Because moderns put stock in value-laden ideas about the uniqueness of centuries—eighteenth-century America, nineteenth-century values, twentieth-century modernism—they have become accustomed to seeing fourth-century B.c. Athens as somehow decadent and a pale imitation of its grand fifth-century predecessor, which was decimated by a hideous war that ended in 404. Add that Socrates, embodiment of the fifth-century Athenian enlightenment, was executed in 399, and the picture of a sharp departure (or, rather, downturn) from the previous majestic hundred years is nearly complete.
