[park123]

Ancient Athens had a really interesting history. It's absolute peak was right before the Peloponnesian War, when there was really an unprecedented amount of cultural development and ferment going on. This was a "city" of about 60,000 inside the city walls, and about 300,000 in the entire city-state. Not a big place by any stretch of the imagination, but drama, philosophy, democracy, historiography, realistic representational art, were all being developed at exactly the same time in that small town, really.

There was a decline following the war, but Plato and later Aristotle were most active during that 4th C BC. Then from my understanding, it was Alexander the Great's conquests and subsequent development of large Greek empires in Egypt and the Near East which really kind of dealt a death blow to Athens. Talent was sucked away to Alexandria and other cities. Already by around 150 BC you had people writing how surprisingly small and poor Athens was.

And then there was a Renaissance under the early Roman empire, especially under Hadrian and the next few emperors, who turned Athens into kind of a big university town, or theme park of Ancient Greece. They built a ton of impressive public buildings, funded chairs of philosophy, and encouraged private patronage from wealthy eastern Roman notables.

That was followed by chaos in the Roman Empire, and a sack by the Goths(?) in the late 3rd C, from which Athens never fully recovered. When the Eastern Roman / Byzantine Empire went full hard-core Christian, there was a decline in the pagan philosophical schools in Athens, and then Justinian shut the last one down. A bit later Greece was overrun by barbarians again and never recovered until the modern era.