Ancient Greece 5,000-300B.C.

Ancient Greece• -Greece is a country in southeastern Europe, known in Greek

as Hellas or Ellada, and consisting of a mainland and an archipelago of islands.

• -Greece is the birthplace of Western philosophy (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), literature (Homer and Hesiod), mathematics (Pythagoras and Euclid), history (Herodotus), drama (Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristophanes), the Olympic Games, and democracy.

• -The concept of an atomic universe was first posited in Greece through the work of Democritus and Leucippus. The process of today's scientific method was first introduced through the work of Thales of Miletus and those who followed him. The Latin alphabet also comes from Greece,

• -The geography of Greece greatly influenced the culture in that, with few natural resources and surrounded by water, the people eventually took to the sea for their livelihood.

• -Greek history is generally divided into the following eras:• Paleolithic (circa 400,000 – 13,000 BP)

• Mesolithic (circa 10,000 – 7000 BCE

• Neolithic (circa 7000 – 3000 BCE)

• Bronze Age (circa 3300 – 1150 BCE)

• Cycladic (circa 3300 – 2000 BCE)

• Minoan (circa 2600 – 1200 BCE)

• Helladic (circa 2800 – 1600 BCE)

• Mycenaean or Late Helladic (circa 1600 – 1100 BCE)

• Dark Ages (circa 1100 – 700 BCE)

• Archaic (circa 700 – 480 BCE)

• Classical (480 – 323 BCE)

• Hellenistic (323 – 30 BCE)

• -The Neolithic Age (c. 6000 - c. 2900

BCE) is characterized by permanent

settlements (primarily in northern

Greece), domestication of animals, and

the further development of agriculture.

• -Several Aegean civilization emerged

in and around the Aegean Sea beginning

around 7,000b.c.

• Minoan Civilization

• -The Minoan Civilization (2700-1500

BCE) developed on the island of Crete,

and rapidly became the dominant sea

power in the region.

Minoan Civilization• -The Minoans are considered to be the first advanced

civilization of Europe.

• -The Minoans developed a writing system known as Linear A

and made advances in ship building, construction, ceramics, the

arts and sciences, and warfare.

Around 1900 B.C., during the Middle Minoan period, Minoan civilization on Crete reached its climax with the establishment of centers, called palaces

-With the palaces came the development of writing, probably as a result of the new record-keeping demands of the palace economy.

• -The Minoans on Crete employed two types of scripts, a hieroglyphic script whose source of inspiration was probably Egypt, and a linear script, Linear A, perhaps inspired by the cuneiform of the eastern Mediterranean.

• -Archaeological and geological evidence on Crete suggests this civilization fell due to an overuse of the land causing deforestation though, traditionally, it is accepted that they were conquered by the Mycenaeans.

Mycenaean Civilization

• - Either by fortune or force, the Mycenaeans outlastedboth the people of Cyclades and the Minoans, and by the end of the 10th c. BCE expanded their influence over the Greek mainland, the islands of the Aegean and Ionian seas, Crete, and the coast of Asia Minor.

• -The Mycenaean Civilization (approximately 1900-1100 BCE) is commonly acknowledged as the beginning of Greek culture,

- They are credited with establishing the culture owing primarily to their architectural advances, their development of a writing system (known as Linear B, an early form of Greek descended from the Minoan Linear A), and the establishment, or enhancement of, religious rites.

- By 1100 BCE the great Mycenaean cities of southwest Greece were abandoned and, some claim, their civilization destroyed by an invasion of Doric Greeks. Archaeological evidence is inconclusive as to what led to the fall of the Mycenaeans.

- What is known is that the extensive damage done to the Mycenaean civilization took three hundred years to reverse.

-We call this period “the Greek Dark Ages” partly because the people of Greece fell into a period of basic sustenance with no significant evidence of cultural development

THE BIRTH OF THE CITY-STATE

• -During the so-called “Greek Dark Ages” before the Archaic period, people lived scattered throughout Greece in small farming villages.

• -As they grew larger, these villages began to evolve. Some built walls. Most built a marketplace (an agora) and a community meeting place.

• -They developed governments and organized their citizens according to some sort of constitution or set of laws. They raised armies and collected taxes. And every one of these city-states (known as poleis) was said to be protected by a particular god or goddess, to whom the citizens of the polis owed a great deal of reverence, respect and sacrifice. (Athens’s deity was Athena, for example; so was Sparta’s.)

• -They all had economies that were

based on agriculture, not trade: For

this reason, land was every city-

state’s most valuable resource. Also,

most had overthrown their

hereditary kings, or basileus, and

were ruled by a small number of

wealthy aristocrats.

-These people monopolized political power, and -Emigration was one way to relieve some of this tension.

-Between 750 B.C. and 600 B.C., Greek colonies sprang up from the Mediterranean to Asia Minor, from North Africa to the coast of the Black Sea.

Two City-States:• 1. Athens:

• -Beginning around the 7th century B.C., ancient Athens was in a state of crisis.

• -One cause of the economic crisis that plagued Athens in the later seventh century may have been that the precariousness of agriculture in this period could sometimes lead to the gradual accumulation of the available farm land in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

-Failed farmers had to borrow food and seed to survive. When they could borrow no more, they had to leave their land to find a job to support their families, most likely by laboring for successful farmers.

-The crisis became so acute that impoverished peasants were even being sold into slavery to pay off debts

Reforms of Solon • -Classical Athenian society begins with the reforms of Solon, beginning with the drafting of a new Athenian constitution around 594b.c.

• -In desperation, the Athenians in 594 B.C. gave Solon special authority to revise their laws to deal with the economic crisis and its dire social consequences that had brought their society to the brink of internecine war.

-His famous “shaking off of obligations” somehow freed those farms whose ownership had become formally encumbered without, however, actually redistributing any land.

-He also forbade the selling of Athenians into slavery for debt and secured the liberation of citizens who had become slaves4 in this way, commemorating his success in the verses he wrote about his reforms: “To Athens, their home established by the gods, I brought back many who had been sold into slavery, some justly, some not ...”

• -Attempting to balance political power between rich and poor, , Solon ranked male citizens into four classes according to their income:

• 1. “five-hundred-measure men”(pentakosiomedimnoi , those with an annual income equivalent to that much agricultural produce),

• 2. “horsemen” (hippeis , income of three hundred measures),

• 3. “yoked men” (zeugitai , two hundred measures),

• 4. and “laborers” (thetes, less than two hundred measures).

-Political system divided into two parts:

• 1. assembly (ekklesia ),

• 2. a council (boule) of four hundred7 men to prepare an

agenda for the discussions in the assembly,

• -Equally important to restoring stability in a time of acute crisis

was Solon's ruling that any male citizen could bring charges on a

wide variety of offenses against wrongdoers on behalf of any

victim of a crime.

• -Furthermore, he provided for the right of appeal2 to the

assembly by persons who believed a magistrate had rendered

unjust judgments against them.

• -He balanced these judicial reforms favoring the people, however, by granting broader powers to the “Council which meets on the Hill of the god of war Ares,” the Areopagus (meaning “Ares' hill”). Archons became members of the Areopagus3 after their year in office.

• -Another major contributor to the development of Athethiademocracy was the hoplite. A hoplite was the most common type of heavily armed foot-soldier in ancient Greece from the 7th to 4th centuries BCE, and most ordinary citizens of Greek city-states with sufficient means were expected to equip and make themselves available for the role when necessary.

2. Sparta:

• -The Spartans made oligarchy the political base for a society devoted to military readiness, and the resulting Spartan way of life1

- Spartans retained not one but two hereditary military leaders of high prestige, whom they called kings.

• -Spartan Oligarchy- The “few” (oligoi ) who made policy in the oligarchy ruling Sparta were a group of twenty-eight men over sixty years old, joined by the two kings.-The distinctiveness of the Spartan way of life1 was fundamentally a reaction to their living in the midst of people whom they had conquered in war and enslaved to exploit economically but who outnumbered them greatly.

• -To maintain their position of superiority over their conquered neighbors, from whom they derived their subsistence, Spartan men had to turn themselves into a society of soldiers constantly on guard.

-They accomplished this transformation by a radical restructuring of traditional family life enforced by strict adherence to the laws and customs governing practically all aspects of behavior.

-In their private lives, helots could keep some personal possessions and practice their religion, as could slaves generally in Greece. Publicly, however, helots lived under the threat of officially sanctioned violence.

The Greco-Persian War• -The Greco-Persian Wars are a sequence of wars fought between the great empire of Persia and the coalition of Greek city-states. It lasted for about half a decade from 499 BC to 488 BC.• -The Ionian Revolt initiated the First Major Persian War. During 539 BC Cyrus The Great ruled Persia and most of West Asia. During his reign his first captured Lydia, which lay along the coast of Anatolia.• -Athens and Eretria had sent a small fleet in support of the revolt, which Darius took as a pretext for launching an invasion of the Greek mainland.• -His forces advanced toward Europe in 492 BCE, but, when much of his fleet was destroyed in a storm, he returned home. However, in 490 a Persian army of 25,000 men landed unopposed on the Plain of Marathon, and the Athenians appealed to Sparta to join forces against the invader.

-After their defeat at Marathon the Persians went home, but they returned in vastly greater numbers 10 years later, led by Darius’ successor, Xerxes.

-On land the Persians attacked the Greeks at Thermopylae for two days but suffered heavy losses.

• The Spartan general Leonidas dispatched most of the Greeks south to safety but fought to the death at Thermopylae with the Spartan and Thespian soldiers who remained.

• -Although the Persian invasion was ended by the battles at Plataea and Mycale, fighting between Greece and Persia continued for another 30 years. Led by the Athenians, the newly formed Delian League went on the offensive to free the Ionian city-states on the Anatolian coast.

PELOPONNESIAN WAR

• -After heroic roles in the defeat of the Persians (480-479 B.C.), for the next half-century Athens and Sparta assumed preeminence among the city-states, and their rivalry slowly led to the long-expected showdown.

• -Nurtured on the tribute of vassal states in the Aegean, Athens did not mothball its triremes; instead, they became a “benign” police force of sorts for its Greek subject allies overseas.

• -Abandoning its countryside to Spartan invaders (431-425 B.C.), Athens understandably refused pitched battle with the crack hoplites of the Peloponnesian and Theban alliance.

Alexander the Great and the

Coming of Rome• The power vacuum left by the fall of these two cities was filled by Philip II of Macedon (382-336 BCE) after his victory over the Athenian forces and their allies at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. Philip united the Greek city states under Macedonian rule and, upon his assassination in 336 BCE, his son Alexander assumed the throne.

• -Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) carried on his father's plans for a full scale invasion of Persia in retaliation for their invasion of Greece in 480 BCE.