Home · Ancient History · Chapter five
Ancient Greece
Hundreds of small, independent city-states on rocky coasts and islands gave the world the alphabet with vowels, democracy, theatre, philosophy, the writing of history and the Olympic Games. Alexander the Great carried Greek culture as far as India, and even after Rome conquered Greece in 146 BCE, the conquerors went on learning from the Greeks.
The polis
THEME ONE
Mountains and sea divided Greece into small territories, and each became a polis - a city with its fields, its citizens, its own laws, gods and army of heavily armed foot soldiers, the hoplites. From the 8th century BCE Greeks founded colonies from Marseille in the west to the Crimea in the east, "like frogs around a pond", as Plato put it. All of them shared one language, the gods of Olympus and the Games.
Athens and Sparta
THEME TWO
In 508 BCE the reforms of Cleisthenes gave the citizens of Athens power to decide in their assembly - the first democracy. Athenians and Spartans together defeated the Persian invasions at Marathon (490 BCE) and Salamis (480 BCE). Under Pericles Athens built the Parthenon, while Sparta trained all its citizens as soldiers from childhood. Their rivalry ended in the Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 BCE), which Sparta won.
Philosophers, poets and historians
THEME THREE
Greek education began with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. In Athens Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides wrote tragedies for festivals in the open-air theatre, Herodotus and Thucydides wrote history as an inquiry into causes, and Socrates questioned everything until the city condemned him to death in 399 BCE. His pupil Plato and Plato's pupil Aristotle founded schools whose questions philosophy still asks.
Alexander and the Hellenistic world
THEME FOUR
In 338 BCE Philip II of Macedon defeated the Greek cities at Chaeronea. His son Alexander, king from 336 BCE, conquered the Persian Empire in eleven years and reached the Indus before dying in Babylon in 323 BCE, aged 32. His generals divided the empire into kingdoms ruled by Greek dynasties. In their capitals, above all in Alexandria with its great library, Greek science flourished as never before.
Periods
Archaic period
C. 800 – 480 BCE
The alphabet, the polis, colonies across the Mediterranean, the first written laws, tyrants and the first philosophers in the Greek cities of Ionia.
Classical period
480 – 323 BCE
From the victory over Persia to the death of Alexander: the golden age of Athens, the Peloponnesian War and the rise of Macedonia.
Hellenistic period
323 – 146 BCE
Greek kingdoms from Egypt to Afghanistan, until Rome takes Greece itself. The last Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, falls only in 30 BCE.
Key dates
- 776 BCETraditional date of the first Olympic Games.
- 508 BCECleisthenes' reforms create democracy in Athens.
- 480 BCEThe Greek fleet defeats the Persians at Salamis.
- 431 BCEThe Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta begins.
- 334 BCEAlexander crosses into Asia to attack the Persian Empire.
- 146 BCERome destroys Corinth and takes control of Greece.
Questions and answers
Could everyone vote in Athenian democracy?
No. Only adult male citizens could vote in the assembly - a minority of the people living in Attica. Women, slaves and resident foreigners were excluded. But those who could vote decided laws, war and peace directly, and many offices were filled by lot rather than by election.
Why does the chapter end in 146 BCE?
In that year the Romans destroyed Corinth and the Greek cities lost their independence. Greek culture did not end: it shaped Rome, and Greek remained the main language of the eastern Mediterranean until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.