Greece+from+Earliest+Times+to+332CE


 * Greek Dark Ages 1150 - 750BC**

Beginning around 1150 BC, the civilization of the Myceneans was lost. The reasons for this loss are still unclear. They may have to do with the geological upheavals that seem to have been goin on in this period throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East as far away as the Indian Ocean. They may have something to do with the arrival of new groups of Indo-European-speaking people from the trans-caucasus region - but this would have to be a large arrival over a long period to cause the kind of social upheaval we are discussing - the loss of most major elements of the civilization, even to the point of losing the ability to write. There may also have been a plague of some sort. Most likely, it is a combination of these and other factors that led to the fall of Mycenean Civilization at this time. Whatever the cause, the archaeological record for the period between 1150 and 750 BC is very sparse. It appears that most Mycenean cities were abandoned wholly or in part, and that the Greeks were reduced to living in small farming valleys, each of which belonged to a king who controlled an army. The food and wealth produced in each of these valleys was partly claimed by the king, and used to outfit his soldiers, and sometimes sailors, as pirates who stole from each other and other traders to increase wealth. This age is known to historians as the Greek Dark Ages. We also know it as the "Homeric Age." Homeric Age:

Also know as the Greek Dark Ages, this period was characterized in Greece by frequent violence, even from kingdom to kingdom, fierce competition for material resources, a lack of a written language, and harsh labor conditions for the majority of Greeks. During this period, most Greeks got what news they received of the outside world through listening to the stories of bards, who travelled throughout the peninsula and traded their stories and songs for shelter and a small amount of food or money. Among them the one whose name is still known today was a bling bard by the name of Homer. To Homer we attribute the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two great stories that are important parts of Greek Mythology today, and form critical parts of our understanding of ancient Greek culture during the dark ages.

The Iliad is a story, set at the walls of the Anatolian city of Troy, that begins 20 years into the battle for the city. The Greeks, led by Agamemnon, are beseiging the city, and the Trojans, defending. Both groups are tired of war after ten years, and many groups on both sides are calling for the leaders to negotiate an end to the fighting. The story starts with a long introduction to why the Greeks are there in the first place. It turns out that Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, had entertained a prince of Troy (Paris) in his home ten years ago, before the beginning of the war. Paris showed his gratitude for the great feasting Menelaus provided for him by seducing melelaus' wife Helen and stealing her back to Troy with him. Menelaus, his pride wounded, went to Agamemnon and other Greek kings and persuaded them to help him get Helen back. He did this by offering what they wanted. For Agamemnon, this meant conquest of the city and control of its resources. For othter Greek kings, it meant war booty. To get rich and become famous, they all agreed to go, including Achilles and his Acheans, a fearsome soldier king, son of a minor goddess, and his elite fighting men. In the course of the fighting, during a daring raid that put the fight back into the Greeks, Achilles, sick of sitting around, lead his mean toward the city and captured a minor outlying temple to Apollo. One of the prisoners taken in the process was the daughter of the chief priest - by all accounts in the story a very beautiful and intelligent woman. After all the Greeks had been rallied to the battle and won a great victory against the Trojans (though not taken the city) they hold a festival in which they divide up the spoils. Agamemnon claims the girl, and Achilles, who did the actual capturing of her, is very angry. She is not consulted, but it is clear that she wants to be free. Achilles, angry at Agamemnon, decides to take his soldiers the Achaeans, and go home. Odysseus, who appears later in the Odyssey as well, and is famous as a wise king and brave warrior, tries to convince Agamemnon to give up the girl. After the Greeks lose badly to the Trojans many times because Achilles refuses to fight, and after Achilles' goddess mother tells him he has to fight because it is his destiny. Still, he is angry, and so Achilles refuses to fight for the Greeks, and his assistant and close friend Patrochlus agrees to take his helmet and armor and dress up like Achilles to scare the Trojans. He is killed as he does so, and Achilles' anger grows. He finally decides to fight, and battles his way to the Trojan hero Hector, brother of Paris.

Ultimately, Achilles and Hector battle it out in front of the walls of Troy. Achilles kills hector, and in his anger, refuses to let the Trojans have his body to bury it properly, but drags it around day and night behind his chariot, subjecting the king of Troy, and Agamemnon, to great indignity by not obeying the rules of war, and by disrespecting Trojan social and religious traditions (rules of war were carefully obeyed by the heroes in these stories). Ultimately, this angers the gods, and Achilles is allowed to be killed for his disobedience and disrespect. This double death of great heroes breaks the stalemate. In the sadness following their deaths, the two sides make peace of a sort - the Greeks disappear with their ships in the middle of the night. Troy is free. As a token of their respect, the greeks leave a huge horse made of driftwood and ship planks ouside the gates of Troy. The Trojans bring it in, and in the middle of the night, the Greeks hatch the nasty plan, created by Odysseus. When everyone is asleep in Troy a small force of Greek warriors sneaks out of their hiding places in the great horse, and unlock the front gate of the city, overpowering the few guards posted. The Greeks then sneak in and destroy the city and attempt what we today might call genocide - to destroy all Trojans in the city. The Greeks thus win the war, and get all the war booty. This is how the story ends. This story is enlightening in a number of ways. Although there is very little that we can confirm as true (it was, after all, a work of fiction), archaeologists have found the city of Troy, and it does appear to have been destroyed in battle within the right period of time. So the fight itself was real. How long it lasted, who was there, etc., we don't know. But the values that the story promotes - the importance of the hero in Greek culture, the winning of valor, fame, and fortune in battle, the rules of war, are all ideas that were carried into later Greek culture after the end of the Greek Dark Ages.


 * Polis**

The ancient Greeks organized their society around a political/economic/social unit centered around the settlement (or city) and known as a city-state. In part because of the geogrpahy of the Greek peninsula (known as Hellas) the Greeks were not united, but lived in politically distinct city-states and often fought amongst themselves. A city was usually what you and I might call a village - around 10,000 people, most of whom were peasants or slaves, whose economy was based on agriculture, with limited trade. Each city-state was centered on its acropolis, a large fort built near the top of the hill or cliff on which the city-state was located for defensive purposes. The acropolis functioned as a refuge in battle, and as a center for the worship of gods, whose assistance in battle was considered vital.

Most city states were ruled by an aristocracy: a group of elites whose right it was to rule, and who often fought amongst each other for the kingship. These aristocracts owned almost the land around a city-state, employed or enslaved up to 80% of the people, and were the warriors as well as the rulers. Rule of this style is known as an oligarchy - in which a committee of aristcrats rule together, rather than a monarchy, in which a single king rules. However, the aristocrats regularly contended with each other for supremacy, and occasionally, as in the Athenian cases of Peisistratos, and Hippias, took power either through force or subterfuge to rule as a "tyrant" - that is, a sole king who had ganed power through non-traditional means. Peisistratos ruled Athens sporadically from 561-582 BC. His son Hippias ruled from 527-508 BC. In any case, whereas most of us today give our political allegiance to, and invest our social identity in, a nation-state, which however it may be defined, consists of more than one city and its surrounding territory, ancient Greeks gave their allegiance, and invested their social identity in, a city that ruled and defended itself as an autonomous organization with no specific loyalty to any higher or geographically broader power.


 * Persian Wars 492 ~ 479 BC**

By many accounts, the two most successful Greek city states in the period between 600 and 300 BC were Sparta and Athens. Sparta was infamous as a state whose citizens were raised as warriors, and who employed large numbers of slaves to perform necessary daily labor. The Spartans were usually consigned to the barracks after the age of 8, and men were not allowed to leave until they were in their sixties. Women were usually allowed to return to their family homes at a younger age to bear children. Those who lived in the barracks were expected to train for military activity almost full time in order to protect Sparta from the internal threat of slave rebellion as well as possible external threats. The discipline and success of the Spartan system had made them known and feared throughout Hellas. Athens, on the other hand, had for most of its history been a third-rate power, a small village, really, with little to show for itself, until after the Archonship of Solon, followed by the tyrrany of Peisistratos. These two periods combined saw a decrease in the number of slaves in Athens, reforms in government finance and credit laws, such that Athenians were encouraged not only to grow more agricultural products, but to export what they grew - particularly olive oil, which had multiple uses and was desired throughout the Mediterranean. Athenian olive oil led to an economic expansion, and eventually population growth, as well. Athenians built a port, then a vast merchant fleet, and eventually a navy to protect their ships and their port. Their growing population was sent to colonize parts of the Mediterranean world, and their growing wealth led to confidence and an important place in the ranks of the great civilizations of the time. In 499 BC, the Ionian Greeks, led by their own tyrant, Aristagoras, rebelled against Persian rule of Greek cities in the Anatolian Peninsula. As a part of this rebellion, and to secure themselves against a Persian attack they expected, Aristagoras and his Ionians determined to attack the Persian Satrap in his local capital Sardis. To do this successfully, they attempted to enlist the help of Greeks in Hellas. Sparta refused, but Athens agreed, and sent a navy to assist, as did Eretria. The success of the raid on Sardis angered the Persian Emperor, Darius I, who determined to attack Athens in punishment for their role in the Ionian Revolt. The attempts to pinish Athens began around 500 BC, and consisted of two rather large campaigns by the Perisians in the Hellas, one under Darius I, and the other under his successor, Xerxes.

The first attack by the Persians on the Greeks was directed specfically at Athens and Eretria. In 492 BC, under Persian generals Datis and Artaphernes, the Persian army destroyed Eretria, but were stopped by the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon. A decade later, Darius' successor, Xerxes, sent another expeditionary force against the Athenians. This time, Spartans under King Leonidus, met the Persians in 480 BC at the Battle of Thermopylae. In the end, only 300 Spartans and a group of 700 Thespians defended a narrow pass that blocked the Persian advance into Hellas for three days, eventually being killed to the last man, but inflicting heavy casualties on the Persians, and giving the Athenians the opportunity to prepare their city and their navy for a naval battle. That battle, the Battle of Salamis, occurred in the straights between Plataea and Thespiai, after the Athenians had evacuated their city, and the Persians had burned it to the ground. The Persians took to their own ships in pursuit of the fleeing Athenians, but were met in the straight of Salamis by the Athenian navy, whose fast ships rammed, then backed off of the Persian vessels causing many of them to sink with thier fully armored crews and contingents of soldiers aboard.

Having lost most of his navy, and a large contingent of soldiers, the Persian Emperor Xerxes retreated to Persia, and left his army in Hellas to fight the Greeks without him. At the Battle of Plataea, the Persians were finally defeated, and the Persian Wars ended. The unity of Greece, however, which had existed as a series of alliances for security against the Perisans, was quetionable. Disagreements between city-states, particularly between Athens and Sparta, eventually led to the foundation of an alliance under the protection of Athens known as the Delian League, aithout Sparta as a participant. Under the terms of this alliance, member states would supply money so that Athens could build ships and pay men for defense. It also provided trade benefits. Athens turned this into an empire, rather than an alliance, by 460BC


 * Peloponnesian Wars**

Members of the Delian League were dissatisfied by 460 BC, and began to ask to leave the alliance. Athens responded that exit was not an option, and in what amounts to the turning of a defensive alliance into a protection racket, the Athenians famously told the island city-state of Delos that they could leave the empire, but to do so would guarantee an Attack by Athens. When the Delians called Athens' bluff on this, they were attacked and destroyed, the city razed to the ground, all men of military age executed, and all other citizens of Delos enslaved. Other members of the league were aghast, and Sparta offered to support them against Athens, creating what was called the Peloponnesian League. In the first Peloponnesian War, which lasted from 460-451 BC the Spartans were on the attack, surrounding Athens, destroying its fields and attempting to block commerce at its port. The strong leadership of Pericles, who under the guise of protecting democracy created a virtual dictatorship in Athens (and was opposed by Socrates, the philosopher, who had also been a soldier in the Persian Wars). Athens spent most of its energy using its navy to raid the coasts of the Peloponnese. Evntually, by 421 BC, the peace of Nicias was signed, and a stalemate was acknowledged. However, attacks by Athens on Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, in 415 BC. The Athenian force in Syracuse was utterly defeated in 413 BC, but the fight on Sicily led to renewed violence in Greece itself between Athens and Sparta. Sparta this time had help from Persia, and followed a strategy that included encouraging rebellion within Athens' empire, and the removal of Athens' naval superiority by financial and military means. By 404 BC, Athens was defeated and occupied by Sparta. The Peloponnesian wars had wreaked havoc on the Greek economy, leaving its mainstay, the trading state of Athens, subject to Sparta, and unable to recover economically. Sparta came to dominate the Greek peninsula, and the general level of prosperity of the Attic peninsula after the war declined drastically. This, more than anything else, seems to mark the end of the golden age of classical Greece.
 * Macedonia & the Conquest of Greece**

Philip II of Macedon

King as first among nobles

Macedon was unified in a limited way

Unification of Greece


 * Alexander the Great**

Son of Philip, and commander of the forces that unified Greece

334 - 323 BC Conquers Persia, Egypt, and lands East and Northeast of Persia

Died 323 Babylon


 * Alexander窶冱 Legacy**

Alexander窶冱 goal was to unify the cultures of East and West

He encouraged his administrators to treat him like a divine Persian king, but encouraged local government in the autonomous Greek style

At his death, Alexander窶冱 empire went in pieces to his generals, with Ptolemy becoming ruler of Egypt, Seleucus ruling Persia, etc. ..


 * The Hellenistic Age**

The Hellenistic Age is characterized by the cultural mixing Alexander desired

Greek cities were built, by Greek architects, who blended Persian and Egyptian, and Greek styles in building a Polis style city that was not ever actually independent, but part of a great empire.

Greeks were transplanted in droves, and their children were bi-cultural

Art was transformed as well as philosophy, science, and politics.


 * Greek Religion**

Polytheistic

Greek religion in general included such gods as Athena, Zeus, Apollo, Dionysius, Hera, Pan

The way these gods were worshipped, and the importance attributed to them, however, varied by city-state.

Athens, for example, had Athena as its chief deity

It was also less important that one believe in these deities than that one show up for festivals in their honor - as a sign of civic pride, not of worship.


 * Polytheism and Greek Life**

Priests of these deities did not promulgate moral rules, nor did they act as moral arbiters. They simply maintained the temples, and performed the rituals required.


 * Grounded in Nature**

Greek polytheism was grounded in nature

Greek beliefs came from attempts to explain natural occurrences by means of myth. Thus, when a wind blew, it was thought to be some god in action This view of gods as nature, combined with the lack of any deep moral meaning to religion led to a willingness to question nature as a series of devine actions.


 * Greek Philosophy**

The first Philosopher we know of was Thales of Miletus, who lived about 600BC

Thales' main idea was that human reason, not myth, should be used to explain nature.

Secondary to that, Thales saw water as the basic element from which all else must be formed


 * Physikoi 窶・Philosophy/Physics**

Thales successors, including Anaximander, decided variously that the basic element must be air, fire, "the boundless" or Ether

Democritus (460 - 370 BCE), another Ionian Greek, decided the basic element was something he called an "atom"

All atoms, according to Democritus, were basically the same However, atoms were constantly in motion, and combinations of atoms was what made material things


 * Pythagorus of Samos (582 - 500BCE)**

Pythagorus believed that material nature was composed of immaterial patterns of numbers He came to this conclusion through observation of patterns in music and geometry Pythagorus saw the human body as distinct from its soul


 * Effects of the Physikoi**

It is clear that the major concern of these early Greek philosophers was "Phisikoi" or understanding the physical world In the 5th Century BCE, another group of Philosophers decided that, rather than myths and gods, the proper subject of human study was humans themselves. These philosophers were called "Sophists" (meaning Intellectual in Greek)

The Sophists took it upon themselves to question everything, and eventually came to the conclusion that all Truth is relative.


 * Herodotus of Halicarnassus**


 * (484-425 BCE)**

The father of History

Herodotus was a direct inheritor of the tradition of Thales, though his goal was to explain the way things were in his own time by understanding the past that had led to them, rather than to simply be a story teller.

Herodotus refused to accept a story until he could verify it through other sources, or see the truth of it for himself

Herodotus窶・methods were limited in their ability to separate truth from legend, and much of what he wrote turns out to be the latter. Still, he is considered the father of modern history.


 * Socrates (470 - 399BCE)**

Agreed with Sophists that humanity was proper subject for study

Interested in study of life, morality, good & evil

Socrates, however, did not only question, but searched for satisfying logical answers to his questions

According to Socrates, humans could, through reason and discussion, agree on common truths.

Socrates felt that it was important to understand oneself fully. "An unexamined life," he said, "is not worth living."


 * Plato (427 - 347 BCE)**

Socrates' student, Plato divided the world. Truth, he said, exists only in the realm of thought. Physical objects are only a pale and partial reflection of thoughts. Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" suggested that we are unable to know the future naturally - that we have to go against our nature, and struggle to identify the Truth, and not to be scared by it. It requires a supreme act of courage and reason to realize even that we are unaware of the truth, and to begin the search for it. In his Republic, Plato suggests that Philosophers ought to lead society in a kind of benevolent dictatorship, in order to drag humanity, literally, into the light.


 * Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE)**

A student of Plato, Aristotle thought that ideas have no existence separate from the physical world. Two of his works are:

The Ethics, in which he identifies two virtues:

Intellectual Virtue, attained through human reason, and usually only achieved by philosophers

Moral Virtue, attainable by anyone, consisting of things like character, justice, courage, etc. ..

The Politics is Aristotle's answer to Plato's utopian "Republic窶・br> Aristotle is more realistic.

According to The Politics, the State is necessary for "the good life" because its laws and education provide an understanding of moral virtue for all citizens, allowing them to live their lives in peace and prosperity. In this view, the state and the individual do not oppose each other, but compliment each other.