Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece was the civilisation of the Greek-speaking peoples of the eastern Mediterranean from the Archaic period, around 800 BCE, through the Classical period, to the end of the Hellenistic period. Organised into independent city-states, the Greeks developed democracy, philosophy, theatre, history-writing and scientific thought, and created art and literature that profoundly influenced Western civilisation.

After the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation around 1200 BCE, Greece entered a "Dark Age", in which writing was lost. From around 800 BCE, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, adding vowels, and the epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written down. The first Olympic Games are traditionally dated to 776 BCE. Greek cities founded colonies around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, from Marseille to Crimea, in southern Italy, called Magna Graecia, and Sicily.

Greece was divided into hundreds of independent city-states, poleis, each with its own government, laws and gods, such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes. Citizens were adult free men; women, slaves and foreigners were excluded from political life. Many cities were ruled at times by tyrants, oligarchies or democracies.

In Athens, the reforms of Solon, around 594 BCE, and Cleisthenes, in 508 BCE, created the world's first known democracy, in which citizens voted directly in the assembly. Sparta, by contrast, was a military state, where citizens trained from childhood as soldiers, supported by the labour of an enslaved population, the helots.

In the Persian Wars, from 499 to 479 BCE, the Greeks defeated two Persian invasions, at Marathon, Salamis and Plataea. Athens then built an empire and enjoyed a golden age under Pericles, building the Parthenon. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes wrote tragedies and comedies, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides founded history-writing, and the sculptor Phidias created great works. The Peloponnesian War, from 431 to 404 BCE, ended in Athens's defeat by Sparta.

Greek thinkers sought rational explanations of the world. Thales, Pythagoras and others studied nature and mathematics. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle founded much of Western philosophy. Hippocrates founded medicine as a discipline separate from religion. Later, Euclid systematised geometry and Archimedes made discoveries in mathematics and physics.

The Greeks worshipped gods such as Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo and Poseidon, who were believed to live on Mount Olympus and were honoured with temples, sacrifices and festivals. Oracles, such as Delphi, were consulted.

In 338 BCE Philip II of Macedon defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea. His son Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, spreading Greek culture to Egypt and India. After his death in 323 BCE, the Hellenistic kingdoms ruled the region until Rome conquered Greece in 146 BCE.

Rome adopted much of Greek culture, and Greek learning was preserved in Byzantium and the Islamic world, and revived in the European Renaissance. Greek ideas shaped Western philosophy, politics, science, art, architecture and literature.

Our maps from 500 to 300 BCE show the Greek world beside the Achaemenid Empire, and the 323 BCE map the Macedonian Empire.