--

they wanted to use this extra power to brutal effect.

Boris Rankov believes that the front of each ship

was reinforced to make a ram.

BORIS RANKOV: The ram was essentially

a projection at 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 triremes vulnerable sides would be exposed.

Boris Rankov believes that the ships must have been built

from an extremely light wood.

BORIS RANKOV: Flat out, they could probably manage something

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 boat

houses 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.

Weapons expert Mike Loades reveals the kind of tactic

the hoplites used in battle.

BORIS RANKOV: He would have vast phalanxes 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

eight to 12 rows deep.

Now, 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's 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 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 could cause rising fever.

You can become unconscious, delirious.

You can 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]