Ancient Greece was the civilization of Greek-speaking peoples who lived around the Aegean Sea and, through colonies, across much of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts. In the narrow sense, it covers the period from the end of the Greek Dark Ages (about 800 BC) to the Roman conquest in the 2nd century BC. Broader definitions start with the Bronze Age Aegean palace cultures and end in late antiquity. Greece was never a single unified state. It was a world of hundreds of independent city-states that shared a language, religion and festivals. Its political experiments, literature, philosophy, mathematics and art shaped later Mediterranean, Islamic and European cultures, mainly through the Roman Empire.
Periodization
Historians usually divide Greek history into several phases:
- Aegean Bronze Age (c. 3000–1100 BC): the Minoan civilization on Crete was followed by the Mycenaean palace states on the mainland. The Mycenaeans wrote an early form of Greek in the Linear B script.
- Dark Ages (c. 1100–800 BC): the palace system collapsed, the population fell and writing went out of use.
- Archaic period (c. 800–480 BC): the city-state took shape, colonization spread, the Greek alphabet appeared and the earliest Greek literature was written.
- Classical period (c. 480–323 BC): runs from the Persian invasion of 480 BC to the death of Alexander the Great.
- Hellenistic period (323–31 BC): Greek-ruled kingdoms stretched from Egypt to Central Asia. The period is conventionally said to end with the Battle of Actium and Rome's annexation of Ptolemaic Egypt in 30 BC.
Some scholars criticize the label "Classical" because it suggests that the periods before and after it were lesser.
The polis and political life
The basic political unit was the polis, a self-governing city together with its surrounding countryside. Leading poleis included Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes. In the Archaic period many cities came under tyrants, but this was also when the earliest written law codes and constitutions appeared. The hoplite, a heavily armed citizen foot soldier, became the core of Greek armies.
Athens developed the best-documented form of democracy. Solon's reforms in the early 6th century BC eased debt bondage and reorganized citizen rights. Cleisthenes' reforms of 508/507 BC set up the institutions of the Classical democracy: an assembly of adult male citizens, a council chosen by lot, and popular courts. Women, slaves and resident foreigners were excluded from political participation.
Sparta took a different path. It conquered neighbouring Messenia and forced its population into serfdom as helots. Spartan society was organized around military training, and Sparta led the Peloponnesian League.
Wars and empire
In the early 5th century BC the Greek cities fought off two invasions by the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the Greco-Persian Wars. Athenians defeated the first invasion at Marathon in 490 BC. Under Xerxes, the Persians captured and sacked Athens in 480 BC, but the allied Greeks won at Salamis that year and at Plataea in 479 BC. Athens then led the Delian League, an alliance that gradually turned into an Athenian maritime empire.
Rivalry between Athens and Sparta led to the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), which ended with Athens' defeat. Sparta and then Thebes held power for short periods afterwards. Philip II of Macedon defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 BC and took control of the Greek cities. His son Alexander conquered the Persian Empire. After Alexander died in 323 BC, his generals divided his empire into kingdoms, including the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt and the Seleucid kingdom in Asia. Rome gradually took over the Greek world: it destroyed Corinth in 146 BC and annexed the last major Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, in 30 BC.
Economy and society
Greece has mountains and little good farmland, so communities relied on the sea. From the 8th century BC, Greeks founded colonies from Massalia (Marseille) in the west to the Black Sea coast in the east. These colonies built trade networks covering the whole Mediterranean. Coinage spread across the Greek world from the 6th century BC, and Athenian silver coins circulated widely. The economy was based on farming olives, grain and grapes, and relied heavily on slave labour. Households were headed by male citizens. In most cities, women had limited legal and public roles.
Religion
Greek religion was polytheistic. It centred on the Olympian gods, such as Zeus, Hera, Athena and Apollo, and was practised through sacrifice, festivals and oracles such as the one at Delphi. Several festivals were shared by all Greeks. The most famous were the Olympic Games at Olympia, traditionally dated from 776 BC. These festivals brought the separate city-states together and strengthened a common Hellenic identity.
Language and literature
In the 8th century BC the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script into the first fully phonetic alphabet with separate letters for vowels. The epics attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are among the earliest works of European literature. Hesiod and lyric poets such as Sappho followed. Athens in the 5th century BC developed theatre, with the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes. Herodotus and Thucydides founded history as a critical, prose-based form of inquiry. In the Hellenistic period, Koine Greek became a shared language across the eastern Mediterranean.
Philosophy and science
Greek philosophy began in Ionia in the 6th century BC. Thales and his successors tried to explain nature without relying on myth. Democritus proposed that matter is made of indivisible atoms. In Athens, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle set out lasting questions in ethics, metaphysics, politics and logic. Hellenistic schools such as Stoicism and Epicureanism followed.
Greek mathematicians made deductive proof central to the subject. Euclid's Elements organized geometry as a system built from axioms. Archimedes used the method of exhaustion to calculate areas and volumes. Greek astronomy produced geometric models of planetary motion. The Antikythera mechanism is a geared device that modelled astronomical cycles. Engineers such as Hero of Alexandria described pneumatic and mechanical devices. In medicine, the Hippocratic writings explained disease by natural rather than supernatural causes. Hellenistic Alexandria, with its Museum and Library, was the main centre of scholarship.
Art and architecture
Greek architecture developed the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders. The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis was completed in the 430s BC. Greek sculpture moved from the stiff Archaic kouros figures to the naturalistic Classical style and then to the emotional and dramatic Hellenistic style. Painted pottery, first black-figure and then red-figure, is one of the main sources for daily life and mythology.
Legacy
Rome absorbed Greek culture, and the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire preserved it. Scholars of the Abbasid Caliphate translated many Greek scientific and philosophical works into Arabic. Western European interest in Greek texts revived during the Renaissance. Greek ideas about citizenship, rational inquiry and artistic form still shape political vocabulary, scientific terminology and the education tradition known as the classics.
References
- Classical Greeceen.wikipedia.org
- 6.1: Introduction to Ancient Greece - Humanities LibreTextshuman.libretexts.org
- The Five Ages of Ancient Greece: From Bronze to Hellenistic - GreekReporter.comgreekreporter.com
- History in 3 acts: a brief introduction to Ancient Greece [excerpt]goodreads.com
- Ancient Greece - History of Ancient Greek World, Time Line and Periods, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic.ancientgreece.com