The Greeks recorded Olympic winners from 776 BCE, but no one knows whether the Games actually began that year. The first Olympic event was a foot-race called the stadion. It was 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. Later the Games added chariot races, wrestling, boxing, the discus, the javelin, a five-part contest called the pentathlon, and the pankration. During a pan-Hellenic truce, as many as 40,000 spectators came from all over Greece to Olympia. Women were not permitted to compete, but they could own horses, and the owner of a winning horse won the olive crown.
The Parthenon's marble looks white today. But the Parthenon sculptures and other parts of the building were once painted in vivid colours. 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. In 1687 an explosion ripped the Parthenon apart. A Venetian shell had hit the gunpowder stored inside it.
In 447 BCE the Athenians began a big building project, led by Pericles. Over the next forty years it 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 became the largest Doric Greek temple, though it also mixed in the newer Ionic style. It had 92 carved metopes and a frieze running around the building.
Socrates wrote nothing himself, so what we know of him comes mostly from his students, above all Plato. Historians still debate how accurately Plato's dialogues show what Socrates really taught. Thales is said to have predicted a solar eclipse on 28 May 585 BCE, though some doubt this. 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. Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War as it happened, and he is often called the father of scientific history for his emphasis on evidence. 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 and suspected the goldsmith had cheated. But Archimedes' own surviving book never mentions the golden crown.
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. The Assembly met on the Pnyx hill, in a space that could hold around 6,000 citizens. Critics of Athenian democracy, such as Thucydides and Aristophanes, pointed out that a rich elite dominated the proceedings. They said the people could be swayed by a good speaker.
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. 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 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).
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. Major digs at the site of Troy in 1870 revealed a small citadel mound and layers of debris 25 meters deep.
Words to know
- evidence: proof
- Parthenon: Athena's temple
- metopes: carved square panels
- dialogues: written conversations
- citadel: fortified hill
