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Ancient Greece

The Ancient World's Great Civilizations

Anyone living in the western world can trace the influence the ancient Greek world had on their modern day society, from democracy to philosophy, to the advancement sin all the arts. The Greeks rose form their dark age past rising to prominence in an age of feudal city states, and professional standing armies.

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Ancient Greece

The Hellenic Character

The ancient Greeks were a deeply religious people. They worshipped many gods whom they believed appeared in human form and yet were endowed with superhuman strength and ageless beauty. The Iliad and the Odyssey, our earliest surviving examples of Greek literature, record men's interactions with various gods and goddesses whose characters and appearances underwent little change in the centuries that followed.

The Greeks attributed these epic narratives to Homer, a poet living at the end of the 8th century BC Each Greek city was normally under the protection of one or more individual deities who were worshipped with special emphasis, as, for example, Athens and the goddess Athena. While many sanctuaries honored more than a single god, usually one deity such as Zeus at Olympia or a closely linked pair of deities like Demeter and her daughter Persephone at Eleusis dominated the cult place. Elsewhere in the arts, various painted scenes on vases, and stone, terracotta and bronze sculptures portray the major gods and goddesses. The deities are depicted either by themselves or in traditional mythological situations in which they interact with humans and a broad range of minor deities, demi-gods and legendary characters.

Greek Architecture

The Acropolis hill, so called the "Sacred Rock" of Athens, is the most important site of the city. During Perikles' Golden Age, ancient Greek civilization was represented in an ideal way on the hill and some of the architectural masterpieces of the period were erected on its ground. The first habitation remains on the Acropolis date from the Neolithic period. Over the centuries, the rocky hill was continuously used either as a cult place or as a residential area or both. The inscriptions on the numerous and precious offerings to the sanctuary of Athena (marble korai, bronze and clay statuettes and vases) indicate that the cult of the city's patron goddess was established as early as the Archaic period (650-480 B.C.).

During the Classical period (450-330 B.C.) three important temples were erected on the ruins of earlier ones: the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, and the Temple of Nike, dedicated to Athena Parthenos, Athena Polias, and Athena-Apteros Nike, respectively. The Propylaea, the monumental entrance to the sacred area was also constructed in the same period.

The monuments on the Acropolis reflect the successive phases of the city's history. Some of them were converted into Christian churches, houses of the Franks and later on, of the Turks. After the liberation of Athens from the Turks, the protection, restoration and conservation of the monuments was one of the first tasks of the newly-founded Greek state. This major effort is continued until today, with the large-scale restoration and supporting of the monuments, which started in the 1970's and is still in progress.

The first excavations on the hill were conducted between 1835 and 1837. More systematic work was carried out in 1885-1890 by Panagiotis Kavvadias

Ancient Greek Warfare

The phalanx was an offensive infantry formation for hand-to- hand shock combat. It usually fought without light troop or cavalry support, which should have been an important disadvantage, but the Greeks largely ignored these auxiliary troops. As long as they fought among themselves, lack of missile troops and cavalry was not a problem.

The heavy infantry on each side in a battle would close with each other at a deliberate pace, maintaining formation. When the opposing phalanxes came together, the first several ranks would lower their pikes and the two sides would thrust at each other, attempting to strike an unprotected area on an opponent. The pike points of several men in a file could project beyond the front rank. Men in the front were simultaneously attacked by several spears.

The Cities of the Ancient Aegean

The Greek cities were originally monarchies, although many of them were very small and the term "King" for their rulers is misleadingly grand. In a country always short of farmland, power rested with a small class of landowners, who formed a warrior aristocracy fighting frequent petty inter-city wars over land. But the rise of a mercantile class (shown by the introduction of coinage in about 680) introduced class conflict into the larger cities. From 650 onwards, the aristocracies were overthrown and replaced by populist leaders called tyrants (tyrranoi), a word which did not necessarily have the modern meaning of oppressive dictators.

By the 6th century several cities had emerged as dominant in Greek affairs: Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. Each of them had brought the surrounding rural areas and smaller towns under their control, and Athens and Corinth had became major maritime and mercantile powers as well. Athens and Sparta developed a rivalry that dominated Greek politics for generations.

In Sparta, the landed artistocracy retained their power, and the constitution of Lycurgus (about 650) entrenched their power and gave Sparta a permanent militarist regime under a dual monarchy. Sparta dominated the other cities of the Peloponnese, and formed alliances with Corinth and Thebes.

In Athens, by contrast, the monarchy was abolished in 683, and reforms of Solon established a semi-constitutional system of aristocratic government. The aristocrats were followed by the tyranny of Pisistratus and his sons, who made the city a great naval and commercial power. When the Pisistratids were overthrown, Cleisthenes established the world's first "democracy" (500), with power being held by an assembly of all the male citizens.

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Greek Art

Greek Literature 

The Odyssey, written by Homer, is the story of the homecoming of another of the great Greek heroes at Troy, Odysseus.

"TELL ME, O MUSE, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them."

Homer (Greek ?μηρος Hóm?ros) was a legendary (or perhaps mythical) early Greek poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary works such as Margites. A few ancient authors credited him with the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the Trojan War as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons.

Tradition held that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities are claimed to be his birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate.

It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"; the "Batrachomyomachia", Homeric hymns and cyclic poems are generally agreed to be later than these two epic poems.

Greek Archeology

The Tombs of Alexander are some of the most important archeological sites of ancient greece. Archaeologists were interested in the hills around Vergina as early as the 1850s, knowing that the site of Aigai was in the vicinity and suspecting that the hills were burial mounds. Excavations began in 1861 under the French archaeologist Leon Heuzey. Parts of the Macedonian royal palace were discovered. The excavations were abandoned because of the risk of malaria.

Ivory head in relief, probably depicting Alexander IV, from the Tomb of Philip at Vergina, third quarter of 4th century BC, Thessaloniki, Archaeological Museum.

In 1937 the University of Thessaloniki resumed the excavations. More ruins of the ancient palace were found, but the excavations were abandoned on the outbreak of war with Italy in 1939. After the war the excavations were resumed and during the 1950s and 1960s, and the rest of the royal capital was uncovered. Manolis Andronikos became convinced that a hill called the "Great Tumulus" (in Greek, Μεγαλη Τουμπα) concealed the tombs of the Macedonian Kings.

In 1977 Andronikos undertook a six-week dig at the Tumulus and found four buried chambers which he indentified as tombs, hitherto undisturbed. Three more were found in 1980. Excavations continued through the 1980s and '90s. Andronikos maintained that one of the tombs was of Philip II, and another was of Alexander IV of Macedon, son of Alexander the Great. This has now become the firm view of Greek archaeologists and the Greek government, but some other archaeologists dispute this identification.

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