Ancient Greece was never one country. Mainland Greece is a large peninsula with the Mediterranean Sea on three sides, and many islands, including Crete, belong to Greece. Mountains cover 80 percent of the land, and only small rivers run through it, which gives little encouragement for farming. With few natural resources and water all around, the Greeks took to the sea for their living and became skilled sailors and traders. Between 750 and 600 BCE Greek colonies sprang up from the Mediterranean to Asia Minor, from North Africa to the coast of the Black Sea. The Minoan civilization grew up on Crete; the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans uncovered the Minoan palace of Knossos in 1900 CE and named the culture for the Cretan king Minos. Athens itself grew up around the Acropolis, a rocky hill that rises from the central plain of Attica about five miles (eight kilometers) from the sea.
Before Cleisthenes, the lawgiver Solon made laws, around 594 BCE, that evened out the political power of Athenian citizens and gave democracy its groundwork. Around 507 BCE Cleisthenes brought in a new form of government that today is recognized as democracy. The Assembly met at least once a month, more likely two or three times, on the Pnyx hill, in a space that could hold around 6,000 citizens. A council of 500 citizens, chosen by lot (by chance, not by election) and serving for one year, prepared the business for the Assembly. 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; 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. 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 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.” 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. The democracy that Cleisthenes began lasted only about two centuries, but it paved the way for the representative democracies of today.
In 447 BCE the Athenians began a big building project, led by Pericles, that over the next forty years put up marble buildings on the Acropolis. The name Parthenon comes from one of Athena's titles, Athena Parthenos, meaning Virgin; at first Parthenon was the name of the room inside that held her statue. The Parthenon had 92 carved metopes and a frieze running around the building, and its two ends were filled with large sculptures. It looks perfectly straight, but it contains no straight lines and no right angles: its builders gave long horizontal lines a slight upward curve so that they would not seem to sag. Greek builders also gave Doric columns a slight inward lean and a slight bulge in the middle, to make a large temple seem perfectly straight.
The Parthenon's marble looks white today, but the Parthenon sculptures and other parts of the building were once painted in vivid colours; most Greek sculpture was painted, not polished. Marble sculpture appears from the early 6th century BCE, when the first life-size statues began to be produced; marble was chosen because it could be worked, and the statues were painted. 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. Pericles paid for the temple with money from the Delian League, an organization of Greek city-states formed for mutual defense.
Sparta had three main groups: the Spartans, who were full citizens, the helots, who were enslaved farm workers, and the perioeci, who were neither slaves nor citizens. 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. It was said that Sparta used bars of iron as money until its first coins, which came in the reign of King Areus. The Greeks credited Lydia with inventing coins in the early 6th century BCE; coins were stamped by the state to guarantee their value. Greek coins were stamped with designs that proudly declared the identity of the city that minted them.
The first Olympic event was a foot-race called the stadion, run over one length of the stadium track: 600 ancient feet, or 192 metres. The winner of the first race on record was Koroibos of Elis. During a pan-Hellenic truce, athletes and as many as 40,000 spectators came from all over Greece to the Games at Olympia. Women were not permitted to compete in the ancient Games, but they could own horses, and the owner of a winning horse won the olive crown. Later the Games added chariot races, wrestling, boxing, the discus, the javelin, a five-part contest called the pentathlon, and the pankration. Because every Olympic victor was recorded and each Olympiad was named after the winner of the stadion, the Games gave historians the first accurate dating system for the ancient Greek world. The marathon race was started at the first modern Olympics in 1896.
Greek theatre began in Athens, where plays were put on at festivals. The word thespian, for an actor, comes from Thespis, who is credited with the innovation of the first actor around 520 BCE. Plays competed at the festivals; a panel judged them on the day, and the prize for the winner, besides honour and prestige, was often a bronze tripod cauldron. At the Great Dionysia each day featured a succession of three tragedies by one playwright, followed by a satyr play, a whimsical parody with lighthearted jokes. Aristophanes wrote comedies full of sharp political satire; his play The Clouds made fun of education and of the teachings of Socrates. Actors changed costumes in a small tent behind the stage, the skene, which later grew into a monumental façade. The works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes formed the foundation on which all modern theatre is based.
Historians date the Iliad to about 750 BCE and the Odyssey to about 725 BCE. The Iliad has 15,693 lines of verse and the Odyssey 12,109, and each is divided into 24 books, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. 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. Major digs at the site of Troy in 1870, led by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, revealed a small citadel mound and layers of debris 25 meters deep. Historians think Greek myths were probably believed by some people and doubted by others, and were also used for teaching and plain entertainment. Many things today are named after Greek myths: Nike sneakers after the goddess of victory, Amazon.com after a race of mythical warriors, and sports teams called Titans, Spartans and Trojans.
Thales of Miletus, who lived around 585 BCE, is regarded as the first Western philosopher; he asked what the basic stuff of the universe is, and, according to Aristotle, answered that it was water. 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. Pythagoras was born around 580 BCE on the island of Samos, and he and his followers linked mathematics to music; they noticed that a plucked string sounds an octave higher when it is half as long. Euclid did not come up with most of the ideas in The Elements; he collected, organized and proved geometric ideas that were already used as applied techniques.
Eratosthenes heard that at noon on the summer solstice the Sun shone straight down a well at Syene, while in Alexandria a pole cast a shadow; the angle of that shadow, with the distance between the two cities, gave him the size of the Earth. He 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 of Samos first proposed a model of the universe with the Sun, not the Earth, at the center. His model was rejected because it challenged the accepted view of the size of the universe and of Earth's special place at its center; it survives because Archimedes described it in The Sand Reckoner.
The Antikythera mechanism could help track the motions of the Sun, Moon and five of the planets, and it could even tell when athletic competitions such as the Olympics were set to take place. The shipwreck that held it 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, and 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.
Hippocrates was born on the island of Kos in the 5th century BCE and became the most famous physician of ancient times; he set up a school of medicine on Kos. 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. Herodotus, born around 484 BCE in Halicarnassus (now Bodrum, Turkey), is often called the father of history; his work chronicles the conflict between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states. Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta as it happened, and he is often called the father of scientific history for his emphasis on evidence. He was sent into exile by the Athenians for 20 years, which probably let him gather accounts from both the Spartan and Athenian sides.
Alexander's rule spread Greek culture and ideas across the lands he conquered, and so inspired a new historical period called the Hellenistic Period. Alexandria had a great Library and an attached Museum, a school of advanced studies that attracted scholars; the Library held thousands of scrolls. Every ship that arrived in Alexandria's port was boarded and searched for books, which were copied; the originals were kept in the library. Historians do not agree on how the Library 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.
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. Sources date the Greek alphabet differently: one says it developed around the 8th century BCE, another says it emerged around 1000 BCE. The Etruscans passed the Greek alphabet to the Romans, who developed the Latin script, the basis of modern alphabetic scripts; the Greek alphabet also influenced the Cyrillic alphabet.
Words to know
- polis: Greek city-state
- Assembly: citizens' meeting
- metopes: carved square panels
- pentathlon: five-part contest
- phonetic: sound-based
- deduction: step-by-step reasoning
