THE GREEK ADVENTURE“The function of the ruler is to use his best endeavors to make his subjects happier.”

- Isocrates

INTRODUCTION

The small, rocky peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea now called Greece proved to be the single most important source of later Western civilization.

The history of the ancient Greeks can be divided into three epochs: The Mycenaean Age lasted from about 2000 B.C. to the conquest of the

Greek peninsula by invaders in the 1100s.

The Hellenistic Period extended from the time of Homer to the conquest of the Greek city-states by the Macedonians in the mid-300s.

The Hellenistic Age was the final period of Greek predominance, lasting from about 300 B.C. to the first century A.D.

THE MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION

More than most societies, Greece was shaped by its geography. Greece has very little suitable land for large-scale farming, no broad river

valleys, and no level plains.

Dozens of harbors and bays can be found all along the coast.

The mountains of the peninsula make overland travel very difficult and it has almost always been easier to travel and trade by sea than by land.

Greek geography encouraged political fragmentation as the people in each valley and river basin developed their own sense of patriotism and identity.

Greeks grew up thinking of themselves first as residents of a given place or town and only secondarily as Greeks sharing a common culture and language with the other inhabitants of the peninsula.

THE MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION

The first Greeks to enter the peninsula came about 2000 B.C. as wandering nomads from the eastern European plains.

By about 1600 they had become semi-civilized and some lived in fair-sized towns, notably Mycenae on the eastern side of the Peloponnesus.

The people are known as the Mycenaeans and the few hundred years of Greek civilization are called the Mycenaean Age.

Our knowledge of this period comes largely from archaeological excavations and from the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epics of ancient Greece written by the magnificent poet Homer.

The Iliad deals with the Mycenaeans’ war against the powerful city-state of Troy and the Odyssey tells of the adventures of the hero Odysseus after the war.

HOMERINTERESTING FACTS

• Homer is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets; yet, he was a Babylonian named Tigranes, who took the name Homer when taken hostage by the Greeks.

• Although it is unknown when he lived, modern scholars estimate that Homer lived in the 7th and 8th centuries B.C.

THE MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION

For a long time, historians believed that the Trojan War was simply a fiction created by a great poet about his ancestors.

But thanks to archaeology, we know that there actually was a Troy and that it was destroyed about the time that Homer indicates – about 1300 B.C.

The Mycenaean civilization was inspired by the model of one of its trading partners and rivals: Crete.

Minos, the mythical king of Crete, established a wide-ranging trade empire, which included Greece, by about 1600 and had much to do with the civilizing of the Greeks.

The Minoans, named for Minos, taught their pupils too well in most ways.

MINOSINTERESTING FACTS

• Minos was the author of the Cretan constitution and the founder of its naval supremacy.

• On the Athenian stage, Minos was a cruel tyrant – the heartless exactor of the tribute of Athenian youths to feed to the Minotaur every nine years.

• After his death, he became the judge of the dead in the underworld.

THE MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION

About 1400 B.C., the warlike Mycenaeans turned on their teachers and destroyed much of the island settlements, aided by volcanic explosions and earthquakes.

By 1300, the high Minoan civilization was in ashes and the island of Crete ceased to play an important role in Mediterranean affairs.

From about 1100 B.C. to about 800, the Greek peninsula declined, so much so that this period is called the Dark Age.

Not only did the arts decline but even the ability to write seems to have been largely lost during these centuries.

During this time, the achievements of the Mycenaeans were forgotten and the formerly urban civilization reverted to a rural, much less sophisticated one during the Dark Age.

EARLY HELLENIC CIVILIZATION

Starting about 800 B.C., the Greek mainland slowly recovered the civilization that it had created during the Mycenaean Age.

It would continue to far greater heights during its Classical Age (500-325 B.C.)

During the Dark Age, the Greek institution of the polis gradually developed. In Greek, polis means the community of free persons who make up a town or any

inhabited place.

In a modern sense, the word is defined as a “city-state.”

At one time the Greek mainland and inhabitable islands were the home to more than 200 poleis.

Each thought of itself as a political and cultural unit, independent of every other.

Yet each polis also thought of itself as part of that distinct and superior family of peoples calling themselves “Greek.”

EARLY HELLENIC CIVILIZATION

The polis was much more than a political and governmental unit: Free males of twenty years of age or more possessed full civil rights while

women, who were considered citizens, were excluded from political life.

This meant that as much as eighty percent of the population was excluded from political life based on gender, age, or social status.

Each polis had more or less the same economic design: A town of varying size, surrounded by farmland, pasture and woods

supplied the town with food and other necessities.

In the town lived artisans of all kinds and many others needed to make up a civilized society.

ATHENS AND SPARTA

The two poleis that dominated Greek life and politics in the Classical Age were Athens and Sparta.

They were poles apart in their conceptions of the “good life” for their citizens:

Athens was the center of Greek artistic and scientific activity as well as the birthplace of political democracy.

Sparta was a militaristic, authoritarian society that held the arts and intellectual life in contempt.

Eventually, the two opposites came into conflict. What was the outcome?

Interestingly, the artistic, philosophical, and democratic Athenian polis that provoked the war ultimately ruined Athens.

ATHENS AND SPARTA

In general, four types of government were known to the Greeks: A monarchy is rule by a single person, a king or equivalent (either sex)

who has the final word in law by right.

An aristocracy is rule by those who are born to the leading families, whether or not they are particularly qualified in other ways.

An oligarchy is rule by a few and almost always the few are the wealthiest members of society.

A democracy is rule by the people as a whole, almost always by means of majority vote on disputed issues.

Additionally, the Greek word tyranny originally meant rule by a dictator who had illegally seized power.

EARLY ATHENS

Athens went through all of these forms of government in the period after 750 B.C., when we knew something definite about its history.

The original monarchy was gradually forced aside by the aristocrats, who ruled the polis in the seventh and early sixth centuries.

The aristocrats gave way in the 500s to oligarchs, some of whom were nobly born and some of whom were rich commoners.

The most important oligarch was Solon, who was given supreme power to institute reforms to quell social and economic discontent.

Solon responded by establishing a constitution that struck a balance between the desires of the wealthy few and the demands of the impoverished masses.

SOLONINTERESTING FACTS

• Solon put an end to the worst evils of poverty in Attica and provided his fellow countrymen with a balanced constitution and a humane code of laws.

• After completing his numerous works of reform, Solon surrendered his extraordinary authority and left the country under his own accord.

EARLY ATHENS

Eventually, an aristocratic tyrant named Pisistratus succeeded in making himself the sole ruler and made certain important concessions to the common people to gain their support for his plan to start a new monarchic dynasty with his sons as his successors.

His sons were not nearly as clever as their father and were swept from power by rebellion in 510 B.C.

The winner of the ensuing free-for-all was Cleisthenes, an aristocrat and the true founder of the Athenian democracy.

Cleisthenes believed that the people should have the last word in their own government because he believed it to be just and the best way to keep civil peace.

CLEISTHENESINTERESTING FACTS

• Cleisthenes introduced the concept of ostracism, whereby a vote from more than 6,000 of the citizens would exile a citizen for ten years.

• Ironically, Isagoras, Cleisthenes’ rival, used the policy of ostracism to exile him under the pretext of an ancient curse.

ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Cleisthenes in effect gave away his tyrannical powers to a series of political bodies that were unprecedentedly democratic in character: the ekklesia, boule, and deme.

The ekklesia was the general “town meeting” of all free male Athenians, who had an equal voice in the great decisions of the polis.

All could speak freely in an attempt to win over the others; all could be elected to any office; all could vote at the meetings of the ekklesia in the center plaza of Athens below the Acropolis hill.

The boule was a council of 500 citizens who were chosen by lot for one-year terms.

It served as a day-to-day legislature and executive, making and implementing policy under the general supervision of the ekklesia.

The boule supervised the civil and military affairs of the polis and carried out many of the functions of a modern city council – all male citizens could expect to serve at least one term.

ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

The deme was the basic political subdivision of the polis. It was a territorial unit but smaller in population.

Each deme was entitled to select a certain number of boule members and was represented more or less equally in the offices of the polis.

To enforce the will of the majority, Cleisthenes introduced the idea of ostracism, or the “pushing out” of a citizen who would not conform to the will of the majority.

An ostracized person lost all rights of citizenship for a certain length of time, normally for ten years.

So attached were the Greeks to their poleis that many preferred to kill themselves rather than submit to ostracism.

ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

The idea that the ordinary man was capable of governing himself wisely and efficiently was quite daring when it was introduced.

But even within Athens, there was a strong resistance to the democratic idea that did not cease until democracy had been abandoned and condemned as “the rule of the mob.”

Eventually democracy did fail in Athens and was discredited after the fourth century B.C.; however, it would be resurrected in the eighteenth century A.D.

Ultimately it was the democratic leadership in Athens that created the conditions that allowed the opponents of democracy to win out.

SPARTAN MILITARISM

By about 500 B.C., Sparta differed from Athens in almost every possible way, although the two were originally similar.

The Spartan polis, located in the southern Peloponnesus about eighty miles from Athens, was a small city surrounded by pastoral villages.

As the population grew in the 700s, the Spartans engaged in a bloody territorial war, the Messenian Wars, with their Greek neighbor, Messenia, and won.

The defeated Messenians were reduced to a state of slavery to the Spartans, who from this point on became culturally different from most other Greeks.

During the 600s, the Messenians rebelled again and again, and as a result the Spartans made themselves into a nation of soldiers and helpers of soldiers so that they could maintain their privileged position.

SPARTAN MILITARISM

Unlike other Greeks, the Spartans held the arts in contempt and rejected individualism as being unworthy of them.

Public life was expressed in total obedience to the state.

Sparta’s economic needs were largely met by the captive Messenians, who worked the fields and conducted the necessary crafts and commerce under close supervision.

The Spartans themselves devoted their energies to the military arts. Male children entered a barracks at the age of seven and were allowed

only sufficient free time thereafter to ensure that another generation of Spartan warriors would be born of Spartan mothers.

SPARTAN MILITARISM

What did the other Greeks think of Sparta? Most Greeks admired the Spartan way of life, especially its self-discipline,

sacrifice, rigid obedience, and physical vigor.

Even the Athenians thought the Spartan way was superior to their own and envied the single-minded purpose displayed by the Spartans in all their public affairs.

Despite its military nature, Sparta was a conservative and nonaggressive state.

The Spartan army was so large and so feared that after about 600 B.C., Sparta rarely had to use it in war.

Sparta actually became a peaceful polis and directed its attention to keeping the political status quo within its own borders.1

THE PERSIAN WARS

Throughout the early fifth century B.C., the foreign policy interests of Athens and Sparta more or less coincided.

Both were primarily concerned with maintaining their independence in the face of foreign threats, which mostly originated from Persia.

In 490 B.C., Darius I was faced with a spreading rebellion among his subjects – the Greeks on the Turkish coast.

When he attempted to subdue them, Athens went to their aid.

Determined to punish the Athenians for their boldness and wising to expand their domains, Darius sent an army across the Aegean Sea to the Greek mainland.

The Athenians were waiting and defeated the Persian expedition at the Battle of Marathon in the First Persian War.

BATTLE OF MARATHON

http://www.history.com/videos/the-battle-of-marathon#the-battle-of-marathon

THE PERSIAN WARS

Ten years passed before Darius’s successor, Xerxes, could find time to take up the challenge to conquer Greece.

The Second Persian War would be fought on both land and sea.

This time not only Athens but several other Greek polei assisted in the defensive effort.

Spartan troops lived up to their fame at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 and again at the decisive defeat of the Persian force at Platea in 479.

The Athenian navy completely routed the larger Persian fleet at Salamis and established Athens as the premier naval force in the eastern Mediterranean.

By the end of these Persian Wars, the Greeks had turned back the attempts of the Asian empire to establish a universal monarchy over the Mediterranean basin.

BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAEhttp://www.history.com/topics/leonidas/videos#last-stand-of-the300-the-kill-zone

THE PELOPONNESIAN WARS

Athens used its new prestige and growing wealth to form groups of unwilling satellites, the Delian League, among the nearby poleis.

The democrats, led by the great orator Pericles, were now in command and were responsible for bringing Athens into conflict with Corinth, one of Sparta’s Peloponnesian’s allies.

Corinth asked Sparta for help and when the Spartans warned the Athenians to back down, Pericles responded with war.

Athens was embarking on an imperial adventure, with the goal of extending its authority over not only Greece but the surrounding coasts as well.

The Athenians thought that they had earned this right but it turned out to be a fatal error – one the Pericles did not live to see.

PERICLESINTERESTING FACTS

• Pericles is credited with the founding of the city of Athens and with stimulating the so-called “Golden Age of Greece.”

• Under his supervision, Phidias designed and built the Parthenon, a Doric-style temple to the Greek goddess Athena.

THE PELOPONNESIAN WARS

With its powerful navy, Athens believed that it could hold off the land-based Spartans indefinitely while building their alliances.

These allied forces would then be able to challenge the Spartan army on Sparta’s home territory.

For a long while, the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) was an often sporadically fought deadlock.

Pericles died in 429, leaving democratic and anti-democratic forces to argue over the war.

Finally, in 404 the Spartans obtained effective naval aid (from Persia!) and defeated the Athenians at sea.

After that, it was a simple matter for their large army to lay siege to Athens and starve it into surrender.

THE PELOPONNESIAN WARS

The Peloponnesian War ended with a technical victory for Sparta but actually this long civil war between the leading Greek cities was a loss for all concerned.

Sparta was not inclined or equipped to lead the squabbling Greeks into an effective central government.

Defeated Athens was torn between the discredited democrats and the conservatives favored by Sparta.

THE FINAL ACT IN CLASSICAL GREECE

After the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks fought amongst themselves for supremacy for two generations.

Whenever a strong contender emerged to rule over all of Greece, the other poleis would band together against it.

Once they succeeded in defeating their rival, they would quarrel among themselves again.

The Greek passion for independence and individuality had degenerated into endless quarrels and maneuvering for power.

To the north of Greece were the Macedonians, who the Greeks regarded as savage and barbarian.

Philip of Macedonia, the ruler of this kingdom, had transformed it from a primitive society into an effectively governed and aggressive state.

PHILIP IIINTERESTING FACTS

• Philip was himself a hostage of the Greeks at Thebes and while in captivity there, he observed their military techniques – only to strengthen and reorganize the Macedonian military.

• Philip II was assassinated by Pausanias of Orestis, one of his seven bodyguards, as he entered the capital’s theater on the second day of his daughter’s wedding celebration.

THE FINAL ACT IN CLASSICAL GREECE

One by one Philip began to absorb the northern Greek poleis, until by the 340s he made himself the master of much of the mainland.

After much delay, the Athenians awoke to the impending danger and convinced Thebes to join with them against the menace from the north.

In the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., however, Philip’s forces defeated the combined army of Athens and Thebes, which became provinces of the Macedonian empire.

Chaeronea was the effective end of the era of Greek independence and of the Classical Age’s great triumph of the spirit and the arts.

From the latter part of the fourth century B.C. onward, the Greeks were almost always under the rule of foreigners.