Argument

Ancient Greece

Overview

Ancient Greece (Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάς, romanized: Hellás) was an ancient civilization existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (c. 600 AD), comprising a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and regions, primarily centered in the northeastern area of the Mediterranean Sea. Prior to the Roman period, most of this area was officially unified only once, from 338 to 323 BC under the Kingdom of Macedon. In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period.

Scholars mark Ancient Greece as beginning with Mycenaean Greece, which declined during the Bronze Age collapse c. 1100 BC. Three centuries later, Greek urban city-states, or poleis, began to form in the 8th century BC, ushering in the Archaic period and Greek colonization of the Mediterranean Basin. This was followed by the intellectual flourishing of the Classical period of Ancient Greece, from the Greco-Persian Wars to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, which included the Golden Age of Athens, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the short-lived Spartan and Theban hegemonies, the creation of the Hellenic league led by Philip II of Macedon and the subsequent conquest of the Achaemenid Empire by his son Alexander the Great, leading to the spread of Ancient Greek culture: the Hellenistic period, ending c. 30 BC, when the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, centred in Alexandria, was annexed by Rome.

Classical Greek culture, especially Greek philosophy, had a powerful influence on Ancient Rome, which propagated variants of it throughout the Mediterranean and much of Europe. For this reason, Classical Greece is generally considered the cradle of Western civilization, the seminal culture from which the modern West derives many of its founding archetypes and ideas in politics, philosophy, science, and art.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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All the different states of ancient Greece possessed, each of them, but a very small territory; and when the people in anyone of them multiplied beyond what that territory could easily maintain, a part of them were sent in quest of a new habitation, in some remote and distant part of the world; the warlike neighbours who surrounded them on all sides, rendering it difficult for any of them to enlarge very much its…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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These, then, are the two different sorts of these monarchies, and another is that which in ancient Greece they called _aesumnetes_; which is nothing more than an elective tyranny; and its difference from that which is to be found amongst the barbarians consists not in its not being according to law, but only in its not being according to the ancient customs of the country. Some persons possessed this power for life…
Aristotle, Politics
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A similar vision of the decline of the Greek drama and of the contrast of the old literature and the new was present to the mind of Aristophanes after the death of the three great tragedians (Frogs). After about a hundred, or at most two hundred years if we exclude Homer, the genius of Hellas had ceased to flower or blossom. The dreary waste which follows, beginning with the Alexandrian writers and even before them…
Plato, Phaedrus
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Ancient Greece

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