The first known philosopher of Greece, Thales of Miletus, apparently wrote nothing, yet his name anchors a tradition that would define Western thought. Ancient Greece was not a unified nation but a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th to 9th centuries BC until the end of classical antiquity in the 6th century AD. This civilization, located in the northeastern Mediterranean, was shaped by a geography of mountains and islands that forced communities into small, independent units known as poleis. Unlike the vast empires of Egypt or Persia, these city-states fiercely defended their autonomy, rarely contemplating unification until the Kingdom of Macedon briefly seized control from 338 to 323 BC. The absence of powerful states after the collapse of Mycenaean power encouraged the development of these small independent city-states, each with its own dialect, cultural peculiarities, and identity. Regionalism and regional conflicts were prominent features, with cities often located in valleys between mountains or on coastal plains, dominating a certain area around them. Despite this fragmentation, the Greeks considered themselves one people, sharing the same religion, basic culture, and language, a unity that Herodotus was able to extensively categorize by tribe.
The Archaic Awakening
The Dipylon Vase of the late Geometric period marks the beginning of the Archaic period, lasting approximately from 800 to 500 BC, which saw the culmination of political and social developments that had begun in the Greek Dark Age. During this era, the polis became the most important unit of political organization, and the population of the widening area of Greek settlement increased roughly ten-fold from 800,000 to as many as 10 million. This demographic explosion was not merely for trade but resulted in the large-scale establishment of colonies elsewhere, with Euboean settlements at Al-Mina in the east as early as 800 BC and Ischia in the west by 775 BC. Increasing contact with non-Greek peoples in the Near East inspired developments in art and architecture, the adoption of coinage, and the development of the Greek alphabet. Athens developed its democratic system over the course of the archaic period, with the right of all citizen men to attend the assembly appearing to have been established in the 7th century. After a failed coup led by Cylon of Athens around 636 BC, Draco was appointed to establish a code of laws in 621, though this failed to reduce political tension. In 594 Solon was given the authority to enact another set of reforms, which attempted to balance the power of the rich and the poor, setting the stage for the radical democracy that would follow.
In 490 BC, the Athenians, heavily outnumbered, defeated the Persian hordes at the Battle of Marathon, causing the Persian fleet to turn tail and marking a pivotal moment in the Greco-Persian Wars. Ten years later, a second invasion was launched by Darius' son Xerxes, and a coalition of 31 Greek city states, including Athens and Sparta, determined to resist the Persian invaders. At the same time, Greek Sicily was invaded by a Carthaginian force, and in 480 BC, the first major battle of the invasion was fought at Thermopylae, where a small rearguard of Greeks, led by three hundred Spartans, held a crucial pass guarding the heart of Greece for several days. The Persians were decisively defeated at sea by a primarily Athenian naval force at the Battle of Salamis, and on land in 479 BC at the Battle of Plataea. The alliance against Persia continued, initially led by the Spartan Pausanias but from 477 by Athens, and by 460 Persia had been driven out of the Aegean. During this long campaign, the Delian League gradually transformed from a defensive alliance of Greek states into an Athenian empire, as Athens' growing naval power intimidated the other league states. Athens ended its campaigns against Persia in 450, after a disastrous defeat in Egypt in 454, and the death of Cimon in action against the Persians on Cyprus in 450.
The Peloponnesian Fire
In 431 BC, the Peloponnesian War began, a conflict that would see the first phase of the war involve a series of fruitless annual invasions of Attica by Sparta while Athens successfully fought the Corinthian empire in northwest Greece. The war turned after Athenian victories led by Cleon at Pylos and Sphakteria, but the Athenians rejected a peace proposal from Sparta. The Athenian failure to regain control of Boeotia at Delium and Brasidas' successes in northern Greece in 424 improved Sparta's position after Sphakteria. After the deaths of Cleon and Brasidas, the strongest proponents of war on each side, a peace treaty was negotiated in 421 by the Athenian general Nicias. The peace did not last, however, and in 415 Athens launched an ambitious naval expedition to dominate Sicily, which ended in disaster at the harbor of Syracuse, with almost the entire army killed and the ships destroyed. Soon after the Athenian defeat in Syracuse, Athens' Ionian allies began to rebel against the Delian league, while Persia began to once again involve itself in Greek affairs on the Spartan side. In 405 the Spartan Lysander defeated Athens in the Battle of Aegospotami, and began to blockade Athens' harbour, driving the city to sue for peace and agree to surrender their fleet and join the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League.
The Macedonian Ascent
By 371 BC, Thebes was in the ascendancy, defeating Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra and killing the Spartan king Cleombrotus I, invading Laconia and leading to Messenia gaining independence. The rising power of Thebes led Sparta and Athens to join forces, but in 362 they were defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Mantinea, where their general Epaminondas was killed. The power vacuum in Greece after the Battle of Mantinea was filled by Macedon, under Philip II, starting from the battle of Crocus field. In 338 BC, he defeated a Greek alliance at the Battle of Chaeronea, and subsequently formed the League of Corinth. Philip planned to lead the League to invade Persia, but was murdered in 336 BC. His son Alexander the Great was left to fulfil his father's ambitions. After campaigns against Macedon's western and northern enemies, and those Greek states that had broken from the League of Corinth following the death of Philip, Alexander began his campaign against Persia in 334 BC. He conquered Persia, defeating Darius III at the Battle of Issus in 333 BC, and after the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC proclaimed himself king of Asia. From 329 BC he led expeditions to Bactria and then India, with further plans to invade Arabia and North Africa halted by his death in 323 BC.
The Hellenistic Spread
The period from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC until the death of Cleopatra, the last Macedonian ruler of Egypt, is known as the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and power expanded into the Near East from the death of Alexander until the Roman conquest. The first Hellenistic kings were previously Alexander's generals, and took power in the period following his death, though they were not part of existing royal lineages and lacked historic claims to the territories they controlled. The most important of these rulers in the decades after Alexander's death were Antigonus I and his son Demetrius in Macedonia and the rest of Greece, Ptolemy in Egypt, and Seleucus I in Syria and the former Persian empire. The great capitals of Hellenistic culture were Alexandria in the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Antioch in the Seleucid Empire. The conquests of Alexander had numerous consequences for the Greek city-states, greatly widening the horizons of the Greeks and leading to a steady emigration of the young and ambitious to the new Greek empires in the east. Many Greeks migrated to Alexandria, Antioch and the many other new Hellenistic cities founded in Alexander's wake, as far away as present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom and the Indo-Greek Kingdom survived until the end of the 1st century BC.
The Roman Absorption
The Greek peninsula came under Roman rule during the 146 BC conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth, with Macedonia becoming a Roman province while southern Greece came under the surveillance of Macedonia's prefect. Athens and other Greek cities revolted in 88 BC, and the peninsula was crushed by the Roman general Sulla. The Roman civil wars devastated the land even further, until Augustus organized the peninsula as the province of Achaea in 27 BC. Greece was a key eastern province of the Roman Empire, as the Roman culture had long been in fact Greco-Roman, with the Greek language serving as a lingua franca in the East and in Italy. The Achaean league outlasted both the Aetolian league and Macedon, but it was also soon defeated and absorbed by the Romans in 146 BC, bringing Greek independence to an end. The Hellenistic period is considered to have ended in 30 BC, when the last Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, was annexed by the Roman Republic, marking the final chapter of independent Greek political history before the establishment of Byzantium by Constantine as the capital of the Roman Empire in 330 AD.
The Enduring Legacy
The civilization of ancient Greece has been immensely influential on language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, science, and the arts, becoming the Leitkultur of the Roman Empire to the point of marginalizing native Italic traditions. The first known philosophers of Greece were the pre-Socratics, who attempted to provide naturalistic, non-mythical descriptions of the world, followed by Socrates, whose ideas laid the basis of Western philosophy. Socrates' disciple Plato, who wrote The Republic and established a radical difference between ideas and the concrete world, and Plato's disciple Aristotle, who wrote extensively about nature and ethics, are also immensely influential in Western philosophy to this day. The Greeks developed astronomy, which they treated as a branch of mathematics, to a highly sophisticated level, with the first geometrical, three-dimensional models to explain the apparent motion of the planets developed in the 4th century BC by Eudoxus of Cnidus and Callippus of Cyzicus. 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, discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The ancient Greeks also made important discoveries in the medical field, with Hippocrates considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine, revolutionizing the field by establishing it as a discipline distinct from other fields that it had traditionally been associated with.