ATHENS is served by dozens of flights from the UK every week, but most passengers are bound for nearby islands. The city oppresses the senses with heat, noise and fumes. Leave as soon as you've done the sights; the rest of Greece is much more rewarding than its capital suggests.

WHAT MADE some members of the audience at the Liverpool Playhouse walk out of Lysistrata? Billed enthusiastically as the rudest comedy ever, Aristophanes' play, written during the Peloponnesian War in 411BC, has the women of Athens and Sparta taking steps to end the war. They deny the men sex and take charge of the money supply. Defensive this may be: offensive it's not.

The gussets of the men's trousers are so floor-sweepingly voluminous you feel you'd have no problem stuffing a full week's family shopping into them. Which is just as well, given what they're forced to accommodate in the second half of Aristophanes' sublimely lewd Lysistrata. Here the hard-ons are as high as an elephant's eye or, to put it another way, is that a shoe-tree in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? When one poor male attempts a courteous bow, he practically concusses himself on his reared-up rigidity.

Sir: Boris Rankov's excellent article 'The good ship democracy' (14 June) begins: 'This week sees the Hellenic community in Britain celebrating 2,500 years of Greek democracy.' This is to date Greek democracy from the year 507 BC, the most important year in the career of Cleisthenes, who is often described as 'the father of Athenian democracy'. But democracy was getting off the ground even towards the beginning of the sixth century BC. 594 BC was the year of the sole archonship of Solon, and it is he who is regarded by some as 'the father of Athenian democracy'; if he was not, he surely deserves the title of 'the grandfather of Athenian democracy'.

THIS week sees the Hellenic community in Britain celebrating 2,500 years of Greek democracy. The anniversary will be marked, amongst other festivities, by the visit of a reconstruction of an ancient Athenian warship to the River Thames. Powered by 170 rowers of both sexes, the Hellenic Navy trireme Olympias will on Wednesday evening pirouette in front of the Palace of Westminster, play host to Madam Speaker, and then paddle off majestically towards Tower Bridge.

TO ARISTOTLE, he was vulgar. To Plato, he was dangerous. To less snooty citizens of the world's first democracy, he was Spitting Image, Viz and Ray Cooney rolled into one. He didn't invent comedy, but he is the earliest comic playwright whose work survives. They say humour doesn't travel, and satire is not supposed to last, but this week Aristophanes of Athens, aged about 2,450, is back in the West End of London.

Sir: Why was Athens not mentioned in Herbert Girardet's article on the environmental threat posed by cities such as London, Berlin and Paris ('Dust off the cities, clean up the world', 19 May)? Indeed, Athens seems to be mentioned increasingly rarely these days. I would have thought Athens was one of the strongest arguments the environmentalists have in the world battle to curb city pollution.

Ince & Co is to open a Mediterranean regional office next month. The new office, in Piraeus, Greece, will be headed by Simon Todd, and will provide on-the-spot advice to the firm's shipping clients in the area.

A prominent member of the ruling conservative party stunned his colleagues in parliament yesterday by resigning his seat and denouncing the government's foreign policy just hours before a confidence vote, Reuter reports from Athens. George Rallis, a former conservative prime minister, said he could not 'approve the government's handling of the Skopje (Macedonia) issue'. The government narrowly survived the vote.

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Sir: The caption to the picture accompanying the announcement of your Young Essayists' Competition (17 September) refers to 'the poor' as excluded from the Athenian democratic reforms. In fact, those of the poor who were free citizens of ancient Athens were given full rights.

As darkness fell over Athens on the evening of 27 September last year, President Constantine Karamanlis threw a switch. A laser beam burned across the sky between the Acropolis and the Hill of the Pnyx where the citizens of classical Greece convened to take decisions on the future of the city state. The light linked the Acropolis with a newly unveiled monument to Eucrates, a founding father of Greek democracy.

ATHENS (AP) - Scores of fires raged out of control in many parts of Greece yesterday, destroying more than 10,000 acres of forest. A young girl was killed over the weekend. Five fires in southern Greece have destroyed 2,075 acres of forest.

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