Matthew Nicholls - 30-Second Ancient Greece: The 50 Most Important Achievements of a Timeless Civilization, Each Explained in Half a Minute

The 50 most important achievements of a timeless civilization, each explained in half a minute

Editor

Matthew Nicholls

Contributors

Emma Aston

Timothy Duff

Patrick Finglass

Katherine Harloe

Matthew Nicholls

Kelli Rudolph

Amy C. Smith

Illustrator

Nicky Ackland-Snow

First published in the UK in 2016 by

Ivy Press

Ovest House 58 West Street

Brighton

BN1 2RA United Kingdom

www.quartoknows.com

Copyright The Ivy Press Limited 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage-and-retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Digital edition: 978-1-78240-435-4

Hardcover edition: 978-1-78240-388-3

This book was conceived, designed and produced by

Ivy Press

Publisher Susan Kelly

Creative Director Michael Whitehead

Editorial Director Tom Kitch

Commissioning Editor Sophie Collins

Project Editor Joanna Bentley

Designer Ginny Zeal

Picture Researcher Katie Greenwood

Illustrator Nicky Ackland-Snow

Glossaries Text Matthew Nicholls

Matthew Nicholls

The ancient Greeks thought of themselves as linked by language, religion and a complex web of ethnic and political ties, but they did not inhabit a nation state: the world that emerged from the Greek dark ages by around 800 BCE was a fragmented landscape of individual, competing city states (polis, plural poleis). These poleis filled the peninsula and islands of modern Greece, often competing over its limited agricultural land, but were also found across the Aegean Sea on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and in cities as far away as southern Italy and even France. Their capacity for both shared cultural identity and intense mutual competition spurred an extraordinarily fertile creative energy.

The Greek miracle of the Archaic and Classical periods, around 800300 BCE, marked a profound moment in the development of civilization. The Greeks made huge strides in almost every field of human endeavour. They were enormously interested in the power of the spoken and written word, developing new literary forms (epic and lyric poetry, drama, history), which they wrote down with an alphabet developed through contact with the Levant. They experimented with new ways of organizing their societies (democracy, oligarchy, different sorts of empire, jury trials, the power of rhetoric), and thought about these deeply and systematically. They enquired profoundly into the human condition, whether through literature, philosophy, artistic representation (in painting, pottery and sculpture), or even sport. They built dramatic new architectural settings for these activities, from theatres and gymnasia to spectacular temples.

This period of intense development reached one high-water mark in Athens of the 5th4th centuries BCE, and much of our evidence is from this remarkable city. In many ways the achievements of Athens Classical period its architecture, sculpture, philosophy, drama and democracy are what come to mind when we think of the ancient Greeks.

Alexander the Greats lightning conquests spread Greek culture further afield than ever before, ushering in the Hellenistic period.

The Panhellenic festivals of the ancient Greek world would often feature music and drama as well as athletics, wrestling and boxing, and were the inspiration for the modern Olympic Games.

But Athens was one among many competing Greek poleis, and as its star faded, other centres of power Thebes, Macedon, Alexandria rose to prominence. The world of small, competing city-states (and Athens two centuries of experimentation with democracy) was disrupted by the ambition and resources of autocratic rulers who built larger, hegemonic power blocks. The greatest of these was the Macedonian Alexander the Great, whose conquests radically expanded the boundaries of the Greek world. The Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded his empire continued to spread Greek ideas across the Middle East, explaining why the greatest library of the Greek world was found in Egyptian Alexandria, and why Greek architectural forms are found as far away as modern Afghanistan.

In time the Hellenistic kingdoms themselves fell to invasion as Rome eclipsed the political, but not the cultural, power of its Greek neighbours. Greek thought continued to exert a powerful influence over the Roman imagination; Rome took many of its gods, literary forms, architectural styles and artistic treasures from the Greeks. Today the influence of Greek ideas is felt in almost every sphere of intellectual and cultural life, in politics, economics, rhetoric, philosophy, democracy, technology, mathematics, drama and music all terms derived from Greek words. As Shelley wrote in the preface to his drama Hellas, We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.

The stone-cut inscriptions that survive in many Greek sites tell historians a great deal about life in the ancient past.

An overview of Greek history

The eastern Mediterranean in the 5th century BCE. Greek city-states or poleis spread across the mainland, the islands of the Aegean Sea, and beyond.

ca. 1575 BCE onwards

Mycenaean Greek civilization dominant in Greece and Aegean

ca. 14251200 BCE

Linear B used to write Mycenaean Greek

ca. 1200 BCE

Wave of civilizational collapses in the eastern Mediterranean, including Mycenaean Greeks, Hittites in Anatolia and Syria, and the new kingdom in Egypt

c. 1200800 BCE

Greek dark ages

8th century BCE

Development of the Greek alphabet