Athens served at various points as an intellectual center, a provincial home, and a site of imperial ceremony within the Byzantine world. The city was the destination of the future emperor Julian for philosophical study in his youth, and later the birthplace of Irene, who rose from its western provinces to become empress despite her iconodule convictions clashing with the iconoclast court she married into; it also received Basil II after his Bulgarian conquest, where he gave thanks in the Parthenon, then functioning as the Church of the Mother of God. Centuries after the empire's fall, Athens honored Constantine XI by erecting a statue of him with sword raised, marking him as an enduring symbol of resistance.
What each episode says
Episode 5 (2 mentions)
Where Julian traveled to continue his philosophical studies, wandering the Greek world sitting at the feet of great thinkers. It was here, at age 23, that Constantius summoned him to Milan to become co-ruler.
“On his way to Athens, he stopped at the great library at Ephesus, and at this point seems”
“He reached Athens in the summer of his twenty-third year, an awkward, painfully shy man with”
Episode 11 (1 mention)
The home city of the orphan who would become Empress Irene. Growing up in the western provinces, Irene was strongly iconodule, in contrast to the iconoclast court she married into.
“He chose a stunningly beautiful orphan from Athens, and though her original name is lost,”
Episode 13 (1 mention)
The city where Basil II ended his formal tour of the new Bulgarian province, attending a service in the Church of the Mother of God — better known as the Parthenon — to give thanks after the conquest.
“He ended in Athens, where he attended a service in the Church of the Mother of God, better”
Episode 16 (1 mention)
Brownworth ends the episode noting that when Athens achieved its independence, it erected a statue of Constantine XI still standing with his sword arm defiantly raised — a final recognition of the last emperor as a symbol of resistance.
“In a final act of recognition, the city of Athens, when it achieved its independence,”
Episode 17 (1 mention)
“Put it in the second century. What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens in the West?”
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