Ancient Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  Ancient Greece was never one country. It was a loose collection of several hundred culturally and linguistically related city-states, scattered across the northeastern Mediterranean and divided by hills, mountains, and rivers. Before the Roman period, these regions were officially unified only once, under the Kingdom of Macedon, and that unity lasted barely fifteen years, from 338 to 323 BC. Yet from this fractured landscape came the seminal culture that the modern West draws on for its founding ideas in politics, philosophy, science, and art. The civilization stretched from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th to 9th centuries BC to the close of classical antiquity around 600 AD. How did a people who fiercely refused to unify produce the cradle of Western civilization? What held them together when nothing politically did? And why do names like Homer, Socrates, and Alexander still echo more than two thousand years later? This is the story of a world of rival cities that shared a religion, a language, and a restless habit of asking why.

• 2. From Dark Age To Empire

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  Three centuries after Mycenaean Greece declined during the Bronze Age collapse, Greek urban poleis began forming in the 8th century BC. This opened the Archaic period, when the polis, or city-state, became the most important unit of political organisation. The absence of powerful states after the Mycenaean collapse, combined with mountainous terrain that cut settlements off from their neighbours, encouraged small independent communities to take root.

  In 499 BC the Ionian city-states under Persian rule rebelled, supported by troops from Athens and Eretria, and burned Sardis before being driven back. Darius did not forget. In 490 the Athenians, supported by their Plataean allies, defeated his forces at the Battle of Marathon. Ten years later his son Xerxes launched a second invasion, met at Thermopylae in 480 BC by a small rearguard led by three hundred Spartans who held a crucial pass for several days.

  The Persians were broken at sea at Salamis and on land at Plataea in 479 BC. The death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC closed the Classical period and opened the Hellenistic age. His conquests carried Greek culture into the Near East and founded cities as far away as present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms survived until the end of the 1st century BC.

• 3. Cities That Would Not Unite

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  Several hundred relatively independent poleis made up ancient Greece, a situation unlike most contemporary societies, which were tribal or were kingdoms ruling large territories. The ancient Greeks had no doubt they were one people. They shared the same religion, the same basic culture, and the same language, and Herodotus could categorise the city-states by tribe. Yet these higher-level bonds rarely played a major role in politics.

  The independence of the poleis was fiercely defended, and unification was something the Greeks rarely contemplated. Even during the second Persian invasion, when a group of city-states allied to defend Greece, the vast majority of poleis stayed neutral, and after the Persian defeat the allies quickly returned to infighting. Conquest or direct rule by another city-state was quite rare.

  Instead, the poleis grouped themselves into leagues whose membership was in constant flux. Later in the Classical period these leagues grew fewer and larger, dominated by Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, and cities were often compelled to join under threat of war. Even after Philip II of Macedon conquered the Greek heartlands, he did not annex the territory. He compelled most of the poleis to join his own Corinthian League instead.

• 4. Democracy And Diarchy

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  Many Greek city-states began as petty kingdoms, often keeping a city official who carried residual ceremonial functions of the king, such as the archon basileus in Athens. By the Archaic period most had become aristocratic oligarchies. In Athens the kingship was reduced to a hereditary lifelong chief magistracy, became a decennial elected archonship by 753 BC, and an annually elected archonship by 683 BC, transferring power away from a single individual.

  After a failed coup led by Cylon around 636 BC, Draco was appointed to establish a code of laws in 621 BC, which created a citizens' assembly called the Ecclesia. In 594 BC Solon was given authority to enact reforms balancing the power of rich and poor. Pisistratus later established himself as a tyrant, and after his death in 527 his son Hippias inherited the position before being overthrown, after which Cleisthenes carried out further democratising reforms. When Athens ended its tyranny, it founded the world's first democracy.

  Sparta was a notable exception, ruled through the whole period by two hereditary monarchs in a form of diarchy. The kings belonged to the Agiads and the Eurypontids, descendants of Eurysthenes and Procles, both believed to be twin sons of Aristodemus, a Heraclid ruler. Their powers were held in check by a council of elders, the Gerousia, and by five magistrates called ephors who watched over the kings.

• 5. Slaves, Helots, And Citizens

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  Only free, land-owning, native-born men could be citizens entitled to the full protection of the law in a city-state. By 600 BC chattel slavery had spread in Greece, and by the 5th century BC slaves made up one-third of the population in some city-states. Between 40 and 80 percent of the population of Classical Athens were slaves. Owners were not allowed to beat or kill their slaves, and often promised freedom in the future to encourage hard work.

  Unlike in Rome, freedmen did not become citizens. They were mixed into the population of metics, foreigners and people from other city-states officially allowed to live in the state. City-states also legally owned slaves who lived on their own and performed specialized tasks. In Athens public slaves were trained to spot counterfeit coinage, while Scythian slaves served as a police force corralling citizens to political functions.

  Sparta had a special type of slave called helots, Messenians enslaved en masse during the Messenian Wars and assigned to families. Helots raised food and did household chores so that men could devote their time to training as hoplites. Their masters treated them harshly, and helots revolted several times. In 370/369 BC, after Epaminondas liberated Messenia from Spartan rule, the helot system there ended, though it persisted in Laconia until the 2nd century BC.

• 6. Reason And The Heavens

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  Ancient Greek philosophy focused on the role of reason and inquiry, and clear unbroken lines of influence lead from it to medieval Muslim philosophers, the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the secular sciences of today. The first known philosophers were the pre-Socratics, who tried to provide naturalistic, non-mythical descriptions of the world. They were followed by Socrates, whose ideas survive only through second-hand accounts, his disciple Plato, who wrote The Republic, and Plato's disciple Aristotle, who wrote extensively about nature and ethics.

  The Greeks treated astronomy as a branch of mathematics. The first three-dimensional models explaining planetary motion were developed in the 4th century BC by Eudoxus of Cnidus and Callippus of Cyzicus. Heraclides Ponticus proposed that the Earth rotates around its axis, and in the 3rd century BC Aristarchus of Samos was the first to suggest a heliocentric system. Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth with great accuracy using the angles of shadows at widely separated regions.

  The Antikythera mechanism, a device for calculating the movements of planets, dates from about 80 BC and was the first ancestor of the astronomical computer. It was discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete. Its differential gear and miniaturized parts were comparable to a clock made in the 18th century. The original is displayed in the Bronze collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

• 7. Words, Music, And Stone

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  The earliest Greek literature was poetry, composed for performance rather than private reading. The earliest known poet is Homer, part of an existing tradition of oral poetry. The first poet to certainly compose in writing was Archilochus, a lyric poet from the mid-7th century BC. Comedy became an official event at the City Dionysia in Athens in 486 BC, though the first preserved ancient comedy is Aristophanes' Acharnians, produced in 425 BC.

  In Ancient Greek society music was ever-present and considered a fundamental component of civilisation, woven into religious worship, weddings, funerals, and household entertainment. The music was primarily vocal, sung by a solo singer or a chorus and usually accompanied by an instrument. The Greeks used stringed instruments such as lyres, harps, and lutes, and wind instruments, of which the most important was the aulos, a reed instrument.

  The Hellenistic period moved the literary centre of the Greek world from Athens to Alexandria. The Library of Alexandria, part of the Museum, had the previously unenvisaged aim of collecting copies of all known authors in Greek. Thanks to this patronage by Hellenistic kings, so much ancient Greek literature survived. The art of ancient Greece, especially in sculpture and architecture, would later inspire generations of European artists well into the 19th century.

• 8. Captive Greece

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  Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on ancient Rome, which carried a version of it throughout the Mediterranean and much of Europe. Greece became a key eastern province of the Roman Empire, and Greek served as a lingua franca in the East and in Italy. Greek intellectuals such as Galen performed most of their work in Rome. The poet Horace captured the reversal when he wrote, Captive Greece took captive her uncivilised conqueror and instilled her arts in rustic Latium.

  The Byzantine Empire inherited Classical Greek-Hellenistic culture directly, without Latin intermediation. Its preservation of Classical Greek learning influenced the Slavs, the Islamic Golden Age, and the Western European Renaissance. A modern revival took place in the Neoclassicism movement of 18th and 19th century Europe and the Americas.

  Late Antiquity refers to the period of Christianization from the later 4th to early 6th centuries AD. It was consummated by the closure of the Academy of Athens by Justinian I in 529, when an institution rooted in Plato's city finally fell silent under a Christian emperor.