The Greeks told myths, stories about gods and heroes. Many things today are named after them: Nike sneakers after the goddess of victory, Amazon.com after a race of mythical warriors, and sports teams called Titans, Spartans and Trojans. Myths explained things such as the weather. They also retold historical events, so that people could keep in touch with their ancestors. In the myths, the gods and goddesses were said to live on Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece. Hercules is one of the most famous heroes of the myths, and he had twelve labours, or great tasks. The heroes of the myths pursued fantastic adventures and stood for qualities like perseverance. Myths were also shown in art. The Parthenon, for example, had sculptures and carved scenes from Greek mythology.
Stories also came in poems. A poet named Homer made two long poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Historians date the Iliad to about 750 BCE and the Odyssey to about 725 BCE. Homer's poems were made and passed on by mouth. They were not written down until much later. The Odyssey tells of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home. Without widespread reading and writing, bards told the myths for centuries, and the Greeks first passed myths on by mouth. In one story of the Trojan War, Greek warriors led by Odysseus climbed out of a large wooden horse left outside the gates of Troy.
Greek theatre began in Athens, where plays were put on at festivals. The Great Dionysia was held in March or April. In the plays, the actors wore masks. The chorus was a group of up to 15 actors, all men, who sang and danced but did not speak. The word thespian, for an actor, comes from Thespis, who is credited with the innovation of the first actor around 520 BCE. 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.
Now look at the letters and the coins that people used in Greece long ago. Greek coins were stamped with designs that proudly declared the identity of the city that minted them. The Greeks gave Lydia the credit for inventing coins in the early 6th century BCE. The Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenician script. The Greek alphabet was the first fully phonetic alphabet, with a letter for each sound. The Etruscans passed it to the Romans, who developed the Latin script, the basis of modern alphabetic scripts.
Words to know
- myths: old stories
- bards: story singers
- chorus: singing group
- tragedy: serious play
- alphabet: set of letters
