Historians of ancient Greece weigh numbers, old texts and finds. They do not always agree. The historian Raaflaub calls democracy in ancient Athens a unique and truly revolutionary system: no polis had ever dared to give all its citizens equal political rights, whatever their descent, wealth, social standing or education. Yet the system left out women, foreigners and the many enslaved people. In Athens in the middle of the 4th century BCE there were about 100,000 citizens, about 10,000 resident foreigners and 150,000 slaves, and only male citizens over 18, about 40,000 people, took part in the democratic process. Citizens were probably only 10-20% of the population of the polis, and perhaps only about 3,000 of them took an active part in politics. The word democracy comes from the Greek dΔmos, the whole body of citizens, and kratos, meaning rule. The democracy that Cleisthenes began lasted only about two centuries, but it paved the way for the representative democracies of today.
Thucydides recorded the Athenian view: "We alone consider a citizen who does not partake in politics not only one who minds his own business but useless." Critics of Athenian democracy, such as Thucydides and Aristophanes, pointed out that a rich elite dominated the proceedings and that the people could be swayed by a good speaker. Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War as it happened. He was sent into exile by the Athenians for 20 years, which probably let him gather accounts from both the Spartan and Athenian sides. He is often called the father of scientific history for his emphasis on evidence. Little is known about the historical Homer. The name may simply mean one who fits a song together, and ancient writers disputed which poems he wrote. Some myths, like the story of the Trojan War, have a basis in historical fact. Major digs at the site of Troy in 1870 revealed a small citadel mound and layers of debris 25 meters deep.
Historians do not agree on how the Library of Alexandria fell. The popular claim that Julius Caesar's fire destroyed it is doubted because the library still existed afterwards, and a loss of royal support is the more probable explanation. Alexandria had a great Library and an attached Museum, a school of advanced studies that attracted scholars. Every ship that arrived in Alexandria's port was boarded and searched for books, which were copied. The originals were kept in the library. Alexander, who founded the city in 331 BCE, died in 323 BCE at the age of thirty-three. His rule spread Greek culture and ideas across the lands he conquered. Classical Greece, mainly the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, was a time of great advances in politics, philosophy and the arts, and a golden age of theatre.
Sources date the Greek alphabet differently: one says it developed around the 8th century BCE, another says it emerged around 1000 BCE. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician script. The word alphabet is Greek, formed from the names of the first two letters, alpha and beta. The Greek alphabet was the first fully phonetic alphabet, with a letter for each sound, including vowels, which earlier alphabets had not used as standalone letters. It had 24 letters. The Etruscans passed the Greek alphabet to the Romans, who developed the Latin script, the basis of modern alphabetic scripts. The Greeks credited Lydia with inventing coins in the early 6th century BCE, and coins were stamped by the state to guarantee their value. Greek coins carried designs that proudly declared the identity of the city that minted them.
Socrates wrote nothing himself, and historians still debate how accurately Plato's dialogues show what Socrates really taught. Thales was an early user of formal deduction in geometry. He showed that a diameter cuts a circle in half and that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal. From ancient times to the late 19th century CE, people considered The Elements a perfect example of correct reasoning, though Euclid did not come up with most of its ideas.
Clay tablets from Nineveh show that the Babylonians knew number triplets that fit the Pythagorean theorem, such as 3-4-5 and 5-12-13. Eratosthenes took the distance between Alexandria and Syene as 5,000 stadia and measured the angle of the Sun's rays at Alexandria. From these he arrived at a circumference for the Earth of 250,000 stades, approximately 24,854 miles (40,000 km). Aristarchus's sun-centered model was rejected because it challenged the accepted view of the size of the universe and of Earth's special place at its center. His model survives because Archimedes described it in The Sand Reckoner. The shipwreck that held the Antikythera mechanism has been dated to between 60 and 70 BCE. Other evidence suggests the mechanism may have been made around 200 BCE. Historians had thought gears like these did not appear until many centuries after the shipwreck. The find amazed researchers who had held that this level of technology was not developed until the 14th century. The best-known version of the crown story, by the Roman architect Vitruvius, says King Hiero II gave a craftsman pure gold for a crown. But Archimedes' own surviving book never mentions the golden crown.
Information about the life of Hippocrates is patchy and unreliable, and many legends about him are likely pure invention. The Hippocratic Corpus, a large collection of medical writings credited to Hippocrates, was compiled in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and modern scholars think it was written by many authors. Hippocrates stressed careful observation of the patient and treating the whole person, not religious or superstitious explanations for illness. Hippocrates was born on the island of Kos in the 5th century BCE and set up a school of medicine there. Historians think Greek myths were probably believed by some people and doubted by others. Herodotus, born around 484 BCE, is often called the father of history. He travelled widely, and through his travels he gathered different views and described the customs of different peoples.
In 371 BCE Sparta suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Leuctra and afterwards continued only as a second-rate power. It was said that Sparta used bars of iron as money until its first coins, which came in the reign of King Areus. Spartan women became among the richest members of society and eventually controlled two fifths of Spartan land. The Spartans depended on the helots, whose name means captives, to do the farming and daily work. The helots were fellow Greeks the Spartans had conquered and turned into slaves. Unlike Athens, a centre for the arts, learning and philosophy, Sparta was built around a warrior culture. Spartan women could own property and had more freedom than other Greek women. Sparta had three main groups: Spartans (full citizens), helots (enslaved farm workers) and perioeci, who were neither slaves nor citizens.
Words to know
- deduction: step-by-step reasoning
- circumference: distance around
- Hippocratic: of Hippocrates
- phonetic: sound-based
- citadel: fortified hill
