Ancient Greece

Minoan Civilization
The islands of the Aegean Sea and the small, rocky peninsula in c. 2000-1400 BCE
on Crete
the eastern Mediterranean Sea that is now called Greece proved to c. 1600 - 1100 BCE Mycenaean Age
be the single most important sources of later civilizations in the
Western world. In this sea and unpromising landscape emerged a c. 1100 - 800 BCE Dark Age
vigorous, imaginative people who gave later human beings a c. 800 - 300 BCE Hellenic Civilization
tradition of thoughts and values that is still very much alive. The Classical Age in
c. 500 - 325 BCE
history of the ancient Greeks can be divided into three epochs: Greece
Alexander the
1. The Minoan-Mycenaean Age: lasted from about 2000 BCE to 336 – 323 BCE Great’s reign and
the conquest of the Greek peninsula by invaders in the 1100s. Campaigns
Hellenistic Age in
2. The Hellenic Period: extended from the time of Homer to the c. 300 - 50 BCE eastern
Mediterranean
conquest of the Greek city-states by the Macedonians in the mid-
300s. It includes the Classical Age, when Greek philosophical and artistic achievements were most
impressive.
3. The Hellenistic Age: was the final blossoming of Greek cultural innovation, lasting from about 300
BCE to the first century CE. During this age, emigrant Greeks interacted politically and intellectually
with other peoples to produce a hybrid culture that was extraordinarily influential on the arts and
science of both Western and Asian civilizations.
I. The Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations:
Our knowledge of this period comes largely from archaeological excavations and from the Iliad and
the Odyssey, two epics of ancient Greece written by the poet Homer in the 8th C BCE. The Iliad deals
with the Mycenaeans’ war against the powerful city state of Troy, and the Odyssey tells of the
adventures of the hero Odysseus (Ulysses) after the war. For a long time, historians believed that the
Trojan War was simply a fiction created by a great poet about his ancestors. But thanks to
archaeology, we know that there actually was a Troy and that it was destroyed about the time that
Homer indicates—about 1300 BCE.
The Minoan civilization flourished on Crete from around 2500 to 1450 BC. It was the first
sophisticated civilization to develop in Europe; it was centred on trade and an efficient bureaucracy,
and unlike most other early civilizations, it seemed entirely unwarlike.
The Mycenaean civilization flourished from around 1600 BCE until around 1250 BC. It
consisted of a group of city-states united by a common language and way of life. Of its great centres
were the cities of Athens, Thebes, Pylos, Tiryns, and Gla. The Mycenaeans themselves seem to have
engaged in extensive internal warfare among the competing towns. These wars weakened them
sufficiently that they fell to a new wave of nomads from the north, the Dorians.
From about 1100 BCE to about 800, the culture of the Greek peninsula declined—so much so
that this period is called the Dark Age. Not only did arts and crafts decline, but even the ability to
write seems to have been largely lost during these centuries.

II. Early Hellenic Civilization: The Time of Rebirth

During and after the Dark Age, the institution of the polis gradually developed. In Greek, polis means
the community of adult free persons who make up a town or any inhabited place. In modern political
vocabulary, the word is usually translated as “city-state.” The polis was much more than a political-
territorial unit. It was the frame of reference for the entire public life of its citizens and for much
private life as well. Citizenship was greatly prized, and by no means was everyone who lived in a
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polis a full citizen. Women were entirely excluded from political life. There were many resident
aliens, who were excluded from citizenship, as were the numerous slaves. Normally, only free males
of twenty years of age or more possessed full civil rights. Each large polis had more or less the same
economic and demographic design: a town of varying size, surrounded by farmland, pasture, and
woods that supplied the town with food and other necessities. In the town lived artisans of all kinds,
small traders and import–export merchants, intellectuals, philosophers, artists, and all the rest who
make up a civilized society. Life was simpler in the countryside. Like all other peoples, most Greeks
were peasants, woodcutters, ditch diggers, and the many other workers of whom formal history
knows little except that they existed.
 Athens and Sparta:
The two poleis that dominated Greek life and politics in the Classical Age were Athens and Sparta.
They were poles apart in their conceptions of the good life for their citizens. Athens was the centre of
Greek educational, artistic, and scientific activity as well as the birthplace of political democracy.
Sparta was a militaristic, authoritarian society that held the arts and intellectual life in contempt and
dreaded the extension of freedom to the individual or the community. Eventually, the two opposites
came into conflict. Interestingly, it was the artistic, philosophical, and democratic Athenian polis that
provoked the unnecessary war that ultimately ruined it.
 Government:
The ancient Greeks were particularly concerned with such fundamental questions as who should rule
and how? Not settling on a definitive answer, government in the ancient Greek world, therefore, took
extraordinarily diverse forms and across different city-states and over many centuries. In general the
Greeks knew four types of government:
1. A monarchy: is rule by a single person, a king who has the final word in law by right. Most of the
poleis were monarchies at one time or another and many of them apparently began and ended as such.
2. An aristocracy: is rule by those who are born to the leading families and thereby are qualified to
rule, whether or not they are particularly qualified in other ways. Aristocrats are born to the nobility,
but not all nobles are born aristocrats.
3. An oligarchy: is rule by a few, and the few are almost always the wealthiest members of society.
Many poleis were ruled by an oligarchy of landlords whose land was worked by tenant farmers.
4. A democracy: is rule by the people—almost always by means of majority vote on disputed issues.
Voting rights in executive and legislative acts are limited to citizens, and in the Greek poleis, this
meant freeborn adult males.
Additionally, the Greek word tyranny originally meant rule by a dictator who had illegally seized
power. That person might be a good or bad ruler, a man or a woman.
Athenian Democracy: The ekklesia was the general “town meeting” of all free male Athenians,
called on an ad hoc basis to make critical decisions affecting the future of the polis. All could speak
freely in an attempt to win over the others; all could be elected to any office; all could vote at the
meetings of the ekklesia in the center plaza of Athens below the Acropolis hill.
Spartan Militarism: Sparta differed from Athens in almost every possible way, although the two
were originally similar. The Spartan polis, located in the southern Peloponnesus was a small city
surrounded by pastoral villages. As the population grew in the 700s, the Spartans engaged in a bloody
territorial war, the Messenian Wars, with their nearest Greek neighbour, Messenia, and finally won.
The defeated people were reduced to a state of near slavery (helotry) to the Spartans, who from this
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point on became culturally different from most other Greeks. The most striking example of their
divergence was their voluntary abdication of individual freedoms. During the 600s, the Messenians
rebelled again and again, and as a result the Spartans made themselves into a nation of soldiers and
helpers of soldiers so that they could maintain their endangered privileges.
 The Persian Wars:
Throughout the early 5thC BCE, the foreign policy interests of Athens and Sparta more or less
coincided. Both were primarily concerned with maintaining their independence in the face of foreign
threats. These threats originated from imperial Persia, which had expanded rapidly in the 500s. They
took the form of two Greco-Persian wars. The First Persian War ended with an Athenian victory. The
Second Persian War (480–478 BCE) was fought on both land and sea and resulted in an even more
decisive Greek victory. By the end of these Persian Wars, the Greeks had decisively turned back the
attempts of the Asian empire to establish a universal monarchy over the Mediterranean basin. It was
in retrospect a crucial turning point for Western civilization.
 The Peloponnesian War:
Victory over the Persians in the two Persian Wars encouraged democratic and imperialist Athens to
attempt dominion over many other city-states. Its main opponent was militaristic and conservative
Sparta, and the two came to blows in the lengthy Peloponnesian War, which ended with a Spartan
victory in 404. The Peloponnesian War ended with a technical victory for Sparta, but actually it was a
loss for all concerned. The Spartan leadership was not inclined or equipped to lead the squabbling
Greeks into an effective central government. Defeated Athens was torn between the discredited
democrats and the conservatives favoured by Sparta.
III. The Final Act in Classical Greece
After the war, the Greeks fought intermittently among themselves for political supremacy for two
generations. Whenever a strong contender emerged, such as the major polis of Thebes, the others
would band together against it. Once they had succeeded in defeating their rival, they would begin to
quarrel among themselves, and the fragile unity would break down once again. The Greek passion for
independence and individuality had degenerated into endless quarrels and manoeuvring for power,
with no clear vision of what that power should create.
To the north of Greece were a people—the Macedonians —whom the Greeks regarded as
savage and barbarian, although they were ethnically related. Philip of Macedonia, the ruler of this
northern kingdom, had transformed it from a relatively backwards society into an effectively
governed, aggressive state. One by one, he began to absorb the northern Greek poleis, until by the
340s he had made himself the master of much of the mainland.
After much delay, the Athenians finally awoke to the danger and convinced Thebes to join
with them against the menace from the north. In the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, however,
Philip’s forces defeated the allies. The former city-states became provinces in a rapidly forming
Macedonian Empire. Chaeronea was the effective end of the era of polis independence and of the
Classical Age. From the latter part of the fourth century BCE onward, Greeks were to almost always
be under the rule of foreigners to whom the daring ideas of polis democracy were unknown or
inimical.
 Alexander and the Creation of a World Empire:
After the battle at Chaeronea—which brought him mastery of the former poleis of Greece—King
Philip of Macedonia was assassinated, and his young son, Alexander, succeeded to the throne. In his

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thirteen-year reign (336–323 BCE), Alexander the Great conquered most of the world known to the
Greeks and proved himself one of the most remarkable individuals in world history. His boldness and
vigour became the stuff of legend among the Greeks who fought under him. Alexander’s break with
previous military tradition regarding the status of the conqueror is also memorable.
At the time of his death, Philip had been organizing a large, combined Macedonian-Greek
army with the announced purpose of invading the huge Persian Empire. After swiftly putting down a
rebellion in Thebes, Alexander continued this plan and crossed the Dardanelles in 334 with an army
of about 55,000 men. In three great battles fought in Asia Minor, the young general brought down the
mightiest empire the world had yet seen, the empire of Darius III of Persia, who was slain by his own
troops after the third and decisive loss at Gaugamela in present-day Iraq.
Conquering an unresisting Egypt, Alexander then invaded the Persian heartland and proceeded
eastward into the unknown borderlands of India. After spending five years defeating the numerous
tribal kingdoms of the Indus Basin and the wild highlands to its north (present day Pakistan and
Afghanistan), his remaining troops finally mutinied and refused to go farther. In 324, Alexander led
his exhausted men back to Persia. A year later, he died in Babylon at the age of thirty-three. The few
years of his reign and his much-disputed view of the desirable form of imperial government would
have a lasting effect on much of the world’s history.
Greeks and Easterners in the Hellenistic Kingdoms
The civil wars after Alexander’s death resulted in the formation of three major successor kingdoms,
each ruled by a former Greek general who had fought his way into that position:
1. The Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. A general named Ptolemy succeeded in capturing Egypt, the
richest of all the provinces of Alexander’s empire. There he ruled as a divine king, just as the
pharaohs once had. By the 100s BCE, the many immigrant Greeks and the Egyptian upper class had
intermixed sufficiently to make Egypt a hybrid society. Many Greeks adopted the Egyptian way of
life, which they found pleasant. Meanwhile, ordinary Egyptians remained exploited peasants or
slaves.
2. The Seleucid Kingdom of Persia. The Seleucid Kingdom reached from India’s borders to the
shores of the Mediterranean. It was founded by a former general named Seleucus, and, like Ptolemaic
Egypt, it lasted until the Roman assault in the first century BCE. Many tens of thousands of Greek
immigrants came here as officials, soldiers, or craftsmen, and the contact between the locals and
Greeks was extensive in the western parts of the kingdom, especially Syria and Turkey. The kingdom
was too large to govern effectively, however, and it began to lose pieces to rebels and petty kings on
its borders as early as the 200s. By the time the Romans were invading the western areas, most of the
east was already lost.
3. The Antigonid Kingdom was also founded by a general, who claimed the old Macedonian
homeland and ruled part of what had been Greece as well. The rest of Greece was divided among
several leagues of city-states, which vied with each other for political and economic supremacy, until
both they and the Macedonians fell to the Romans in the middle 100s BCE.