The Ages of Ancient Greece
The ancient Greeks are among the best-documented of all the ancient peoples.
It’s no coincidence that they have almost unarguably had the greatest effect on modern culture and thought as well. Yet when we speak of “ancient Greece”, what is it exactly that we’re speaking about?
In fact, the era of ancient Greece spans over two thousand years and several distinct civilizations. What’s more, the actual beginning of “ancient Greece” is a distinction that historians sometimes disagree upon. According to most experts, the first people to qualify for the label are the Minoans, who lived on the island of Crete from the 27th century B.C. onward. The first signs of what we would today consider a culture show up about one thousand years later, around 1700 B.C. As an island people, the Minoans relied heavily on seafaring and trade with the Mediterranean coastal civilizations of the day. Perhaps their most important innovation was their written hieroglyphic language, which later invaders adopted as their own.
As it happened, those invaders were the Mycenaeans, who inhabited mainland Greece. The Mycenaeans arrived on the scene in the 20th century B.C., but they started to truly flourish three hundred years later, around 1600 B.C. Unlike the Minoans, the Mycenaeans were a warlike civilization, as evidenced by their invasion of Minoan Crete in 1420 B.C. The Mycenaeans borrowed the Minoan script and transformed it into what would later become the Greek script that the great playwrights, historians, and philosophers of Classical period Greece used. They largely inhabited the land later known as the Peloponnese, the large southern peninsula of Greece, and built the first cities at Sparta, Athens, and Argos. The Mycenaeans are also the subjects of the Iliad, Homer’s timeless epic about a protracted and bloody war between the peoples of the Peloponnese and the city of Troy, on the coast of what is now Turkey. We don’t know much about this ancient culture, and even the Classical period Greeks had little firm knowledge of them, relying instead on the myth-filled narrative of Homer’s epic and similar oral traditions.
However, we do know that the Mycenaean civilization eventually declined and died out. Around 1100 B.C., many of the inhabitants of Greece fled across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas to other countries, and major Greek cities dropped dramatically in their numbers. While historians are not sure why this occurred, the most popular theory attributes the decline in population and of the Mycenaean culture as a whole to yet another set of invaders, this time from the east. The Dorians, as they were known, overran the Peloponnese and much of the rest of Greece. This “invasion” may refer to a military conquest against the Mycenaeans or to the cultural domination of a new group of settlers, but either way, the Dorians would become entrenched in southern Greece for centuries afterwards.
The Greek Dark Ages followed the decline of the Mycenaean civilization, dating from around 1100 B.C. and lasting a few hundred years, until 800 B.C. As the name suggests, this period was marked by a relative lack of record-keeping, construction, or cultural advance (although it should be noted that Homer, the first poet in recorded human history, is believed to have lived sometime during the end of the Dark Ages). Since we don’t know very much about life during this period, it is difficult to tell specifically what sort of turns Greek society took at the time.
Greece eventually emerged from the Dark Ages into the Archaic period. Around 750 B.C., mainland Greece began to recover from its nearly four century-long slump in population and productivity. The Greek cities experienced a steady rise in population during this period, and major centers such as Athens, Sparta, and Thebes began to emerge as regional powers with their own unique cultures, governmental structures, and regional spheres of influence. It was during this period that the polis, or city-state, was developed, and also when Athens instituted its famous democracy. The first historical figures of Greek history also show up during this period, including the lawmakers Solon, Lycurgus, and Draco, the genius mathematician Pythagoras, the fabulist Aesop, and Sappho, the first woman poet in recorded history. Around this period we also find the first literary references to the “Hellenes”, or the Greeks as a people with a common history and identity. In short, Greece began to look like what we think of when we talk about “ancient Greece” today.
Still, Greek culture and civilization wouldn’t reach its pinnacle of influence until the 400s B.C., when the Classical period began. This period saw the rise of the Greek city-states as Mediterranean military powers, beginning in 480 B.C. with the united Greek armies routing an attempt at invasion by the massive and powerful Persian Empire. Athens emerged from the conflict the primary power of Greece, with a naval fleet that was incredibly large for the city’s population and size. This gave Athens a great degree of control over the Aegean Sea and the many island city-states contained within. While the Athenians practiced a democratic form of government, they also pursued repressive policies when it came to dealing with their neighbors, and their age-old rivals the Spartans were not pleased by this increase in their power and influence. Tensions built up for decades until the Peloponnesian War finally broke out. This bloody conflict lasted for thirty years and ended in the destruction of Athens as a regional power and the short-lived dominance of Sparta over Greece.
While Classical period Greece is known for its near-constant tension and strife among the Greek city-states, it is better known for its people. Pericles, one of the greatest statesmen in world history, lived in Classical period Athens, as did legendary playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, many of whose works survive today. Herodotus and Thucydides, who wrote the world’s first still extant histories, lived in 5th century B.C. Greece. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, perhaps the most influential thinkers in all of history, were also products of this time and place. Even more amazingly, all but one of these men were Athenian citizens (the exception being Herodotus, a Greek from modern-day Turkey). Never again has a city with such a relatively small population produced so many men in such a short period of time whose influence and power would be felt for millennia afterwards.
However, the Athenians would eventually fall from the pinnacle of their power, and the whole of Greece would shortly follow. After finally winning the Peloponnesian War in 404 B.C., the famously fierce and tough Spartans gained control over the Hellenes. Yet these legendary warriors would not be able to maintain their city’s status as the hegemon of Greece. Sparta held onto its power for 33 years, ultimately losing it to rival city-state Thebes in 371 B.C. after a protracted land war. Thebes would lose its own hegemony even more quickly, after a scant nine years. Greece’s internal strife was noticed by King Philip II of Macedon, the ruler of a large and warlike land-based power situated in modern-day northern Greece and the southern Balkans. Philip pounced on the opportunity to expand his empire, and a long war against the hastily allied Greek forces, he won Greece over. Philip would soon thereafter be assassinated, leaving his empire to his son Alexander, whom history would know as Alexander the Great.
These events were the lead-in to what we now call the Hellenistic period. While all of Greece lost its political independence under Philip and Alexander, the Macedonian kings (who considered themselves ethnically Greek) would spread Greek culture, language, and thought throughout the Levant, Egypt, and all the way to Persia. Greek became the dominant language of the eastern Mediterranean and would retain this position until the Muslim conquests swept the region almost one thousand years later. The centers of influence, learning, and political power also shifted from the Greek mainland to other parts of Alexander’s empire, namely to Alexandria in Egypt and Syracuse in Sicily. The Hellenistic period would produce many more great thinkers and enduring philosophies, such as Stoicism and Epicurianism. Perhaps the greatest genius of this period was Archimedes, a Greek mathematician, engineer, and scientist who lived in Syracuse and devised inventions that would change the world forever.
The decline and ultimate end of Greek power in the eastern Mediterranean came with the rise of the Roman Republic. The Romans, who had by the 200s B.C. secured the whole of Italy, Sicily, and much of the northern coast of Africa, turned their ambitions eastward towards Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms left in the wake of Alexander’s death and the fracturing of his massive empire. The Macedonian masters of Greece, allied with a nominally independent group of Greek city-states in the Peloponnese, fought four separate wars with the Romans to defend against invasion. However, Greece was eventually incorporated into the Roman world, finally falling to the republic’s superior military power in 146 B.C. The ethnically Greek-ruled kingdoms of Syria and Egypt would later succumb to Roman invasions, thus ending all Greek political influence in the Mediterranean for centuries. This final period of ancient Greece is known as the Roman period, signifying the domination of Rome over Greece and the shift of cultural influence from Athens, Alexandria, Syracuse, and other major Greek centers to the city of Rome itself. Greek cultural and political influence would only rise again with the establishment of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire near the end of antiquity, albeit in a very different form.
Ancient Greek history is a deep, varied, and fascinating subject, incorporating all sorts of cultures and peoples. Perhaps more importantly, it allows us a look into our own origins. The ancient Greeks played an enormous role in the development of western civilization, and if you’re just beginning to seriously study history, there is no better period or civilization with which to begin.
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