Greek history (X)

4th century:

Greece thus entered the 4th century under a Spartan hegemony, but it was clear from the start that this was weak. A demographic crisis meant Sparta was overstretched, and by 395 BC Athens, Argos, Thebes, and Corinth felt able to challenge Spartan dominance, resulting in the Corinthian War (395-387 BC). Another war of stalemates, it ended with the status quo restored, after the threat of Persian intervention on behalf of the Spartans.

Delian League,  before the Peloponnesian War 

The Spartan hegemony lasted another 16 years, until, when attempting to impose their will on the Thebans, the Spartans suffered a decisive defeat at Leuctra in 371 BC. The Theban general Epaminondas then led Theban troops into the Peloponnese, whereupon other city-states defected from the Spartan cause. The Thebans were thus able to march into Messenia and free the population.
Deprived of land and its serfs, Sparta declined to a second-rank power. The Theban hegemony thus established was short-lived; at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC, Thebes lost her key leader, Epaminondas, and much of her manpower, even though they were victorious in battle. In fact such were the losses to all the great city-states at Mantinea that none could establish dominance in the aftermath.

The weakened state of the heartland of Greece coincided with the Rise of Macedon, led by Philip II. In twenty years, Philip had unified his kingdom, expanded it north and west at the expense of Illyrian tribes, and then conquered Thessaly and Thrace. His success stemmed from his innovative reforms to the Macedon army. Phillip intervened repeatedly in the affairs of the southern city-states, culminating in his invasion of 338 BC.
Decisively defeating an allied army of Thebes and Athens at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), he became de facto hegemon of all of Greece, except Sparta. He compelled the majority of the city-states to join the League of Corinth, allying them to him, and preventing them from warring with each other. Philip then entered into war against the Achaemenid Empire but was assassinated by Pausanias of Orestis early on in the conflict.
Alexander, son and successor of Philip, continued the war. Alexander defeated Darius III of Persia and completely destroyed the Achaemenid Empire, annexing it to Macedon and earning himself the epithet 'the Great'. When Alexander died in 323 BC, Greek power and influence was at its zenith. However, there had been a fundamental shift away from the fierce independence and classical culture of the poleis—and instead towards the developing Hellenistic culture.

Greek history (IX)

5th century:

Athenian coin, depicting the head of Athena and her owl

Athens and Sparta would soon have to become allies in the face of the largest external threat ancient Greece would see until the Roman conquest. After suppressing the Ionian Revolt, a rebellion of the Greek cities of Ionia, Darius I of Persia, King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, decided to subjugate Greece. His invasion in 490 BC was ended by the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon under Miltiades the Younger.
Xerxes I of Persia, son and successor of Darius I, attempted his own invasion 10 years later, but despite his larger army he suffered heavy casualties after the famous rearguard action at Thermopylae and victories for the allied Greeks at the Battles of Salamis and Plataea. The Greco-Persian Wars continued until 449 BC, led by the Athenians and their Delian League, during which time the Macedon, Thrace, the Aegean Islands and Ionia were all liberated from Persian influence.

Attic red-figure pottery,ca. 480 BC (Paris, Louvre)

The dominant position of the maritime Athenian 'Empire' threatened Sparta and the Peloponnesian League of mainland Greek cities. Inevitably, this led to conflict, resulting in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Though effectively a stalemate for much of the war, Athens suffered a number of setbacks. The Plague of Athens in 430 BC followed by a disastrous military campaign known as the Sicilian Expedition severely weakened Athens. An estimated one-third of Athenians died, including Pericles, their leader.
Sparta was able to foment rebellion amongst Athens's allies, further reducing the Athenian ability to wage war. The decisive moment came in 405 BC when Sparta cut off the grain supply to Athens from the Hellespont. Forced to attack, the crippled Athenian fleet was decisively defeated by the Spartans under the command of Lysander at Aegospotami. In 404 BC Athens sued for peace, and Sparta dictated a predictably stern settlement: Athens lost her city walls (including the Long Walls), her fleet, and all of her overseas possessions.

Greek history (VIII)

Peloponnesian war alliances 

Peloponnesian War:

The Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BC, was an ancient Greek war fought by Athens and its empire against the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases. In the first phase, the Archidamian War, Sparta launched repeated invasions of Attica, while Athens took advantage of its naval supremacy to raid the coast of the Peloponnese attempting to suppress signs of unrest in its empire. This period of the war was concluded in 421 BC, with the signing of the Peace of Nicias. That treaty, however, was soon undermined by renewed fighting in the Peloponnese. In 415 BC, Athens dispatched a massive expeditionary force to attack Syracuse in Sicily; the attack failed disastrously, with the destruction of the entire force, in 413 BC. This ushered in the final phase of the war, generally referred to either as the Decelean War, or the Ionian War. In this phase, Sparta, now receiving support from Persia, supported rebellions in Athens' subject states in the Aegean Sea and Ionia, undermining Athens' empire, and, eventually, depriving the city of naval supremacy. The destruction of Athens' fleet at Aegospotami effectively ended the war, and Athens surrendered in the following year.

The Peloponnesian War reshaped the ancient Greek world. On the level of international relations, Athens, the strongest city-state in Greece prior to the war's beginning, was reduced to a state of near-complete subjection, while Sparta became established as the leading power of Greece. The economic costs of the war were felt all across Greece; poverty became widespread in the Peloponnese, while Athens found itself completely devastated, and never regained its pre-war prosperity. The war also wrought subtler changes to Greek society; the conflict between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta, each of which supported friendly political factions within other states, made civil war a common occurrence in the Greek world.

Greek warfare, meanwhile, originally a limited and formalized form of conflict, was transformed into an all-out struggle between city-states, complete with atrocities on a large scale. Shattering religious and cultural taboos, devastating vast swathes of countryside, and destroying whole cities, the Peloponnesian War marked the dramatic end to the fifth century BC and the golden age of Greece.

Greek history (VII)

The Persian Wars:
In Ionia (the modern Aegean coast of Turkey), the Greek cities, which included great centres such as Miletus and Halicarnassus, were unable to maintain their independence and came under the rule of the Persian Empire in the mid-6th century BC. In 499 BC that region's Greeks rose in the Ionian Revolt, and Athens and some other Greek cities sent aid, but were quickly forced to back down after defeat in 494 BC at the battle of Lade. Asia Minor returned to Persian control.

Greeks against Persians

In 492 BC, the Persian general, Mardonius led a campaign through Thrace and Macedonia and, while victorious, he was wounded and forced to retreat back into Asia Minor. In addition, the naval fleet of around 1,200 ships that accompanied Mardonius on the expedition was wrecked by a storm off the coast of Mount Athos. Later, the generals Artaphernes and Datis submitted the Aegean islands through a naval expedition.
In 490 BC, Darius the Great, having suppressed the Ionian cities, sent a fleet to punish the Greeks. 100,000 Persians (historians are uncertain about the number; it varies from 18,000 to 100,000) landed in Attica intending to take Athens, but were defeated at the Battle of Marathon by a Greek army of 9,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000 Plateans led by the Athenian general Miltiades. The Persian fleet continued to Athens but, seeing it garrisoned, decided not to attempt an assault.
Ten years later, in 480 BC, Darius' successor Xerxes I sent a much more powerful force of 300,000 by land, with 1,207 ships in support, across a double pontoon bridge over the Hellespont. This army took Thrace, before descending on Thessaly and Boetia, whilst the Persian navy skirted the coast and resupplied the ground troops. The Greek fleet, meanwhile, dashed to block Cape Artemision. After being delayed by Leonidas I, the Spartan king of the Agiad Dynasty, at the Battle of Thermopylae (a battle made famous by the 300 Spartans who faced the entire Persian Army), Xerxes advanced into Attica, where he captured and burned Athens. But the Athenians had evacuated the city by sea, and under the command of Themistocles defeated the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis.

Statue of King Leonidas of Sparta

In 483 BC, during the time of peace between the two Persian invasions, a vein of silver ore had been discovered in the Laurion (a small mountain range near Athens), and the hundreds of talents mined there had paid for the construction of 200 warships to combat Aeginetan piracy. A year later, the Greeks, under the Spartan Pausanias, defeated the Persian army at Plataea. Following the Battle of Plataea, the Persians began withdrawing from Greece and never attempted an invasion again.
The Athenian fleet then turned to chasing the Persians from the Aegean Sea, defeating their fleet decisively in the Battle of Mycale; then in 478 BC the fleet captured Byzantium. In the course of doing so Athens enrolled all the island states and some mainland ones into an alliance called the Delian League, so named because its treasury was kept on the sacred island of Delos. The Spartans, although they had taken part in the war, withdrew into isolation afterwards, allowing Athens to establish unchallenged naval and commercial power.

Greek history (VI)

Cleisthenes:

In 510 BC, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow their king, the tyrant Hippias, son of Peisistratos. Cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy headed by Isagoras. But his rival Cleisthenes, with the support of the middle class and aided by democrats, managed to take over. Cleomenes intervened in 508 and 506 BC, but could not stop Cleisthenes, now supported by the Athenians. Through his reforms, the people endowed their city with isonomic institutions—i.e., ones that all have the same rights—and established ostracism.

Cleisthenes."the father of Athenian democracy"

The isonomic and isegoric democracy was first organized into about 130 demes, which became the foundational civic element. The 10,000 citizens exercised their power via the assembly (the ekklesia, in Greek) of which they all were part, headed by a council of 500 citizens chosen at random.
The city's administrative geography was reworked, the goal being to have mixed political groups — not federated by local interests linked to the sea, to the city, or to farming — whose decisions (declaration of war, etc.) would depend on their geographical situation. Also, the territory of the city was divided into thirty trittyes as follows:
ten trittyes in the coastal "Paralie"
ten trittyes in "Asty", the urban centre
ten trittyes in rural "Mesogia".
A tribe consisted of three trittyes, taken at random, one from each of the three groups. Each tribe therefore always acted in the interest of all three sectors.

This is this corpus of reforms that would in the end allow the emergence of a wider democracy in the 460s and 450s BC.

Rise to power:

With help from the Alcmaeonidae (Cleisthenes' genos, "clan"), he was responsible for overthrowing Hippias, the tyrant son of Pisistratus. After the collapse of Hippias' tyranny, Isagoras and Cleisthenes were rivals for power, but Isagoras won the upper hand by appealing to the Spartan king Cleomenes I to help him expel Cleisthenes. He did so on the pretext of the Alcmaeonid curse. Consequently, Cleisthenes left Athens as an exile, and Isagoras was unrivaled in power within the city. Isagoras set about uprooting hundreds of people from their homes on the pretext that they too were cursed, and attempted to dissolve the council (βουλή, boulê). However, the council resisted, and the Athenian people declared their support of it. Hence Isagoras and his supporters were forced to flee to the Acropolis, remaining besieged there for two days. On the third, they fled and were banished. Cleisthenes was subsequently recalled, along with hundreds of exiles, and he assumed leadership of Athens.

Greek history (V)

Classical Greece:
Classical Greece was a 200 year period in Greek culture lasting from the 5th through 4th centuries BC.This classical period had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire and greatly influenced the foundations of the Western Civilization. Much of modern Western politics, artistic thought, such as architecture, scientific thought, literature, and philosophy derives from this period of Greek history. In the context of the art, architecture, and culture of Ancient Greece, the Classical period corresponds to most of the 5th and 4th centuries BC (the most common dates being the fall of the last Athenian tyrant in 510 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC). The Classical period in this sense follows the Archaic period and is in turn succeeded by the Hellenistic period.
5th century BC:

Map

From the perspective of Athenian culture in Classical Greece, the period generally referred to as the 5th century BC encroaches slightly on the 4th century BC. This century is essentially studied from the Athenian outlook because Athens has left us more narratives, plays, and other written works than the other ancient Greek states. In this context, one might consider that the first significant event of this century occurs in 510 BC, with the fall of the Athenian tyrant and Cleisthenes' reforms. However, a broader view of the whole Greek world might place its beginning at the Ionian revolt of 500 BC, the event that provoked the Persian invasion of 492 BC. The Persians (called "Medes") were finally defeated in 490 BC. A second Persian attempt failed in 481-479 BC. The Delian League then formed, under Athenian hegemony and as Athens' instrument. Athens' excesses caused several revolts among the allied cities, all of which were put down by force, but Athenian dynamism finally awoke Sparta and brought about the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. After both forces were spent, a brief peace came about; then the war resumed to Sparta's advantage. Athens was definitively defeated in 404 BC, and internal Athenian agitations mark the end of the 5th century BC in Greece.
Since the beginning, Sparta had been ruled by a "diarchy." This meant that Sparta had two kings serving concurrently throughout its entire history. The two kingships were both hereditary and were either from the Agiad dynasty or the Eurypontid dynasty. Allegedly, the hereditary lines of these two dynasties spring, respectively, from Eurysthenes and Procles, twin descendants of Hercules. Eurysthenes and Procles were said to have conquered Sparta two generations after the Trojan War.

Greek history (IIII)

Archaic Greece:


The Archaic period in Greece (800 BC – 480 BC) was a period of ancient Greek history that followed the Greek Dark Ages. This period saw the rise of the polis and the founding of colonies, as well as the first inklings of classical philosophy, theatre in the form of tragedies performed during Dionysia, and written poetry, which appeared with the reintroduction of the written language, lost during the Greek Dark Ages. The term archaic covers these cultural aspects as well

Amphora warriors

The termini of the Archaic period are defined as the "structural revolution", meaning a sudden upsurge of population and material goods that occurred c. 750 BC, and the "intellectual revolution" of classical Greece.The end of archaism is conventionally marked by Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

Loutrophoros Analatos

The sharp rise in population at the start of the Archaic period brought with it the settlement of new towns and the expansion of the older population centres. The Archaic period is also characterized by the spread of colonization along the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts that began about 800 B.C. The reason for this phenomenon is described by Greek authors as stenochoria, or "the lack of land", but in practice it was caused by a great number of reasons, such as rivalry between political groups, a desire for adventure, expatriation, the search for trade opportunities, etc.

The term archaic describes things belonging to ancient times and is derived from the Greek word archaikos, which means primitive. This term arose from the study of Greek art, where it mainly refers to styles of surface decoration and sculpture, placing it chronologically between geometric and Classical Greek art. These styles are considered archaic in the sense that they contain the seeds of Classical art. Modern historians think of the term archaic as a misnomer, as the archaic period is considered to be one of the most fruitful periods of Greek history.

Greek history (III)

The Parthenon was created in ancient Greece

Ancient Greece:
Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (ca. 600 AD). Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the period of Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Classical Greece began with the repelling of a Persian invasion by Athenian leadership. Because of conquests by Alexander the Great, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the western end of the Mediterranean Sea.
Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean region and Europe, for which reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture.The historical period of ancient Greece is unique in world history as the first period attested directly in proper historiography, while earlier ancient history or proto-history is known by much more circumstantial evidence, such as annals or king lists, and pragmatic epigraphy.
Herodotus is widely known as the "father of history", his Histories being eponymous of the entire field. Written between the 450s and 420s BC, the scope of Herodotus' work reaches about a century into the past, discussing 6th-century historical figures such as Darius I of Persia, Cambyses II and Psamtik III, and alludes to some 8th-century ones such as Candaules.
Herodotus was succeeded by authors such as Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle. Most of these authors were either Athenians or pro-Athenians, which is why far more is known about the history and politics of Athens than of many other cities. Their scope is further limited by a focus on political, military and diplomatic history, ignoring economic and social history

Greek history (II)

Cycladic and Minoan civilization

Reconstruction of the Proto-Greek area: circa 3rd millenium BC

One of the earliest civilizations to appear around Greece was the Minoan civilization in Crete, which lasted from about 2700 (Early Minoan) BC to 1450 BC, and the Early Helladic period on the Greek mainland from ca. 2800 BC to 2100 BC.

Little specific information is known about the Minoans (even the name is a modern appellation, from Minos, the legendary king of Crete).[4] They have been characterized as a pre-Indo-European people, apparently the linguistic ancestors of the Eteo-Cretan speakers of Classical Antiquity, their language being encoded in the undeciphered Linear A script. They were primarily a mercantile people engaged in overseas trade, taking advantage of their land's rich natural resources. Timber was then an abundant natural resource that was commercially exploited and exported to nearby lands such as Cyprus, Syria, Egypt and the Aegean Islands. During the Early Bronze Age (3300 BC through 2100 BC), the Minoan Civilization on the island of Crete held great promise for the future.

Cape Sounion

The Mycenaean Greeks invaded Crete and adopted much of the Minoan culture they found on Crete. The Minoan civilization which preceded the Mycenaean civilization on Crete was revealed to the modern world by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900, when he purchased and then began excavating a site at Knossus.

The Proto-Greeks are assumed to have arrived in the Greek peninsula during the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BC.The migration of the Ionians and Aeolians resulted in Mycenaean Greece by the 16th century BC.[8][9] The transition from pre-Greek to Greek culture appears to have been rather gradual. Some archaeologists have pointed to evidence that there was a significant amount of continuity of prehistoric economic, architectural, and social structures, suggesting that the transition between the Neolithic, Helladic and early Greek cultures may have continued without major rifts in social texture.[10]

Mycenae

On Crete, however, the Mycenean invasion of around 1400 BC spelled the end of the Minoan civilization. Mycenaean Greece is the Late Helladic Bronze Age civilization of Ancient Greece. It lasted from the arrival of the Greeks in the Aegean around 1600 BC to the collapse of their Bronze Age civilization around 1100 BC. It is the historical setting of the epics of Homer and of most Greek mythology. The Mycenaean period takes its name from the archaeological site Mycenae in the northeastern Argolid, in the Peloponnesos of southern Greece. Athens, Pylos, Thebes, and Tiryns are also important Mycenaean sites.

Mycenaean civilization was dominated by a warrior aristocracy. Around 1400 BC the Mycenaeans extended their control to Crete, center of the Minoan civilization, and adopted a form of the Minoan script called Linear A to write their early form of Greek. The Mycenaean era script is called Linear B.

Table of Cycladic

The Mycenaeans buried their nobles in beehive tombs (tholoi), large circular burial chambers with a high vaulted roof and straight entry passage lined with stone. They often buried daggers or some other form of military equipment with the deceased. The nobility were often buried with gold masks, tiaras, armour, and jeweled weapons. Mycenaeans were buried in a sitting position, and some of the nobility underwent mummification.

Around 1100 BC the Mycenaean civilization collapsed. Numerous cities were sacked and the region entered what historians see as a dark age. During this period Greece experienced a decline in population and literacy. The Greeks themselves have traditionally blamed this decline on an invasion by another wave of Greek people, the Dorians, although there is scant archaeological evidence for this view.

Greek history (I)

                             

     Introduction of Greek history

The history of Greece encompasses the history of the territory of the modern state of Greece, as well as that of the Greek people  and the areas they ruled historically. The scope of Greek habitation and rule has varied much through the ages, and, as a result, the history of Greece is similarly elastic in what it includes. Each era has its own related sphere of interest.

The first (proto) Greek- speaking ribes, known later as  Mycenaeans, are generally thought to have arrived in the Greek mainland between the late 3rd and the first half of the  2nd millennium BC probably between 1900 and 1600 BC. When the Mycenaeans invaded, the area was inhabited by various non-Greek-speaking, indigenous pre-Greek people, who practiced agriculture as they had done since the 7yh millennium BC.

At its geographical peak, Greek civilization spread 

from Greece to Egypt  and to the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan. Since then, Greek minorities 

have remained in former Greek territories (e.g., Turkey, Albania, Itlay and Linya, Levant, Armenia

Georgia etc. and Greek emigrants have assimilated into differing societies across the globe (e.g., 

 North America, Australia, Norherm Europe, South Africa, etc.). Nowadays most Greeks live in the 

modern state of Greece (independent since 1821) and Cyprus.