Attica
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Attica. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a state of ancient Greece, the capital of which, Athens, was once the first city in the world. The territory was triangular in shape, with Cape Sunium (Colonna) as its apex and the ranges of Mounts Cithæron and Parnes as its base. On the N. these ranges separated it from Bœotia; on the W. it was bounded by Megaris and the Saronic Gulf; on the E. by the Ægean. Its most marked physical divisions consisted of the highlands, midland district, and coast district, with the two famous plains of Eleusis and of Athens. The Cephissus and Ilissus, though small, were its chief streams; its principal hills, Cithæron, Parnes, Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Laurium. History. According to tradition the earliest inhabitants of Attica lived in a savage manner until the time of Cecrops, who came, 1550 b. c., with a colony from , Egypt taught them all the essentials of civilization, and founded Athens. One of Cecrops' descendants founded 11 other cities. To Theseus is assigned the honor of uniting these cities in a confederacy, with Athens as the capital, thus forming the Attic state. After the death of Codrus, 1068 B. C., the monarchy was abolished, and the government vested in archons elected by the nobility, at first for life, in 752 b. c. for 10 years, and in 683 b. c. for one year only. The severe Constitution of Draco was succeeded in 594 B. c. by the milder code of Solon, the democratic elements of which, after the brief tyranny of the Pisistratids, were emphasized and developed by Clisthenes, He divided the people into 10 classes, and made the Senate consist of 500 persons, establishing as the government an oligarchy modified by popular control. Then came the splendid era of the Persian War, which elevated Athens to the summit of fame. Miltiades at Marathon the Persians by land and by sea. Attica appears to have contained a territory of nearly 850 square miles, with some 500,- 000 inhabitants, 360,000 of whom were slaves, while the inhabitants of the city 444 B. c., raised Athens to its point of numbered 180,000. Cimon and Pericles, greatest splendor, though under the latter began the Peloponnesian War, which ended with the conquest of Athens by the Lacedæmonians. The succeeding tyranny of the Thirty, under the protection of a Spartan garrison, was overthrown by Thrasybulus, with a temporary partial restoration of the power of Athens; but the battle of Cheronæa (338 B. c) made Attica, in common with the rest of Greece, a dependency of Macedon. The attempts at revolt after the death of Alexander were crushed, and in 260 b. c. Attica was still under the sway of Antigonus Gonatus, the Macedonian king. A period of freedom under the shelter of the Achæan League then ensued, but their support of Mithridates led in 146 B. C. to the subjugation of the Grecian states by Rome. After the division of the Roman empire Attica belonged to the empire of the East until, in 396 A. D., it was conquered by Alaric the Goth, and the country devastated. Attica, along with the ancient Bœotia, now forms a nome or province (Attike and Viotia) of the kingdom of Greece; area, 2,472 square miles; pop. about 450,000.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the southern peninsula and the most famous district of ancient Greece. It is still a land of mountain and plain, of the olive tree and the grape, of oil and wine. It was noted among the ancients for "inhabitants ever seeking some new thing." The political supremacy of ancient Greece was due largely to the seafaring enterprise of the inhabitants of Attica. It is still a geographical division on the map of modern Europe, but its glory lies in the past. No other area so diminutive in size is associated with so much of the world's art, literature, and history. Mt. Pentelicus, noted for its marble; Mt. Hymettus, for its honey; the Plain of Marathon, for the defeat of Darius' army; Eleusis with its mysteries; "the rocky brow which looks o'er sea-born Salamis"; and Athens, itself, "the eye of the world," are some of the names which make Attica famous. It has an area of 2,000 square miles, and a present population of 250,000 engaged in wresting a living from rather barren mountain slopes and a thin, sandy, stony soil. The complete destruction of forests has allowed freshets and torrents to carry away the soil and leave many a hillside bare. Historic fountains and vales, noted in myth and poetry, are reduced to prosaic, dry, rocky gullies. See Greece
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A division of Greece, has the form of a triangle, two sides of which are washed by the Aegean Sea , while the third is separated from Boeotia on the north by the mountains Cithaeron and Parnes.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's put the population of the combined nome of Attica and Boeotia at about 450,000 in 1921, and Aiton's in 1910 described 250,000 people "wresting a living from rather barren mountain slopes." Attica is now the most densely settled corner of Greece: the modern region, no longer yoked to Boeotia, holds roughly 3.7 to 3.8 million people, something over a third of the whole Greek population, in the sprawl of Athens and Piraeus. The turn came almost immediately after Collier's went to press, when the 1922 collapse of the Greek campaign in Asia Minor sent hundreds of thousands of refugees into the Athens basin, creating whole new suburbs. The one story on the page that has simply been dropped is Collier's confident tradition that Cecrops arrived from Egypt in 1550 B.C. and "taught them all the essentials of civilization"; excavation of Mycenaean Athens and the decipherment of Linear B in 1952 replaced the Egyptian colony with a Greek-speaking Bronze Age society, and the Cecrops story is now read as myth rather than chronology.
Written for this edition, 2026.