Why is Edinburgh called the Athens of the North?

Athens and Rome: what the nickname really means

To make sense of it, think of ancient Athens once Rome was in charge. It had lost its independence and become one more piece of a vast empire, yet it was still the city of philosophers and schools. Rome had the legions; Athens had the prestige of ideas. Or so anyone comparing themselves to Athens liked to think.

Edinburgh felt it was in much the same position. Scotland was part of the United Kingdom and of an empire run from London. Historic Environment Scotland, the national heritage body, puts it like this: many people felt that, even within the empire, Scotland should be able to express its own identity, and the situation was likened to that of Athens under Roman rule, "subsumed into a wider empire, but seen as stronger in terms of intellect and culture". Edinburgh was beginning to be seen as "Athens to London's Rome".

So it isn't about the weather, as anyone who's braved Calton Hill in a gale knows. It's about where a small city fits inside a very large empire.

When did people start calling it that?

We'll be honest: we haven't found who said it first. What heritage bodies do say is that it took hold in the nineteenth century. Edinburgh World Heritage writes that, in that century, the city was envisioned as the "Athens of the North", with Calton Hill as its Acropolis.

The historian Iain Gordon Brown, who has written a whole book on the subject, puts the change at roughly 1810 to 1840, with a twist: at first Edinburgh became "Modern Athens", and only later did that turn into "the Athens of the North".

Historic Environment Scotland places the comparison in a particular quarrel. In 1816, with the Napoleonic Wars just over, the Highland Society suggested honouring the Scots who had fallen in them. Some argued that a single British memorial in London should do the job. Edinburgh preferred one of its own. And it's in that row over Scotland's place within the empire that the picture of Athens living alongside Rome appears.

The city's reputation for bright minds was older, but it comes with a catch. The line "Edinburgh is a hot-bed of genius" is usually credited to the novelist Tobias Smollett. In fact it's written by one of his characters, Matthew Bramble, in a letter in the novel Humphry Clinker (1771). To be fair to Bramble, the same letter has him meeting Hume and Smith. He wasn't short of evidence.

Who made it Athens?

The reasons to boast had names. In the later eighteenth century, this one city was home to several people who changed how we think about the economy, the human mind and the age of the Earth: the Scottish Enlightenment.

David Hume, the great sceptic, went to his death in 1776 in such good spirits that, as Adam Smith recorded, plenty of people simply refused to accept the end was near. Smith himself, according to the University of Edinburgh, loved nothing more than getting the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton together at an oyster club to hear them talk. And Hutton, a doctor by training and a farmer, presented a theory of the Earth in 1785 that looked at time in a new way. In the rocks, he wrote, "we find no vestige of a beginning, — no prospect of an end".

In 1783 the city acquired a learned society of its own, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Smith's name was on the petition for its royal charter. According to Historic Environment Scotland, these Enlightenment achievements strengthened the comparison with Athens.

An Acropolis copied from a book

A city that thinks it's Athens needs an Acropolis. Edinburgh found one in Calton Hill, at the east end of Princes Street, and filled it with Greek-looking monuments.

The most elegant is the Dugald Stewart Monument by William Playfair (1831): a round temple of nine columns with an urn inside. That same Royal Society commissioned it in honour of Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1786 to 1828 and a renowned orator. It copies the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, put up to celebrate victory in a choral competition. A trophy for voices, for a great orator: according to Historic Environment Scotland, the nod was probably intentional.

And how do you copy something so far away? Largely with a book: Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens, whose engravings had made the model more widely known. Edinburgh's Athens was, in part, learnt from its plates.

Nor was it alone. The monument to the poet Robert Burns, nearby on Regent Road, follows the same model. And further down the slope, Thomas Hamilton's former Royal High School (1825–1829) bases the order of its central pavilion on the Temple of Theseus, again as it appears in those engravings. Hamilton, says the building's official listing, strengthened the likeness between Calton Hill and the Acropolis, and his school cemented Edinburgh's reputation as the Athens of the North.

The Parthenon that stopped at twelve columns

The star piece had to be a Parthenon, and that's what became of the memorial to the dead of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1822 an appeal went out for £42,000 to "erect a facsimile of the Parthenon". There was a foundation ceremony while George IV was visiting the city, though the King himself didn't attend.

The rest of the money never materialised. In 1826, when the first building contract was signed, the kitty held about £15,000. The stone was the finest to be had, as costly as the work itself, and it was reputed to have taken "twelve horses and 70 men to move some of the larger stones up the hill". By 1829 there wasn't a penny left. What stood were the columns of the west portico with the architrave on top: twelve in all, eight across the front and two on each side.

Plans to complete it have never been in short supply: dedicate it to Queen Victoria, turn it into the National Gallery or a home for Parliament, make it a Great War memorial. All of them stayed on paper. And the columns still carry a nickname that stings: "the pride and poverty of Scotland".

The ones who weren't convinced

Not everyone took all that Greece seriously. Robert Louis Stevenson, the Edinburgh-raised author of Treasure Island, wrote in 1879 that those columns, by then known as the Modern Ruin, lent Edinburgh "that false air of a Modern Athens". Left half-built, he added, they made a fitting monument to certain national traits. With a native son like that, who needs critics?

Perhaps that's the real answer: Edinburgh was called Athens for what it thought, for what it built and also for what it couldn't finish.

Fact or legend.

• Fact: the nickname "Athens of the North" took hold in the nineteenth century. Historic Environment Scotland explains it as a comparison between Edinburgh within the empire and Athens under Rome, strengthened by the Enlightenment and by Greek Revival architecture.
• We don't know: who first used the nickname. According to the historian Iain Gordon Brown, "Modern Athens" came first and "the Athens of the North" later.
• Fact: Calton Hill has copies of Athenian models: the unfinished Parthenon, halted in 1829, and the Dugald Stewart Monument, a copy of the Monument of Lysicrates.
• Attributed interpretation: that the Lysicrates model, a trophy from a choral contest, was chosen on purpose for a great orator. Historic Environment Scotland says "probably".
• Misattributed: the "hot-bed of genius" line isn't Smollett speaking, but a character in his novel.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on The Athens of the North: from the North Bridge to Calton Hill, twelve stops from the bridge to the top of the hill. The reason for the nickname is told beside the Dugald Stewart Monument, at the stop "A little piece of Athens". The unfinished Parthenon has its own stop, "The Parthenon that ran out of money", and so does the Greek temple that did get finished, "A parliament that never moved in". For the practical side of your trip, see our Edinburgh guide.

Further reading

• Historic Environment Scotland, "Calton Hill, off Regent Road, National Monument" (LB27820). https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB27820
• Historic Environment Scotland, "Calton Hill, off Regent Road, Dugald Stewart's Monument" (LB27835). https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB27835
• Historic Environment Scotland, "5 and 7 Regent Road, former Royal High School" (LB27987). https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB27987
• Edinburgh World Heritage, "Calton Hill". https://ewh.org.uk/calton-hill/
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, 1879. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/382
• Iain Gordon Brown, Auld Greekie: Edinburgh as the Athens of the North, Fonthill, 2022.