Many Greek thinkers learned from a teacher and then taught someone else. Socrates walked the public places of Athens. He asked people questions. This way of asking is called the Socratic method. Socrates wrote nothing himself. What we know of him comes mostly from his students, above all Plato. Plato put Socrates in almost all of his dialogues. The dialogues are written as conversations. Plato founded a school called the Academy near Athens. Aristotle joined the Academy at age eighteen. He studied there for about twenty years. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great.

Alexander was born in 356 BCE. His parents were King Philip II and Queen Olympias. As a boy of about 12, he tamed a wild horse named Bucephalus. When he was about 13, his father hired Aristotle to teach him. He became king of Macedonia at the age of twenty. In 331 BCE he founded the port city of Alexandria, in Egypt. Alexandria had a great Library. It also had a Museum, a school where scholars came to study. The Library held thousands of scrolls. Eratosthenes, head of the great library, was the first to calculate the circumference of the Earth.

Other Greeks taught and healed. Euclid wrote The Elements. It is the most widely used mathematics and geometry textbook in history. Around 300 BCE, he ran his own school in Alexandria. Pythagoras was born around 580 BCE on the island of Samos. He is best known for the Pythagorean theorem about the sides of a right triangle. Hippocrates, born on the island of Kos, became the most famous physician of ancient times. He set up a school of medicine on Kos. Young Greeks studied music, gymnastics and grammar. In Sparta, boys left home at age 7 and entered a hard training program.

The Greeks told myths, stories about gods and heroes. Myths explained things such as the weather. Homer's poems were made and passed on by mouth. They were not written down until much later. The Greeks passed myths on by mouth first, too. Bards told them for centuries. Greek theatre began in Athens. Plays were put on at festivals. The word tragedy means goat song in Greek. The three most successful Greek tragedy writers were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Aristophanes was a great writer of comedies.

Words to know

• physician: doctor
• bards: story singers
• Academy: Plato's school
• circumference: distance around
• scrolls: rolled books