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 Ancient
Greece is the term used to describe the Greek-speaking world in
ancient times. It refers not only to the territory of the present
Greek state, but also to those areas settled in ancient times by
Greeks: Cyprus, the Aegean coast of Turkey (then known as Ionia),
Sicily and southern Italy (known as Great Greece), and the scattered
Greek settlements on the coasts of what are now Albania, Bulgaria,
Egypt, France, Libya, Spain, and Ukraine.
There are no fixed or universally agreed dates for the beginning
or the end of the Ancient Greek period. In common usage it refers
to all Greek history before the Roman Empire, but historians use
the term more precisely. Some writers include the periods of the
Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations (from about 1600 BC to about
1100 BC), while others argue that these civilisations, while Greek-speaking,
were so different from later Greek cultures that they should be
classed separately.
Traditionally, the Ancient Greek period was taken to begin with
the date of the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, but most historians
now extend the term back to about 1000 BC. The traditional date
for the end of the Ancient Greek period is the death of Alexander
the Great in 323 BC. The following period is classed Hellenistic.
These dates are historians' conventions and some writers treat
the Ancient Greek civilisation as a continuum running until the
advent of Christianity in the third century AD.
Ancient Greece is considered by most historians to be the foundational
culture of Western Civilization. Greek culture was a powerful influence
in the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts
of Europe. Ancient Greek civilisation has been immensely influential
on the language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, art
and architecture of the modern world, particularly during the Renaissance
in Western Europe and again during various neo-Classical revivals
in 18th and 19th century Europe and The Americas.
Origins
Marble statuette from the Greek islands, 3000 BCThe Greeks are believed
to have migrated southward into the Greek peninsula in several waves
beginning in the late 3rd millennium BC, the last being the Dorian
invasion. The period from 1600 to about 1100 is described in History
of Mycenaean Greece known for the reign of King Agamemnon and the
wars against Troy as narrated in the epics of Homer. The period from
1100 to the 8th century BC is a "dark age" from which no
records, and only scant archaeological evidence, survive. The history
of Ancient Greece is taken to end with the reign of Alexander the
Great, who died in 323 BC. Subsequent events are described in History
of Hellenistic Greece.
Any history of Ancient Greece requires a cautionary note on sources.
Those Greek historians and political writers whose works have survived,
notably Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plato and
Aristotle, were mostly either Athenian or pro-Athenian, and all
were political conservatives. That is why we know far more about
the history and politics of Athens than of any other city, and why
we know almost nothing about some cities' histories. These writers,
furthermore, concentrate almost wholly on political, military and
diplomatic history, and ignore economic and social history. All
histories of Ancient Greece have to contend with these biases in
their sources.
The rise of Hellas
The Acropolis, in ruins, is still at the centre of modern Athens.
It was the greatest architectural statement of 5 c. BC GreeceIn the
8th century BC Greece began to emerge from the Dark Ages which followed
the fall of the Mycenaean civilisation. Literacy had been lost and
the Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Greeks adapted the Phoenician
alphabet to Greek and from about 800 BC a written record begins to
appear. Greece was divided into many small self-governing communities,
a pattern dictated by Greek geography, where every island, valley
and plain is cut off from its neighbours by the sea or mountain ranges.
As Greece recovered economically, its population grew beyond the
capacity of its limited arable land, and from about 750 BC the Greeks
began 250 years of expansion, settling colonies in all directions.
To the east, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was colonised first,
followed by Cyprus and the coasts of Thrace, the Sea of Marmara
and south coast of the Black Sea. Eventually Greek colonisation
reached as far north-east as Ukraine. To the west the coasts of
Albania, Sicily and southern Italy were settled, followed by the
south coast of France, Corsica, and even northeastern Spain. Greek
colonies were also founded in Egypt and Libya. Modern Syracuse,
Naples, Marseilles and Istanbul had their beginnings as the Greek
colonies Syracusa, Neapolis, Massilia and Byzantium.
By the 6th century BC Hellas had become a cultural and linguistic
area much larger than the geographical area of Greece. Greek colonies
were not politically controlled by their founding cities, although
they often retained religious and commercial links with them. The
Greeks both at home and abroad organised themselves into independent
communities, and the city (polis) became the basic unit of Greek
government.
As colonization was bound to exhaust the supply of desirable territory,
first Crete, then in short order the other Greek city-states, adopted
the formal practice of pederasty, in an effort to find a permanent
solution to the problem of overpopulation. From its ritual roots
in Indo-European prehistory, the practice was elevated to prominence,
influencing pedagogy, warfare and social life, and becoming a central
feature of Hellenic culture for the next thousand years.
Social and political conflict
The Greek cities were originally monarchies, although many of them
were very small and the term "King" for their rulers is
misleadingly grand. In a country always short of farmland, power rested
with a small class of landowners, who formed a warrior aristocracy
fighting frequent petty inter-city wars over land. But the rise of
a mercantile class (shown by the introduction of coinage in about
680) introduced class conflict into the larger cities. From 650 onwards,
the aristocracies were overthrown and replaced by populist leaders
called tyrants (tyrranoi), a word which did not have the modern meaning
of oppressive dictators.
By the 6th century several cities had emerged as dominant in Greek
affairs: Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. Each of them had brought
the surrounding rural areas and smaller towns under their control,
and Athens and Corinth had became major maritime and mercantile
powers as well. Athens and Sparta developed a rivalry that dominated
Greek politics for generations.
In Sparta, the landed artistocracy retained their power, and the
constitution of Lycurgus (about 650) entrenched their power and
gave Sparta a permanent militarist regime under a dual monarchy.
Sparta dominated the other cities of the Peloponnese, and formed
alliances with Corinth and Thebes.
In Athens, by contrast, the monarchy was abolished in 683, and
reforms of Solon established a semi-constitutional system of aristocratic
government. The aristocrats were followed by the tyranny of Pisistratus
and his sons, who made the city a great naval and commercial power.
When the Pisistratids were overthrown, Cleisthenes established the
world's first democracy (500), with power being held by an assembly
of all the male citizens.
The Persian Wars
ThemistoclesIn Ionia (the modern Aegean coast of Turkey) the Greek
cities, which included great centres such as Miletus and Halicarnassus,
were unable to maintain their independence and came under the rule
of the Persian Empire in the mid 6th century. in 499 the Greek rose
in the Ionian Revolt, and Athens and some other Greeks went to their
aid.
In 490 the Persian Great King, Darius I, having suppressed the
Ionian cities, sent a fleet to punish the Greeks. The Persians landed
in Attica, but were defeated at the Battle of Marathon by a Greek
army led by the Athenian general Miltiades. The burial mound of
the Athenian dead can still be seen at Marathon.
Ten years later Darius's successor, Xerxes I, sent a much more
powerful force by land. After being delayed by the Spartan King
Leonidas at Thermopylae, Xerxes advanced into Attica, where he captured
and burned Athens. But the Athenians had evacuated the city by sea,
and under Themistocles they defeated the Persian fleet at the Battle
of Salamis. A year later the Greeks under the Spartan Pausanius
defeated the Persian army at Plataea.
The Athenian fleet then turned to chasing the Persians out of the
Aegean Sea, and in 478 they captured Byzantium. In the course of
doing so Athens enrolled all the island states and some mainland
allies into an alliance, called the Delian League because its treasury
was kept on the sacred island of Delos. The Spartans, although they
had taken part in the war, withdrew into isolation after it, allowing
Athens to establish unchallenged naval and commercial power.
The dominance of Athens
 PericlesThe
Persian Wars ushered in a century of Athenian dominance of Greek affairs.
Athens was the unchallenged master of the sea, and also the leading
commercial power, although Corinth remained a serious rival. The leading
statesman of this period was Pericles, who used the tribute paid by
the members of the Delian League to build the Parthenon and other
great monuments of classical Athens. By the mid 5th century the League
had become an Athenian Empire, symbolised by the transfer of the League's
treasury from Delos to the Parthenon in 454.
The wealth of Athens attracted talented people from all over Greece,
and also created a wealthy leisured class who became patrons of
the arts. The Athenian state also sponsored learning and the arts,
particularly architecture. Athens became the centre of Greek literature,
philosophy (see Greek philosophy) and the arts (see Greek theatre).
Some of the greatest names of Western cultural and intellectual
history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus,
Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles, the philosophers Aristotle,
Plato, and Socrates, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon,
the poet Simonides and the sculptor Pheidias. The city became, in
Pericles's words, "the school of Hellas."
The other Greek states at first accepted Athenian leadership in
the continuing war against the Persians, but after the fall of the
conservative politician Cimon in 461, Athens became an increasingly
open imperialist power. After the Greek victory at the Battle of
the Eurymedon in 466, the Persians were no longer a threat, and
some states, such as Naxos, tried to secede from the League, but
were forced to submit. The new Athenian leaders, Pericles and Ephialtes,
let relations between Athens and Sparta deteriorate, and in 458
war broke out. After some years of inconclusive war a 30-year peace
was signed between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League
(Sparta and her allies). This coincided with the last battle between
the Greeks and the Persians, a sea battle off Salamis in Cyprus,
followed by the Peace of Callias (450) between the Greeks and Persians.
The Peloponnesian War
 AlcibiadesIn
431 war broke out again between Athens and Sparta and its allies.
The immediate cause was a dispute between Corinth and one of its colonies,
Corcyra, in which Athens intervened. The real cause was the growing
resentment of Sparta and its allies at the dominance of Athens over
Greek affairs. The war lasted 27 years, partly because Athens (a naval
power) and Sparta (a land-based military power) found it difficult
to come to grips with each other.
Sparta's initial strategy was to invade Attica, but the Athenians
were able to retreat behind their walls. An outbreak of plague in
the city during the siege caused heavy losses, including Pericles.
At the same time the Athenian fleet landed troops in the Peloponnese,
winning battles at Naupactus (429) and Pylos (425). But these tactics
could bring neither side a decisive victory. After several years
of inconclusive campaigning, the moderate Athenian leader Nicias
concluded the Peace of Nicias (421).
In 418, however, hostility between Sparta and the Athenian ally
Argos led to a resumption of fighting. At Mantinea Sparta defeated
the combined armies of Athens and her allies. The resumption of
fighting brought the radical party, led by Alcibiades, back to power
in Athens. In 415 Alcibiades persuaded the Athenian Assembly to
launch a major expedition against Syracuse, a Peloponnesian ally
in Sicily. The expedition was a complete disaster and the whole
expeditionary force was lost. Nicias was captured and Alcibiades
went into exile. This was the turning point of the war.
Sparta had now built a fleet to challenge Athenian naval supremacy,
and had found a brilliant military leader in Lysander, who seized
the strategic initiative by occupying the Hellespont, the source
of Athens' grain imports. Threatened with starvation, Athens sent
its last remaining fleet to confront Lysander, who decisively defeated
them at Aegospotami (405). The loss of her fleet threatened Athens
with bankruptcy. In 404 Athens sued for peace, and Sparta dictated
a predictably stern settlement: Athens lost her city walls, her
fleet, and all of her overseas possessions. The anti-democratic
party took power in Athens with Spartan support.
Spartan and Theban dominance
The end of the Peloponnesian War left Sparta the master of Greece,
but the narrow outlook of the Spartan warrior elite did not suit them
to this role. Within a few years the democratic party regained power
in Athens and other cities. In 395 the Spartan rulers removed Lysander
from office, and Sparta lost her naval supremacy. In 387 Sparta shocked
Greek opinion by concluding a treaty with Persia by which they surrendered
the Greek cities of Ionia and Cyprus, thus reversing a hundred years
of Greek victories against Persia. Sparta then tried to weaken the
power of her former ally Thebes, which led to a war in which Thebes
allied herself with the old enemy, Athens. The Theban generals Epaminondas
and Pelopidas won a decisive victory at the at Leuctra (371).
The result of this battle was the end of Spartan supremacy and
the establishment of Theban dominance, but Athens also recovered
much of her former power. The supremacy of Thebes was short-lived.
With the death of Epaminondas at Mantinea (362) the city lost its
greatest leader, and his successors blundered into an unsuccessful
ten-year war with Phocis. In 346 the Thebans appealed to Philip
II of Macedon to help them against the Phocians, thus drawing Macedon
into Greek affairs for the first time.
The rise of Macedon
 The
Kingdom of Macedon was formed in the 7th century. Some Greeks regarded
the Macedonians as barbarians, but whatever their original ethnic
origins, they were of Greek language and culture by the 5th century.
They played little part in Greek politics before the beginning of
the 4th century, but Philip was an ambitious man who had been educated
in Thebes and wanted to play a larger role. In particular, he wanted
to be accepted as the new leader of Greece in recovering the freedom
of the Greek cities of Asia from Persian rule. By seizing the Greek
cities of Amphipolis, Methone and Potidaea, he gained control of the
gold and silver mines of Macedonia. This gave him the resources to
realise his ambitions.
Philip established Macedonian dominance over Thessaly (352) and
Thrace, and by 348 he controlled everything north of Thermopylae.
He used his great wealth to bribe Greek politicians and create a
"Macedonian party" in every Greek city. His intervention
in the war between Thebes and Phocis brought him recognition as
a Greek leader, and gave him his opportunity to become a power in
Greek affairs. But despite his sincere admiration for Athens, the
Athenian leader Demosthenes, in a series of famous speeches (philippics)
roused the Greek cities to resist his advance.
In 339 Thebes, Athens, Sparta and other Greek states formed an
alliance to resist Philip and expel him from the Greek cities he
had occupied in the north. But Philip struck first, advancing into
Greece and defeating the Greek cities at Chaeronea in 338. This
traditionally marks the end of the era of the Greek city-state as
an independent political unit, although in fact Athens and other
cities survived as independent states until Roman times.
Philip tried to win over Athens by flattery and gifts, but did
not really succeed. He organised the cities into the League of Corinth,
and announced that he would lead an invasion of Persia to liberate
the Greek cities and avenge the Persian invasions of the previous
century. But before he could do so he was assassinated (336).
Alexander the Great
Philip was succeeded by his 20-year-old son Alexander, who immediately
set out to carry out his father's plans. He travelled to Corinth where
the assembled Greek cities recognised him as leader of the Greeks,
then set off north to assemble his forces. The army with which he
invaded the Persian Empire was basically Macedonian, but many idealists
from the Greek cities also enlisted. But while Alexander was campaigning
in Thrace, he heard that the Greek cities had rebelled. He swept south
again, and captured Thebes, razed the city to the ground as a warning
to the Greek cities that his power could no longer be resisted.
In 334 Alexander crossed into Asia, and defeated the Persians at
the river Granicus. This gave him control of the Ionian coast, and
he made a triumphal procession through the liberated Greek cities.
After settling affairs in Anatolia, he advanced south through Cilicia
into Syria, where he defeated Darius III at Issus (333). He then
advanced through Phoenicia to Egypt, which he captured with little
resistance, the Egyptians welcoming him as a liberator from Persian
oppression.
Darius was now ready to make peace and Alexander could have returned
home in triumph, but he was determined to conquer Persia and make
himself the ruler of the world. He advanced north-east through Syria
and Mesopotamia, and defeated Darius again at Gaugamela (331). Darius
fled and was killed by his own followers, and Alexander found himself
the master of the Persian Empire, occupying Susa and Persepolis
without resistance.
 Alexander
pressed on, advancing through what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan
to the Indus river valley, and by 326 he had reached Punjab. He
might well have advanced down the Ganges to Bengal had not his army,
convinced they were at the end of the world, refused to go any further.
Alexander reluctantly turned back, and died of a fever in Babylon
in 323.
Alexander's empire broke up soon after his death, but his conquests
permanently changed the Greek world. Thousands of Greeks travelled
with him or after him to settle in the new Greek cities he had founded
as he advanced, the most important being Alexandria in Egypt. Greek-speaking
kingdoms in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Bactria were established. The
Hellenistic age had begun. |
