I think I am up, so I played.
Some MM'ing (since the objective is to re-learn how to win in higher levels ... MM'ing become increasingly important in higher levels).
Since we know that we are happy cap, we should be working on lesser food tile but higher commerce or hammer tiles. Gold will take at least 10 turns to connect, so it won't help in time.
Having said that, it doesn't really matter much. Because 1 or 2 turns later, I decided to start a settler. So, the population should go back to high food yield.
But, just when I wanted to do that, the most-hated event occurs.
Sigh. I chose the second option, and suspended the settler to allow city to grow back. Once grown, settler was resumed and later whipped. Hence, end of my turns, the above MM lesson is pointless, since gold is connected and city Athens needs to regrow its whipped pop.
Anyhow, strangely, when Corinth's border pops, we got a message that city was connected to Athens.
Probably because the culture pop covers the coastline. Strange because I thought sailing is required to connect city by coastline.
Anyhow, it is a good thing, since that means the iron need not be roaded back to Athens. A road on the iron mine would connect it to Corinth, and since thereby to Athens by induction.
The iron was connected just before Corinth completes its warrior, and it automatically become a spearman

... an axe would be better.
Research wise, I completed archery, and proceeded with pottery -> writing, now started Maths.
With writing in, I open borders to JC, and immediately Buddhism is spread to Athens
As you can see, he has no iron.
We are rated the weathiest CIv ... thanks.
Note also in the last three screenies, you can see that Judaism is FIADL, and Oracle and Great Wall are also BIADL. Let's hope it is not the same distant land.
End turn, our settler is nearly at the iron denial site.
JC has an archer stationed there, but no settler in sight. So, we probably will beat him to it. We can either settle 1E of pig, 1W of iron, or 1S of corn ... all will pull in 2~3 peaks into our BFc

A forth alternative is to settle on iron.
However, do note that there is one more source of iron in the north coast to deny ... which is probably easier since it is much closer to us.
We should probably whip the library in Sparta, and start running a scientist or two there once it grows to happy cap to take advantage of our Philosophical trait.