Ancient Greece

Chapter 4

First Greek Civilizations

The first Greek state was called Mycenae.

The Mycenaean were above all warriors.

The most famous battles and adventures were captured in epic poems written by Homer. His Iliad and Odyssey were the most famous epic poems to come from this period.

Pages from book 8 of the Iliad

Achilles Achilles v. Hector

The values Homer taught were courage and honor which the Greeks called arête (ahR-ah-TEE).

Marvel Comics mini-series Iliad #1-8

Greek City-States

By 750 B.C., the polis, or city-state, became the central focus of Greek life.

At the top of the hill inside the city was an acropolis, or fortified area (city within the city).

Below the acropolis was the agora or temples for the gods.

Athens & Sparta were two of the most powerful city-states of this time.

The government of Sparta was an oligarchy, which means that it was ruled by the few. It was more militaristic.

The government of Athens after Cleisthenes became the foundation for Athenian democracy. It based its rule on voting.

Classical Greece

The Persians and the Greeks fought in the Persian Wars for 20 years between 499 – 479 BC.

At Thermopylae, a Greek force of 7,000 held off the Persian army of 180,000 for two days.

Why doesn’t Leonidas pull all his troops rather thanStay & fight with his elite 300?

At Thermopylae Pass, the Spartan troops were especially brave, even though the Greek army was vastly outnumbered.

Although the Spartan 300 lost at Thermopylae Pass, the Greeks won the war and Athens, under Pericles, became the center of the New Greek Empire.

This era became known as the Age of Pericles.

Culture of Classic Greece

According to Greek religion, the gods lived on Mount Olympus.

Zeus was the main god. Others included:

Apollo (sun) Hades (underworld) Aphrodite (love) Ares (war) Athena (wisdom) Poseidon (sea & earth).

Gods were emotional and could play favorites and involved making judgments on mortals based on emotion such as jealously, greed, envy, fear, anger, or happiness.

The Greeks also created drama. The first Greek dramas were tragedies. One such tragedy was Oedipus Rex, written by the Greek playwright Sophocles.

Philosophy refers to an organized system of thought.

Sophists stressed the importance of rhetoric or persuasive speaking.

Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

According to Plato, individuals could not achieve a good life unless they lived in a just and rational state.

Aristotle wrote Politics, and gathered that the best form of government was a constitutional government by the people.

Herodotus wrote the History of the Persian Wars, a work commonly regarded as the first real history in Western civilization.

Thucydides is considered by many historians today to be the greatest historian of the ancient world because he examined history from different perspectives and wrote more objective reports than Herodotus.

Alexander and the Hellenistic Age

The conquests of Alexander the Great created the Hellenistic Era, an age that saw the expansion of the Greek language and Greek ideas to the non-Greek world.

The results of Alexander the Great’s conquests were that Greek language, art, architecture, and literature spread throughout Southeast Asia.