Auld Greekie: Edinburgh as the Athens of the North

Around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially in the years between about 1810 and 1840, Edinburgh – long and affectionately known as ‘Auld Reekie’ – came to think of itself and to be widely regarded as something else.

The city became ‘Modern Athens’, an epithet later turned to ‘the Athens of the North’. The latter phrase is very well—known. It is also much used by those who have little understanding of the often confused and contradictory messages hidden within t...