Ancient Greece- an Overview
The `Iliad' tells how Greeks from many city-states - among them, Sparta, Athens, Thebes, and Argos - joined forces to fight their common foe Troy in Asia Minor. In historical times the Greek city-states were again able to combine when the power of Persia threatened them. However, ancient Greece never became a nation.
The only patriotism the ancient Greek knew was loyalty to his city. This seems particularly strange today, as the cities were very small. Athens was probably the only Greek city-state with more than 20,000 citizens.
Just as Europe, unlike North America, is divided into many small nations rather than a few large political units, so ancient Greece was divided into many small city-states. Sometimes the Greek city-states were separated by mountain ranges. Often, however, a single plain contained several city-states, each surrounding its acropolis, or citadel.
These flat topped, inaccessible rocks or mounds are characteristic of Greece and were first used as places of refuge. From the Corinthian isthmus rose the lofty acrocorinthus, from Attica the Acropolis of Athens, from the plain of Argolis the mound of Tiryns, and, loftier still, the Larissa of Argos.
On these rocks the Greek cities built their temples and their king's palace, and their houses clustered about the base.
Only in a few cases did a city-state push its holdings beyond very narrow limits. Athens held the whole plain of Attica, and most of the Attic villagers were Athenian citizens. Argos conquered the plain of Argolis. Sparta made a conquest of Laconia and part of the fertile plain of Messenia.
The conquered people were subjects, not citizens. Thebes attempted to be the ruling city of Boeotia but never quite succeeded (see Thebes, Greece ).
Similar city-states were found all over the Greek world, which had early flung its outposts throughout the Aegean Basin and even beyond. There were Greeks in all the islands of the Aegean. Among these islands was Thasos, famous for its gold mines.
Samothrace, Imbros, and Lemnos were long occupied by Athenian colonists. Other Aegean islands colonized by Greeks included Lesbos, the home of the poet Sappho; Scyros, the island of Achilles; and Chios, Samos, and Rhodes. Also settled by Greeks were the nearer-lying Cyclades - so called (from the Greek word for "circle") because they encircled the sacred island of Delos - and the southern island of Crete.
The western shores of Asia Minor were fringed with Greek colonies, reaching out past the Propontis (Sea of Marmara) and the Bosporus to the northern and southern shores of the Euxine, or Black, Sea.
In Africa there were, among others, the colony of Cyrene, now the site of a town in Libya, and the trading post of Naucratis in Egypt. Sicily too was colonized by the Greeks, and there and in southern Italy so many colonies were planted that this region came to be known as Magna Graecia (Great Greece).
Pressing farther still, the Greeks founded the city of Massilia, now Marseilles, France.
Separated by barriers of sea and mountain, by local pride and jealousy, the various independent city-states never conceived the idea of uniting the Greekspeaking world into a single political unit.
They formed alliances only when some powerful city-state embarked on a career of conquest and attempted to make itself mistress of the rest. Many influences made for unity - a common language, a common religion, a common literature, similar customs, the religious leagues and festivals, the Olympic Games - but even in time of foreign invasion it was difficult to induce the cities to act together.
The government of many city-states, notably Athens, passed through four stages from the time of Homer to historical times. During the 8th and 7th centuries BC the kings disappeared.
Monarchy gave way to oligarchy--that is, rule by a few. The oligarchic successors of the kings were the wealthy landowning nobles, the " eupatridae," or wellborn. However, the rivalry among these nobles and the discontent of the oppressed masses was so great that soon a third stage appeared.
The third type of government was known as tyranny. Some eupatrid would seize absolute power, usually by promising the people to right the wrongs inflicted upon them by the other landholding eupatridae. He was known as a "tyrant." Among the Greeks this was not a term of reproach but merely meant one who had seized kingly power without the qualification of royal descent.
The tyrants of the 7th century were a stepping-stone to democracy, or the rule of the people, which was established nearly everywhere in the 6th and 5th centuries. It was the tyrants who taught the people their rights and power.
By the beginning of the 5th century BC, Athens had gone through these stages and emerged as the first democracy in the history of the world. Between two and three centuries before this, the Athenian kings had made way for officials called "archons," elected by the nobles. Thus an aristocratic form of government was established.
About 621 BC an important step in the direction of democracy was taken, when the first written laws in Greece were compiled from the existing traditional laws. This reform was forced by the peasants to relieve them from the oppression of the nobles.
The new code was so severe that the adjective "draconic," derived from the name of its compiler, Draco, is still a synonym for "harsh." Unfortunately, Draco 's code did not give the peasants sufficient relief. A revolution was averted only by the wise reforms of Solon, about a generation later.
Solon's reforms only delayed the overthrow of the aristocracy, and about 561 BC Pisistratus, supported by the discontented populace, made himself tyrant.
With two interruptions, Pisistratus ruled for more than 30 years, fostering commerce, agriculture, and the arts and laying the foundation for much of Athens' future greatness. His sons Hippias and Hipparchus attempted to continue their father's power.
One of them was slain by two youths, Harmodius and Aristogiton, who lived on in Greek tradition as themes for sculptors and poets. By the reforms of Clisthenes, about 509 BC, the rule of the people was firmly established.
Very different was the course of events in Sparta, which by this time had established itself as the most powerful military state in Greece. Under the strict laws of Lycurgus it had maintained its primitive monarchical form of government with little change.
Nearly the whole of the Peloponnesus had been brought under its iron heel, and it was now jealously eyeing the rising power of its democratic rival in central Greece.
During this period the intellectual and artistic culture of the Greeks centered among the Ionions of Asia Minor. Thales, called "the first Greek philosopher," was a citizen of Miletus.
He became famous for predicting an eclipse of the sun in 585 BC.
Suddenly there loomed in the east a power that threatened to sweep away the whole promising structure of the new European civilization.
Persia, the great Asian empire of the day, had been awakened to the existence of the free peoples of Greece by the aid which the Athenians had sent to their oppressed kinsmen in Asia Minor.
The Persian empire mobilized its gigantic resources in an effort to conquer the Greek city-states. The scanty forces of the Greeks succeeded in driving out the invaders.
