Useful Notes / Ancient Greece

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The Ancient Mediterranean World is believed to have had intensive trading networks, leading to the Bronze Age of Antiquity (roughly 1750 BCE - 1150 BCE). Goods and materials all the way from Ancient Britain (chiefly tin) flowed to far-flung areas. Civilizations such as the Canaanites and the Hittites likewise traded a great deal of goods and communities with Egypt, and through Egypt into the Ancient Mediterranean. This was an era defined by "palace economies" ^note To simplify, a centralized authority in a palace or temple would tax produced goods directly in the form of grain, metals, tools, olive oil, wine, pottery, etc... and redistribute it as needed and large monumental structures. The period is most famous today for the fact that it collapsed completely, plunging the Mediterranean into The Dark Ages, and a real one as opposed to the vaunted projection of the Renaissance. In the Bronze Age collapse, entire writing systems were lost, knowledge was lost, patterns of trade and migration that previously existed in the archaeological period suddenly disappeared.

Hellas, the Land that the Romans would call Greece in Latin, was at the center of trade during the Bronze Age and was deeply affected by the collapse. In the archaeological record, two large settlements and cultures occupy the center of a great deal of research and study. There's the Minoans, on the island of Crete who are credited with developing cities and large buildings of an organized civilization around 2000 BC. On mainland Greece, there was Mycenean civilization seemed to develop in a similar way around 1750 BC.

Minoan writing has survived but it is essentially indecipherable (similar to the writing of the Etruscans in Italy and the Harappans in India). The exact understanding we have about them is hard to fully assess. They seem to have developed a strong trading empire or network, with a navy to protect it, Ancient Egypt has records of Minoans showing up to trade with them. We have uncovered large buildings called “palaces” for lack of a better term, though their function isn’t known too well (one leading theory is that they were a mix of an administrative center, a warehouse and a distribution center). The most famous such discovery is Knossos, unearthed by Arthur Evans who controversially promoted the building as the palace of King Minos. It was Evans who titled the settlement Minoans, who he named after King Minos (i.e. the people of King Minos) but this term is an archaeological construction, and does not at all correspond to what the Ancient Peoples of that land likely called themselves, which in any case is lost to time. Egyptian records refer to the people from that area and time as Keftiu (Kjtjw) but we have no way of knowing if that was a word created by the Egyptians for these people or the word used by the people of Bronze Age Crete.

King Minos is likewise a mythological figure with no historical basis whatsover. The Myth of Minos concerned a tyrannical king who forced the inventor Daedalos to create the Labyrinth, an ancient underground trap at the center of which was the half-man/half-bull monster known as "The Minotaur". King Minos forced enemies to send him prisoners as offerings for sacrifice, all of whom were dropped into the Labyrinth, where they inevitably faced the monster and became consumed by him. Eventually, the Minotaur was defeated by Theseus, Hero of Athens with the help of Minos' rebellious daughter Ariadne. While a myth, historians have gleamed some historical data from this story. Bulls show up constantly in surviving art from this period. Likewise archaeologists have found evidence of Human Sacrifice practiced on Ancient Crete suggesting that the Minoans sacrificed enemy captives to the gods, until the practice was ended by an external invasion from the Mainland or through influence and pressure from different parts of the Mediterranean world.

In Mainland Greece, the settlement of the Myceneans are better known, since their writing has been translated. It consisted of a lot of small kingdoms, with a strongly hierarchical society underneath said kings. They seem to have operated out of large palace complexes, which included administration, good production, and storage in addition to being the king’s home. Records and archaeology of Mycenean trade and products are found all throughout the Mediterranean. Mycenean kingdoms, including on Crete, seem to have been destroyed in the 1100’s BC due to conquest or rebellions or similar, though we don’t know the exact reasons, this was part of the Bronze Age Collapse effecting a lot of societies across the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean.

According to Mythology, King Agamemnon was a Mycenean and he commanded the host that laid siege to the city of Troy, located in the land described as Asia Minor by the Greeks (modern day Turkey today) in the Trojan War. Assessing the truth behind the myths, and especially the version made famous by Homer is hard to impossible, in large part thanks to the persistence of these myths. The amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was especially fixated on unearthing the true history of the Trojan War. Building on research by others who had accurately assessed that Hisarlik was the location of a digsite. Schliemann went ahead and reckless dug his way to Hisarlik and proclaimed, before any facts could be established, that this was the remains of the city of Troy from Homer. Now, many modern archaeologists consider it plausible that Hisarlik is the possible site of Homer's Troy. The problem is that the land contains remains of many settlements that fell only to be built on top over multiple times. And it's impossible to categorically assess which of any of these layers is the mythological Troy and furthermore why the mythological Trojan layer alone over anyone else should be prioritized. Schliemann was such a Homeric fanboy that he used dynamite to blast his way to the earliest digsite destroying the many interim layers that didn't end up in the narrative of a Homeric epic. As many have noted, Schliemann arguably did more to destroy "Troy" than the Greek Invaders ever did. And many see Schliemann, and to a lesser extent Evans, as the manifestations of attempts to map Greek Myth on top of history.

Schliemann's fixation on Homer did unearth old artifacts, many of them genuine and the real deal. However he created names such as "The Treasures of King Priam" or the "Mask of Agamemnon" based on guesswork creating headaches for later scholars who have to spend time to make their students unlearn their assumptions that there's no historical basis to suggest a Mask with Mycenanean-era features was necessarily the same as the Agamemnon of Homer. The most famous of the Mycenanean remains include the Tholoi Tombs, beehive shaped mounds that show a great deal of aesthetic imagination in its design and architecture. Schliemann called one of these "The Tomb of Agamemnon" before other similar tombs were discovered leading many to phase out the Homeric fixation on the concept. With regards to the events of the poem itself, the fighting described by Homer doesn't resemble Bronze Mycenean Greece as far as can be assessed archaeologically. But it does correspond to what can be discerned from the 800 - 700 BCE. Most likely, if the Trojan war is based on actual events, the connection is very thin, or had been heavily distorted over time and is likely a conflation of multiple events recounted orally over centuries rather than a single historical event.

Another mythological story that emanates from this world is of course the story of Atlantis. Atlantis originated in fact from a thought experiment in a dialogue of Plato and is not in fact part of any major Greek myth. Nonetheless the basic mythological story of an advanced island civilization that collapsed under the waves does correspond to many events to the world of Bronze Age Greece and later, Classical Greece. No single event likely inspired the Atlantis of Plato however, but rather a general reality that led to the story. Around 1450, a major disaster hit Crete, followed by years of social disruption and conquest by the Myceneans. The Ionian Sea was filled with storms, heavy weather, volcanic activity and earthquakes. The islands of the Ionian Sea and Peninsular Greece was heavily affected by extreme weather events from this time. One of the most significant was the Minoan Eruption of 1600 BCE which covered the island of Thera (today Santorini) in volcanic ash. Upon excavation in later century, the archaeological site of Akrotiri (Old Thera) became celebrated for its preservation of Ancient Minoan era culture, and especially for its gorgeous and vibrant frescoes showing color, style, and aesthetic richness that is singularly unique and not quite as static as the marble-white seriousness of Greco-Roman sculpture.

Dubious as it is in historical terms, the Trojan War and the stories surrounding it are significant for one reason. They more or less mark a stopping point or closing point for Classical Mythology. While it doesn't have an ending, there are no more stories or great myths and heroes set after the timeline of the Trojan War. Eventually the settlements of Ancient Greece started recording events as history first and myths second. The Olympic Games was held on the East Coast of the Peloponnesean Peninsula and it marked the first Pan-Hellenic (All-Greek) cultural event. It was held every four years and it became a consistent cultural reference point owing to the trade and jockeying between city-states and towns that preceded and followed such events. So much so that the earliest records available to Greek historians were the Olympic Games and eventually in the 3rd Century BCE, historians and archivists started documenting continuous recorded Greek history from the Olympiad held in 776 BCE and from there, Greek History essentially resets.

The period from the Late Bronze Age shows a steady rise in archaeological records, material records, and written records. This is the period that centered on the rise of the polis (singular) or poleis (plural) which is often translated as "cities", but in practical terms refers to any small community that had independence, and was a sufficient settlement to form a government of its own. This is the age where the familiar model of Greek City States and Greek City State rivalries emerged, settlements such as Thebes, Corinth, Sparta, and Athens, as well as many island settlements in the Ionian Sea and beyond the Ionian Sea on the West Coast of Asia Minor where many Greek settlements had established themselves and became prominent.

On account of its small peninsular landmass compared to the Italian boot, and the many islands dotting the Ionian sea, Greeks were natural sailors across history and soon they became explorers, travelers, traders, and prolific settlers building poleis not just in Greece but also in Sicily (most significantly, the city-state of Syracuse), Gaul (the Greek Settlement in Southern France became the ancient foundation for the city of Marseille, today's France's second largest city), Naucratis in Egypt, and even further inland into the Black Sea Coast, in the area of land that is today Crimea in Ukraine, where they came across a group of people calling themselves Scythian who were reported to have female warriors. Greece's cultural output in the Ancient Age is in part based on its ability to incorporate diverse influences and stories from the peoples around them. Each poleis and city state naturally considered themselves independent but linguistically they spoke a Greek language and shared cultural points of affinity, bolstered by trade. The Olympiads were common cultural events for all poleis and the Oracle of Delphi was consulted by everyone across Greece.

Of course, the common presence of Greek culture across city-states should not distract us from the documented fact of endless wars and conflicts within Greek States, one against another, often achieved by means of alliances near and far. Likewise, many other Greeks happily settled and absorbed into other cultures across the Mediterranean, be they Carthage, Persia, Scythia among others. Herodotus the "father of history" (or as Plutarch memorably sneered at him, "the father of lies") is our source for the Archaic Age and his work, called The Histories can be misleading owing to its implicit narrative project of communicating a common identity of Greek culture that united against the threat of Persia in the East. Today historians while commending Herodotus on the fact that archaeology does support a lot of his findings (though not all), disregard his narrative schema of inherent antimonies between Greek and neighboring kingdoms, or even the idea of inherent national feeling that historically speaking only had a few brief moments in the ancient record compared to the longer record of hostility and violence between Greek City States.

Greek settlements in Asia Minor, eventually became large kingdoms, with the most famous being the Kingdom of Lydia ruled by Croesus, the richest known figure in his area, with the phrase, "rich as Croesus" enduring centuries later to refer to proverbial wealth. The rise of Cyrus the Great and The Achaemenid Empire saw Persia expanding westwards, conquering the Levant, Egypt, and Asia Minor. Croesus consulted the Oracle of Delphi about his chances facing Cyrus, and the Oracle of Delphi, according to Herodotus anyway, told him that if he faced Cyrus a great empire would fall. Croesus faced off against Cyrus and was defeated and brought as a captive before the conqueror. The great empire that fell proved to be Croesus'. Cyrus then took over westward and established dominion over the Greek settlements on the Ionian Coast, and a few other islands. A number of Greek kingdoms and states became loyal clients of Cyrus and his governors, most ironically, the Kingdom of Macedonia which during the Archaic Age was barely considered Greek by the Peninsular Hellenes. Indeed it was common for Greek politicians or kings to depart to Persia in exile after they fell afoul of their citizenry. This even included the likes of Themistocles, who fought against the Persians during the Greco-Persian Wars. Ionian Greeks under the Persians were loyal and quite productive, this included a number of Pre-Socratic writers and thinkers, figures such as Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus.

Greek Poleis differed from one another thanks to its many systems of governments. It was common for most Greek states to be ruled by "tyrants" (the Greek word for King, originally neutral but subsequently taking on a level of opprobrium that the word "king" does not provoke). But even then, they differed in their organization and foundation. Unusually, many Greek states had a sense of constitution and institutional continuity, among them Sparta which was founded by Lacedaemon. The L for his name, the Greek alphabet Lambda (Λ/λ) became the logo for Spartans, emblazoned on their shield in many surviving artwork. The constitution of the Spartans was formed by Lykourgos/Lycurgus which prescribed a system run by two Kings from Spartiate aristocrats, and further divided society into a caste system with Spartiates at the top, non-aristocratic citizens in the middle, and helots/slaves below. The latter were sourced from the neighboring state of Messenia who were conquered and subjugated by the Spartans with whole sections of freed citizens made into an eternal slave class, that differed from the general trend of slavery across Greece in being hereditary with only limited manumission, in addition to the annual tradition calling for literal hunting parties of slaves who were regarded as physically strong or socially charismatic or possessing any virtues as such. Thereby pre-emptively snuffing any future Rebel Leader in the bud. The system of slavery in Sparta bears the greatest resemblance to the slavery of the Trans-Atlantic Trade of African slaves, far more than the slavery practiced elsewhere in the ancient world. Sparta in fact provided a model and reference point for advocates of the system. Slavery outside Sparta varied over time and place, and wasn't based on race/religion/ethnicity and while filled with violence, was never organized to the extent of setting up an entire ideology and system dedicated to maintaining a never-ending terror campaign to pre-emptively cull the population. In the case of Sparta, helots were drawn from Messenia, were forced into Indentured Servitude, children of full helot parents became helots (whereas elsewhere children of slaves could be freedmen and it wasn't a hereditary condition), with the only exception being children from helot-aristocrat sexual encounters (which given the nature of the social system is basically impossible to imagine as consensual in the remotest sense).

To safeguard this system of terror, Sparta had a permanent standing army where aristocratic men and women trained their whole bodies to wield weapons and gain physical endurance. Spartan noblewomen had rights that noble women across Greece didn't have, which included the right to own property and conduct business. This relative egalitarianism however was still geared to the first duty of Spartan women, which was to bear children and the physical training of Spartan women was done with a eugenicist mindset that still saw women as cattle, given better breeding and education so that they might create stronger warriors. The farming activities were done by slaves as well as other grunt work giving Spartan citizens a great deal of freetime to work on the time and money intensive training required to build a permanent standing army. Through this system, Sparta developed the resources to build an army that it could then use to subjugate and create client dependencies. Other states also had kingdoms but had an element of constitutional framework, with Athens evolving into a society given laws by Solon (about whom little is known but who is credited rhetorically as a fountain of wisdom). Solon divided Athens into councils and assemblies among free citizens. Many other Greek states were essentially oligarchies (a Greek word, one among many) ruled by a clique of aristocratic citizens.

The common features of all these different states was that rights were restricted to a handful of citizens who had a say in government while all of them ruled over a large body of transients (migrant workers, travelers, soldiers of fortunes, seasonal farmers, and so on) and slaves. This was even the case even when they moved to representative government or populist government. In Athens, the Tyrant Peisistratos took up the causes of the common man and railed against the aristocrats and seized power and instituted many policies and ideas that ironically enough set the seeds for the Democratic Revolution. Among the most significant of his actions was his order to have the works of Homer redacted and written down in parchment. And generally speaking, it is Peisistratos' redaction, retained and copied by centuries of scribes after him that is the Homer we know today. Peisistratos died and power passed to his children who were weak and tyrannical and this resulted in a popular revolution that saw the tyrants deposed in a revolution led by Cleisthenes of the Alcmaeonid Family (ancestor of Pericles). Cleisthenes and others proposed a new system of government where citizens were organized around "demes" (meaning groups of people) who would then be empowered to vote on laws, appointments, and policy. This system of government was democracy, deriving from 'demos' (People) and kratos (Power), aka "power of the people".

Athens had hitherto been a backwater swampland on the Attika peninsula. But the revolution that toppled tyranny created a new kind of culture and tradition, unknown in Greek thought at the time. The culture was previously hierarchical and aristocratic but now became innovative and progressive, at least for its time. Athens would develop into a large city but while democratic in its time (having vastly more people involved in direct government and legislation than anywhere else in Greece) it is oligarchical from a modern perspective since the vast majority of the residents of Athens were non-citizens who had no voting rights whatsoever, including women (citizen or foreign) who couldn't vote, slaves who were property, and immigrants and travelers who could live for a short while in Athens or settle for a major stretch and yet still never get voting rights. Still, the rise of Athens was a cause for alarm across Greece, especially in the Peloponnesian heartland, who looked to Sparta to rein Athens in.

Spartans had initially sent an expedition to Athens (which included the young Leonidas) to restore the sons of Peisistratos to power, but the smallness of their host, and tensions between the Spartans and the Peisistratii led them to give up, though the Spartan presence as a 'show of force' did set the stage for the great rivalry of Athens and Sparta in the next century. Athenians for their part believed that to preserve their Democracy at home, they had to export their revolution outside Athens, specifically to safeguard against them from counter-revolutionary factions who were mostly looking to Sparta. Sparta having established its slave run dyarchy believed that their unique system of government could only be preserved by establishing stability across their lands, and even in their neighbors. They established a client system in the Peloponnese where Spartan agents, called "Harmosts" served as diplomats/governors/overseer would embed themselves in kingdoms of allies and clients, such as Corinth and any other poleis who invited them to stay. Any threat to local aristocracies would be resolved by Spartan commanders taking the field. Both Athens and Sparta contested to be Hegemon so as to establish Hegemony over Greece. Another Greek import, the word Hegemony included words like supremacy, imperialism, control and leadership. This was a period when Greek City States were deeply competitive and not merely in the battlefield but also in the realm of ideas, culture, and sports. Being "second best'' was just not an option.

Athens were wise enough, at the outset at least, to give Sparta a wide-berth. Holding sway over the Attika Peninsula, they harnessed the wealth from the silver mines of Sounion to establish itself as a major economy, and used this to build a powerful navy. The navy was staffed by Athenian citizens, not slaves (contrary to impressions, the Galley Slave was a medieval phenomenon; in fact on one occasion, referred to by Aristophanes in The Frogs, Athenians manumitted a large number of slaves into freedom specifically to serve as oarsmen on the Athenian triremes). Athenians engaged with trade across the Ionian Sea with the many islands and then on the West Coast of Asia Minor. In the reign of Darius I, a large number of states on the Ionian Coast, of Greek origin rose up in revolt against the Persian King, specifically over mistakes and errors made by Persian satraps (regional governors). Darius I decided to meet the Ionians in battle but during the Ionian revolt, Athens decided to back the rising rebels thereby putting them on the radar of Persia. Setting the stage for the Greco-Persian Wars.

There were two wars against Persia, and both became notable and storied for Athenians creating a Pan-Hellenic alliance of multiple Greek City-States, including their rivals Sparta into a bloc to contend against a common foe. The first war ended with the Battle of Marathon. The second war, waged by Darius' successor Xerxes I, resulted in storied events such as the Battle of Thermopylae, the Burning of Athens, and the Battle of Salamis.

Athens came out of the war as the strongest and richest nation of the Aegean Sea.

The era that is officially called "Classical Greece" is in fact far shorter than any other period in Ancient Greece. Depending on estimates, this period lasts from the rise of Athenian Democracy to the end of the Peloponnesian War, or the Death of Socrates, or the Rise of Alexander. But generally when people think of Ancient Greece, they think of the Athenian Century, and to that extent they label the entirety of Ancient Greece, Classical Greece. Athens became the richest, and most populous, and most important city-state in this period, generating a wealth of information and writing that is by and large our sources for the period that preceded it, chiefly Herodotus of Halicarnassus who settled in Athens after his family supported the Ionian Revolt.

In the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars, both sides had reasons to claim victory. Persia, under Xerxes, burned Athens to the ground (after the city had evacuated via the Long Walls to the Port of Piraeus), prompting the King to leave his army and return home, leaving command under the commander Mardonius who was then defeated in the Battle of Plataea, while the Persian Navy was defeated in the Battle of Mycale that happened the same day. The Persians successfully defended the land settlements of Asia Minor, while Athenians liberated the Aegean Islands. For the Athenians, the Spartan defeat of Thermopylae while a Pan-Hellenist propaganda in the time, was politically expedient since the death of 300 Spartans (alongside a much larger host of Thebans and Thespians), weakened Sparta in the interim (the Spartan training regimen was such that recruit replacement was hard for the elite force), allowing them space to build their hegemony. In time, the Athenians built a new alliance they called the Delian League, nominally located in the island of Delos. Historians would call this either the Athenian Empire or the Athenian Hegemony.

Athens expanded and built poleis across these islands, many of them having the same system of democracy based at home. In exchange for establishing this system however, Athenians demanded and extorted tribute from local islands in exchange for military support against remnants of aristocrats who abhorred this newfangled system. Many of these aristocrats benefitted from trade and contact with Persia or Sparta and they looked to them for support in restoring their rights. Likewise, even the newly democratized citizens disliked the fact that Athenian largesse came with strings attached, namely the inability to conduct independent foreign policy and trade, as well as the price of rebellion or leaving the alliance which was essentially, termination with extreme prejudice. Some of the actions taken by Athenians in this time were likewise quite arrogant, chief among them was using the wealth from the silver mines and the Delian tribute to build the Parthenon, a monument even on its construction in its time, and then moving the treasure from Delos to the Temple of Athena in the Parthenon. Despite that a number of Poleis remained committed to the Athenian project and proved loyal in defending their democracy from oligarchical backlash.

Internally, Athenian politics was often divided between across class interests and factions. The citizens of lower-income tended to favor democratic expansion which in practice made many of them take the cause of the navy and so interested and engaged in expansion, settlement, trade, and further exporting their system of government, spreading Democracy even by force. Other factions favored consolidation and internal reforms over naval expansions, which carried with it immense risks, among which was total defeat. Still others were "aristocratic" (power of the best people) who favored peace with Sparta, or Persia, and even a curb and reversal of democratic rights altogether. Athenians believed they were safe from their enemies owing to their navy, a wall of ships around Attika that defended it and had no contender and rival in all of Greece. The long walls of Athens had defended its people from Xerxes, and they were sure it would defend them from Sparta. The coast-hugging travel of antiquity required all ships trading across Greece to alight by the port of Sounion, the site of a major temple to Poseidon built by the Athenians as a symbol of wealth and power. From Sounion, Athenians could inspect and police naval traffic, preventing any surprise attack. This added a sense of security, and in retrospect, complacence, to the Athenian mentality of this time.

The Athenian land army was centered on the citizen soldiers, clad in hoplite armor emblazoned with the Owl of Athena (the sigil of Athens), who wielded shield and armor. Overall military command was overseen by Strategoi (Generals) who were elected by the full citizen body. The Athenian Direct Democracy in this period required all legal, legislative, economic, military policy to be voted by all. This meant that all elected officials had to be popular and had to court public favor to secure appointments. The principle of representative government, patterned in Rome, required elected officials (voted by popular favor) to exercise their judgment on the right people for a given task, irrespective of every single appointee's popular appeal. This meant that Athenian policy was vulnerable to sudden shocks and shifts of public moods, and likewise vulnerable to appeals of Popularity Power, conspiracy theory, smear campaigns, and this explained the jarring shifts in Athenian policy between exporting democracy on one hand, and extorting tribute from clients on the other.

Culturally and intellectually, Athens had no competitors and equals for centuries to come. Everything we know of Greek Philosophy, Greek Drama, Comedy, Architecture, Sculpture, derives to some extent from Classical Athens in this one century. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Socrates, Democritus, Plato were more or less contemporaries of each other. As were Hippocrates, Thucydides, Xenophon and Herodotus. While the Roman Republic and Empire would boast of many great thinkers, there was never a single period that generated as many in a stretch. For centuries to come, Athens would endure not just as 'a' Golden Age but THE Golden Age, and its scientific and artistic achievements wouldn't be mirrored again for centuries to come, first in Baghdad during the Arabian Golden Age on one hand, and the Italian Renaissance on the other. This is reflected in the iconic Raphael painting, The School of Athens, which immortalized this intellectual and cultural lineage. The Athenians believed in this period, as Pericles proclaimed in his speech at the height of The Peloponnesian War that they were the School of Greece, and it's a boast they could more than fully back up. Plato in fact would establish the Akademos, the source for the Academy, that became a School of Philosophy that brought in figures from across Greece to study in Athens, including Aristotle.

In the meantime, there was Sparta and its Peloponnesian League watching all this wealth and power that didn't belong to them, and a rival bloc of power that didn't include them, and which their own system of hegemony could neither touch nor replicate. The Pan-Hellenic alliance that had once united Athens and Sparta against Persia never entirely dialed down the cultural and intellectual hostility between the two states. Athenian politicians could be sympathetic to Sparta and defend it, such as Kimon who accepted a call to send a host to help Spartans subjugate a major Slave Liberation of helots that broke out after an earthquake. But Spartans rejected and feared the arrival of the Athenian host, humiliating Kimon in the process and indirectly aiding the rise of Pericles, who despite his noble heritage took the side of the democratic faction. Eventually, a series of diplomatic crises led to The Peloponnesian War.

The Peloponnesian War was three wars with long stretches of peace in the middle. The war at the outset was a stalemate. Sparta was a land power, Athens was a naval power. Spartans could never besiege Athens so long as it could supply itself via its ships, while remaining holed up behind its Long Walls. Athens likewise found it hard to expand inland to Sparta, located in Lakonia in the Southern tip of the Peloponnese Peninsula. Internally the war resulted in a series of internal crises, not only in Athens but also in Sparta, as seen in retrospect bringing to light the contradictions in both systems of governments. In the case of Athens, it's entire strategy of war was compromised at the outset throught the fatal ill fortune of the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE. This outbreak killed nearly 100,000 people and severely set it back. Among its casualties was Pericles, the only political figure who could safely bridge the many factions in the Athenian electorate. After him the stage was set for Kleon and his faction of expansionist and brutal populism.

Sparta for its part couldn't quite defeat Athens in the traditional way and so relied on innovative commanders like Brasidas to build an expeditionary force that comprised manumitted helots and other lower-class commanders from the mothakes class. A Mothax (singular) was a class of Spartans born from Helot women and Spartiate citizens, mostly Child by Rape, regarded by pureborn Spartiates with the stigma of the bastard child from the Victorian novel. They had rights and citizenship but had the stigma of the recently ennobled and given the nature of their lineage, regarded of suspected loyalty to the Spartan ideology. The most notable of these mothakes was Lysander, who would ultimately be the general who won the war for Sparta. Spartan aristocrats were impressed with Brasidas' victories in the field but they feared the reforms his innovations would unleash internally especially if the price of victory over Athens meant becoming more like them, and less like Sparta, and mostly that is what it came down to in the end. The Athenians for their part were cursed with politicians like Kleon and adventurers like Alcibiades, as well as factional infighting that resulted in internal coups. The war is famous for numerous atrocities committed by both sides. The Spartans massacred citizens of Platea upon surrender, breaking codes and norms that had existed until then. The Athenians subjugated the island of Melos to a storied bloodletting after they proclaimed neutrality and independence from both Sparta and Athens, which Thucydides dramatized in the famous "Melian Dialogue" in his book on the History of the Peloponnesian War. After the Plague, Athens endured the second disaster of the Sicilian Expedition, led by Alcibiades. His command as strategos was compromised owing to political enemies that had opposed him at home, resulting in a series of scandals of dubious cause, that led the event to be doomed at the outset. Alcibiades then betrayed Athens to Sparta, but in time would go back from Sparta to Athens, while also courting favor again from Persia before finally being assassinated at the command of Lysander in the tail end of the war.

The war ended when Lysander found a way to break the gridlock of Athenian naval domination by building his own navy with Persian aid. Lysander defeated the Athenians at sea and soon had a force to put a blockade around Athens at sea, leading Athenians to surrender. Lysander oversaw the destruction of the Long Walls, had Athens participate in the Peloponnesian League as a client of Sparta, and oversaw the installation of the Thirty Tyrants, an oligarchical council that included a few students of Socrates, including Critias. The Thirty Tyrants instituted a Reign of Terror that saw the execution of many Athenian citizens. It lasted for a year however. A rebellion to restore the democracy defeated the Tyrants, and the Spartans supported the restoration of Athenian democracy strangely enough. The Spartans feared Lysander more than Athens at this point. A Mothax general had achieved in field what noble Spartiate commanders of trueborn lineage could not do, and Lysander aspired to be a Pan-Hellenic commander and notable hoped to wage a campaign against Persia to defend the Ionian Poleis. Sparta had now become a Persian client and firmly opposed this scheme.

Lysander would die in battle in the Corinthian War that broke out years after the Peloponnesian War, and afterwards Spartan kings claimed to unearth a conspiracy that Lysander had plotted a revolution in Sparta that would break the traditional dyarchy in place of a more collective leadership (more an oligarchy than a democracy) that would include more rights for the mothakes. Whether this was true or not, it helps explain the Spartan mentality and their desire for friendship with the Athenians. The Spartans were essentially conservative in the fullest sense of the world, i.e. they believed Status Quo Is God and they opposed innovation, both as ends and as means. Lysander was a useful tool to re-establish Spartan hegemony and defeat the Athenians but his rise to power as an ambitious public-facing general who built connections and influences across Greece, all the way to the Persians was a major threat to internal security. Lysander's rise was a threat to the Spartan ideology, the constitution of Lykourgos and the caste system which was prioritized above all considerations. The Athenians, once brought to heel, were allowed to have their little democracy especially since their naval prowess was shredded, and the fact that they had burned several bridges with their neighbors over the course of the prosecution of the war, there was no more threat to Spartan hegemony or any destabilization calls for revolution.

Athens would revive as a democracy and operate in such a framework for about another 50 years or so in fact. Alexander the Great accepted vassalage of Athens but firmly allowed them sovereignty and internal autonomy to keep their system, so long of course as they didn't try to export it outside. Democracy was ultimately replaced by an oligarchical system under the post-Alexander generals. But the War marked the end of the Athenian Century and their period of hegemony.

Xenophon was an Athenian who became a mercenary who sold his sword to the Persians and the Spartans, and he was an eyewitness to the period of Spartan hegemon after the Peloponnesian War, specifically the manner by which Sparta Won the War, Lost the Peace. Sparta had established hegemony over all of Greece, and re-established a status-quo, but their ideology was essentially a call to reset the clock which failed to account for the vast number of social changes and transformation that occured across all of Greece. Much as they tried to do with Athens, they installed puppet rulers or tried to reinstall deposed rulers in poleis that had formerly been Athenian allies, and the result of brutal restoration by force caused violence and instability and was provably unpopular. Allies of Sparta during the Peloponnesian War soon turned against them, chief among them being Thebes.

Thebes was an oligarchical city-state that slowly became more democratic, especially under its outstanding leaders of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, who established an army known as The Sacred Band of Thebes, a squad of elite warriors who were also male lovers, as is traditionally understood. The Thebans established an army centered on cavalry rather than hoplite infantry and the result was a new kind of military doctrine that emphasized strategy and placement. The Thebans contended against Sparta and in the Battle of Leuctra, scored one of the great decisive victories in Ancient Greek warfare. Thebans, numbering 6000, faced a Spartan host of 10,000 and through the use of oblique tactics, broke the back of the numerically superior Spartan army and destroyed a large number of its Spartiate warriors, sufficiently so that the Spartans faced a catastrophic setback.

The nature of The Spartan Way was that the elite warriors took a great deal of time and manpower to train and buildup and that meant replacing them took a great deal of time, a problen for Sparta that Aristotle described as 'oliganthropia'. Traditionally, Spartans wouldn't directly field their own Spartiates in large numbers in the field. Rather they would lean on allies to provide them Cannon Fodder while the Spartiates held operational command. The Thebans exposed the flaw in the Spartan system, where a single large defeat in the battle left the path to Lakonia open. Theoretically, given time and space, Sparta could rebuild its fighting force of course but in the short term, the Thebans marched into Lakonia and Epaminondas liberated the helots of Messenia and resettled them in new poleis, with the rights of freedmen. The Spartan political economy was now fatally compromised because it lacked the numbers to halt the Theban invasion for one, and the force to re-enslave the helots for another, and without the helots brought to heel, the task of rebuilding the Spartiate losses became harder and harder. Sparta as a city-state was never entirely invaded by enemy powers but their time was effectively over. There would be attempts to restore Sparta but never would they return to the Pre-Leuctra status-quo and in the course of time Sparta would entirely decay as a society and civilization, subject to shrinking populations, with many able warriors travelling far to serve as mercenaries for other states. By the time of the Roman Era, Sparta would be little more than a resort town for travellers passng by hoping to see the weird traditions they had read up in histories already seen as classical to the Romans who arrived centuries later. The Thebans for their part struggled in the power vacuum after the fall of the Spartans. Other city-states disliked Theban claims to hegemony, even Athens who fought wars against Thebes even with support from the defeated Spartans, which led to the Thebes to call favors from Persia to help establish their order.

North of Greece, in a landmass close to the modern Balkan areas was the Kingdom of Macedonia. Macedonia spoke Greek but were culturally regarded by the Peloponnesians and the Attikans as culturally remote and backward. For a good part of the Athenian Century, Macedonia had been allied with Persia, and loyal allies at that. They fought against the Spartans and their host at Thermopylai and likewise were part of the army that stood by as Athens burnt to the ground. Persian support allowed Macedon to establish its rule in the Balkan regions, and extend hegemony over Epirus and Thrace. Macedonians were monarchical and aristocratic, very traditionally royal in a manner that the Southern Greeks with their widely varying political systems regarded with scorn. During the course of the Peloponnesian War, thanks to constant fighting down South, the Macedonians slowly became wealthy and stable and soon proved a refuge for figures fleeing violence down south, this includes the playwright Euripides who spent his final years in the court of the Macedonian King. Where Sparta scorned innovation, Macedonia embraced the social changes of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath.

Philip II had served in the Sacred Band of Thebes and absorbing the use of cavalry in the Thebans, he set about on a series of large military reforms on ascending to the throne. Philip II created an army that focused on infantry who were armed with the sarissa, a long spear that could be folded and carried portably with little effort by the soldier. The Sarissa spear was two pronged, forward and backward, and that allowed it to work defensively against enemy cavalry as well as aggressively with its slowly marching army. The companion cavalry of the Macedonians would seek an opening and then attack the enemies obliquely much in the manner of Epaminondas. Through this army, Philip II established the Macedonian hegemony, with which he achieved what had never been possible before, pan-Hellenic unification of all states under the sun of Vergina (the sigil of the Argead dynasty). Philip II defeated enemies in battle, including the Thebans, where he destroyed the Sacred Band of Thebes (which included former comrades-at-arms he now faced on the other side of the battle). In Athens, Demosthenes, a philosopher and orator gave many speeches against Philip arguing against his threat to Greece and the unification of the region under a King. These speeches, called the Philippics, would later influence Cicero. In practice, Philip II allowed Athens autonomy to remain democratic in exchange for accepting client status, and under this arrangement Athens remained loyal and democratic under Philip and then under Alexander. A revolt triggered by Demosthenes after Alexander's death (the Lamian War), led to the end of Athenian Democracy. Furthermore, Philip II had his eye on a grand plan to establish Macedonian legitimacy, to make it so that they would never be seen as mere Greek upstarts, a plan to invade and conquer Persia. To this end, Philip II formed the Hellenic League and was voted Hegemon as an official title. The Hellenic League included representatives from every Greek city-state except of course the Spartans who were too spent to oppose Philip II and too proud to bend the knee as a supplicant, and fortunately for them, too unimportant for Philip to personally march in and invade their territory. Philip II however had problems closer to home. He had a young son named Alexander, who had an ambitious mother Olympias. He also had another wife who was pregnant and well, at a banquet he was assassinated. And also a short while, in a situation that is not at all coincidental, Philip II's second wife and infant child were also murdered. Signs point to either Olympias, or Alexander the Great himself.

Alexander III of Macedon ascended to the title of Basileos (King) and set out on completing his father's project of invading and conquering Persia. He led a Pan-Hellenic Campaign staffed by a large number of generals, who became equally famous and notorious in their own right. He would become the most famous Greek in history, and the most influential of all conquerors, and the epitome of the prodigy who in his young age achieved what many in Greece regarded as impossible. He established the largest known European empire in antiquity, far larger than The Roman Empire at its greatest extent; extending from the Balkans to the Punjab, a domain exponentially greater in landmass than the small number of islands and mountain Greek City-States had pounded each other over in the previous three hundred years. A student of Aristotle, Alexander inherited a deep education in Greek history and Greek mythology as well as the culture of innovation that Athens had developed. The drive to excel and go beyond limits, led Alexander to venture away from Greece into other cultures, absorbing influences as he went along, eventually setting out on a quixotic quest to bring the East and West together into a common polity, seeking to end the divide between Asia and Europe. The dream ended with his death for the most part, since his Empire was broken and carved up by the Successor Generals, who then fought another civil war between themselves and their descendants that lasted for the next hundred years. Pan-Hellenic Unity was the exception in Ancient Greece, and never the norm. The default was rival Greek city-states and later rival Macedonian Greek generals fighting for dominance and supremacy over one another.

Alexander's empire ended up being split into multiple kingdoms. The three major successor kingdoms were: the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Antigonids in Macedon, and the Seleucids, who mostly inherited and controlled the Persian heartland extending all the way to North India. The Seleucids would be the only one that followed on Alexander's dream of assimilating with local cultures, having intermarried with Persian aristocrats. They also engaged in a marriage pact with upstart Indian conquerors such as Chandragupta Maurya who provided them war elephants that they used in their war against the Antigonids and the Ptolemaics. Meanwhile, culturally the Hellenic age saw a great outpouring in art, architecture, and science, largely centered around Alexandria, a settlement in Egypt that would soon become far larger than Athens in size, population, and economy and develop a scientific output that rivalled the Athenian Golden Age, and exceeded it in the realms of science, chief among them being the works of Euclid. The Greek language would spread far and wide, taking on the status in the Ancient World that English would acquire in the modern world. Through the Greek language, ancient languages of Egypt and Pali in India would be deciphered thanks to inscriptions in Greek and local languages left behind on inscriptions. Most famously the Rosetta Stone which helped to translate the hieroglyphics. The New Testament of the Bible has Greek as the language of its original version, and indeed the name Jesus Christ is a Greek rendering of Yeshua or Yoshua, with Christos (the "Annointed One") being a Greek calque for the hebrew word Messiah.

Eventually the Greek conquest of Persia was completely reversed with the rise of the Parthians, who defeated and conquered the Seleucid territories of the East, leaving a small remnant in the Western fringes. The Parthians however used Greek as the language of administration for centuries, and Greek syncretized heavily with native Persian influences in their kingdom, and that of the Sassanians after them. To the West of Greece, there were new hegemons of the Mediterranean, Carthage in North Africa, and Rome in Central Italy. Carthage was the largest economy in the Meditteranean and established a navy that in size and volume was far greater and extensive than Athens in the 400s BCE. Rome had established a Republic, that slowly expanded and conquered all of Italy before fighting a war against Carthage for Mediterranean supremacy. The Ptolemaics had become loyal Roman clients in his period, the Macedonians would initially back Rome before shifting to back Carthage, which put it on the Roman shit list in the aftermath. Much of Sicily was taken over in the first Punic War, Syracuse was conquered and brutally sacked with in 212 BC. Most notably, the Greek scientist Archimedes who was loyal to Hannibal, faced his death at the hands of a Roman legionary. In 146 BCE, during the Third Punic War, all of Peninsular Greece was conquered by the Romans, with Corinth, the final remaining independent Greek polis on the Mainland, subject to a brutal sack after it conducted trade with Carthage. After that, the Romans engaged in wars with the kingdoms and states of Alexander's successors on Asia Minor and the Levant. During the Mithridatic War, Athens was ruled by an ally of King Mithridates and was besieged by the Roman general Sulla Felix who subjected the city to a brutal sack that saw the destruction of much architecture from the Periclean age, though the Parthenon and some other storied sites remained intact though much of its gold and adornments were stolen.

As the poet Horace famously remarked, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror"). Greek culture and tradition was known to the Romans long before conquest but first hand contacts with Greek culture and thought unleashed a cultural and intellectual revolution in Rome. Greek soon became a prized intellectual language for the Romans, taking on the status that French would acquire for the British and Americans in later centuries, and ironically enough what Latin would become from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. As the Romans conquered territory that had once been part of Alexander's empire, they increasingly came to rely on Greek as a language of government and communication, since it was the common tongue on the richer and more popular Eastern territories of the Roman Empire. Increasingly Latin culture mixed with Greek culture to create a Graeco-Roman culture that despite some distinctions proved to synchronize well with one another. The most enduring symbol of this fusion is the fact that many iconic figures of Greek myth and history are primarily known by the Latin names rather than the Greek names: Hercules rather than Herakles, Alexander rather than Alexandros, and likewise using the Latin 'C' for names that in the original Greek were rendered with the kappa alphabet that produced the 'K' sounds i.e. its Achilles rather than Akhilleos, Socrates rather than Sokrates, and so on ^note Originally the Latin 'C' was in fact pronounced with the sound of 'K'. Ergo phonetically, the names we know as Caesar, Cato, Cicero should be pronounced Kaesar, Kato, and Kikero, but the sound associations changed over time, though the German title of Kaiser retains and preserves the original sound of Julius' name .

Many of the great historians of the Roman Empire were Greek by ethnicity and language (Polybius, Plutarch, Appian). Greek scribes were prized as slaves, tasked with instructing their masters and their household in Greek thought and culture, and usually attained manumission as a reward compared to other slaves. Roman emperors such as Hadrian and Julian further expressed admiration for Greek cutlure and earned the names "philhellenes" (lovers of Greek culture).

Eventually the Roman Empire split into two halves, the Western and Eastern Empires and in the Eastern Empire, renamed as the Byzantine Empire, the culture and language was mainly Greek and its rulers likewise became fully Greek after the separation from Western Europe. The Emperor Constantine the Great founded a settlement in Asia Minor, built over Byzantium, a small polis named after King Byzas in the Archaic Age. Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) became the economic and administrative capital of the united Roman Empire in its final centuries, and likewise endured as the largest Greek speaking city, in economy and population. The Hagia Sophia was the enduring monument of this region and stands as a testament to the brilliance and achievement of Late Antiquity, representing thousand years of Graeco-Roman ingenuity. The Eastern Romans also developed new technology, chief among them the "Greek Fire", a substance that when ejected from canons created fires that covered the surface of waters, proving a major advantage in naval battles to defend the Eastern Romans from encroachments on its West and East.

In historical terms, the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire is the longest continuous independent Greek state in its entire history, lasting until the Fourth Crusade, and following that, the conquest by the Ottomans.

A complete list of important/famous Ancient Greek thinkers would be extremely long, here’s a sample list, including several people with their own pages:

• Pythagoras: A mystic, a madman, a cult leader, and a scientist who developed what's still known across the world as the Pythagoras' Theorem, the formula that the Square Root of the Hypoteneuse of a Right-Angled Triangle is the sum of the roots of the other two sides. This formula was later discovered to have been independently devised in other parts of the globe, chiefly in Sumer and in India and Pythagoras himself seemed to have been influenced by Egyptian astronomers who also discovered this secret but in the mathematical record, Pythagoras was the earliest credited discoverer and most commonly cited earliest reference point.
• Ionic Enlightenment/Pre-Socratics: Philosophers and Writers on the Ionian Sea coast who conducted experiments in biology, science, and philosophy that would be orally recorded, or written down only to survive as quotations in later compendiums. Includes figures like Empedokles (who jumped into a volcano to prove his immortality but before that did things like fix the Four Classical Elements of Earth, Fire, Wind, Water), Heraclitus (who is most famous for his maxim, "character is destiny"), Thales (who believed that all of life is water), among many others.
• Socrates: Lived in Athens. Famously, used a method of questioning to lead a person to the conclusions he wanted. When younger, was a pretty good soldier. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, he was charged for 'corrupting the young' and 'worshipping the wrong gods' and rather than seek exile, he made the choice to drink hemlock (a fatal poison). He famously did not write anything down, even believing that written knowledge was a curse. Western Philosophy considers Socrates its founding figure, and divides philosophy as Pre-Socratic, Socrates, and then Plato onwards. His students included Plato and Xenophon but also a bunch of other aristocratic young men who became future war criminals in the Peloponnesian War, including but not limited to Alcibiades and Critias.
• Herodotus: Writer of The Histories, which includes information on a lot of cultures of the Mediterranean as well as their histories, with the Greco Persian wars as the main purpose of the work. He is part of a longer tradition of Ancient Greek Historians, but was named the Father of History (and "the Father of Lies") in Roman times.
• Thucydides: An Athenian naval commander who was removed from his post after defeat in battle. He used his time of unemployment to write a history of the causes leading into the Peloponnesian War, and is considered the founder of political history specifically, and a founding figure in the development of political science. His history of the war is in fact incomplete.
• Xenophon: A student of Socrates, Xenophon became a mercenary soldier who actually lent service to enemies of Athens and never truly fought on behalf of, and in defense of his homeland. He's the author of works such as Anabasis (The Journey Up country) whose famous lines, 'Thalatha! Thalatha" ('The Sea! The Sea!') is one of the most famous catchphrases in classical literature. Xenophon wrote in a more readable dialect than others. He wrote histories, analysis of Spartan constitution, an account of the trial of Socrates, and a biography of Cyrus the Great, that was a favorite of Alexander the Great.
• Diogenes: The most famous of the classical cynical philosophers. The word cynicism (or: Kynikos in Greek, i.e. dog-like) had a meaning in Ancient Greek different from the contemporary idea of the term. The Ancient cynics believed that the purpose of life was to attain inner happiness and inner peace but to achieve it they needed to scorn and discard all earthly material values and comforts, i.e. money, pleasure, glory, career, and so on. Diogenes became known as the most extreme practitioner of this idea, he famously lived in a large pot, never bathed or cleaned himself, and was a smelly figure covered in shit and piss (and hence he was called a Kynikos, owing to how he resembled the life of a stray dog). Diogenes was known for engaging passersby, who occassionally expressed worry about his life and sought to help him, by brutally insulting their way of life, considering them to be posers who just did what society told them to do and scorned most ideas and believes people expressed belief in (ergo, the more modern and familiar idea of cynicism). One famous instance has Alexander visiting Athens during his subjugation of the region and deciding to visit Diogenes who he had heard of. Upon meeting Diogenes in his pot, the Macedonian stood over him, only for Diogenes to scorn him for blocking his shade and then ignoring his presence. Alexander was quite impressed by the only recorded person who wasn't impressed and awed by his sight. As he said to his friends, "Had I not been Alexander, I would have liked to have been Diogenes."
• Plato: A huge amount of writing by Plato survives, including most descriptions of Socrates, and most historians and academics aren't sure if Socrates is really like Plato, or Plato essentially created a version of Socrates to communicate his ideas. Plato founded the Akademos, or the Academy, an open-air place of learning that became the model for the university as we know it.
• Aristotle: The student of Plato. He travelled a great deal across Greece for most of his life, and finally moved out of Athens for good. Wrote a lot about a variety of subjects, including what would later become several scientific fields, government, religion, and ethics. Scientifically, a lot of his writing wasn’t all that accurate, but was still an important step in developing these fields.
• Archimedes: Lived in Syracuse in the 200’s BC. Didn’t do much religious or government philosophy or such, instead, Archimedes as an ancient generalized STEM worker. In math, he’s well known for estimating the area of a circle, in physical sciences, figuring out how buoyancy worked. Famously he discovered the latter while taking a bath and seeing the rise in water levels when he entered the tub (or equivalent thereof). He jumped out crying "Eureka!" (I got it), thereby creating the "Eureka!" Moment. Syracuse had decided to ally with Carthage in the Second Punic War and Archimedes fully backed the war effort, devising siege machines, a giant crane that could (reportedly) scoop up ships and capsize them from afar, as well as a giant magnifying glass that could focus the sun and create a heat ray. Whether any of this was fully true or not is difficult to fully gauge. In either case it wasn't deadly enough or scalable enough for the Syracuseans, and the Romans marched into the city subjecting it to a brutal sack, and Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier. The Romans subsequently claimed that there had been orders to spare him but it's likely this was an ass-covering lie to save them from the embarassment of admitting to kill a tgreat scientist. Not that Archimedes was specifically targeted for assasination either, the fact is that it was war, and Archimedes was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The famous Antikythera Mechanism is hypothesized to be either created by him or inspired by his scientific theories, Cicero described a device that he credited to Archimedes and the discovery of the Mechanism in the 20th Century made many to assume that this was one of similar devices that Cicero had described.

It's a matter of dispute whether Homer even existed to start with. But the Greeks certainly believed he did and Homer inspired a rich poetic and literary legacy in Ancient Greece, leading to works by Pindar, Sappho, Bacchylides, among many others. The Greek Literary tradition has a variety of genres.

There's Aesop's Fables, a collection of folk tales attributed to Aesop, a figure likely as mythological as Homer but who is traditionally considered a Greek slave with deformities (sometimes a hunchback, other times a dwarf, othertimes a bit ugly and deformed). Some ancient commentators even claimed that Aesop was an Ethiopian slave who attained manumission after servitude with Greek masters. The fables fall under the category of folk tales and fairy tales and fell in part of a major oral tradition. It's likely Aesop's Fables or other similar fables were in fact the form of literature most accessible to the common Greek subject of the classical word, the vast overwhelming number of whom were illiterate and neither knew how to read or write, nor had the wealth and connections to access the resources to access the same. The most storied Greek literary texts, and mainly the poems, were in fact read by a tiny minority of elites and accessible to the people, if at all when set to music, either in religious hymns and as popular folk songs.

Greek Theatre is one of the earliest forms of theater we have good records for. It descended in part from religious rituals, the Festival of Dionysos which itself drew inspirations from the Festivals of Osiris in Ancient Egypt, which also had dramatic re-enactments of scenes from Egyptian Mythology. Only a small portion of Greek Theater survives to the present, and there are many mentions of playwrights and dramatic works that were valued by the ancients that have been Lost Forever. The most famous surviving playwrights are: Aescylus (who is credited with introducing multiple speaking parts in a scene and a Greek Chorus), Sophocles (author of Oedipus Rex, the most famous of all Greek plays), Euripides (who was actually for centuries the most popular playwright, with a greater number of his works being well preserved owing to his use of common speech, which made him a favorite for grammarians to learn and teach Greek to students). The only surviving comedic playwright is Aristophanes. Tragedies were almost exclusively scenes from mythology and focused on elevated aristocratic characters, while comedies could be set in contemporary Athens. In the Hellenistic Age, you had playwrights like Menander who also became a prominent playwright. His works are enduring for a catchphrase, "Aneripptho Kybos" ("Let the dice fly!" or "Let's roll the dice") which was quoted by Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon, it was later translated (or mistranslated) as "Alea acta est" ("The die is cast") one of the most enduring catchphrases even in modern times.

Tragedies were given elite importance and favor, and staged in prominent theaters (which still survive as ruins) while Comedies were staged in smaller settings. Only Greek men were allowed to attend tragedies, while comedies were (maybe) open to a wider audience. In the Roman era, this likely changed. The Latins were not as keen on segregation of men and women as the Greeks were, and the Roman theatrical world has many mentions of men and women attending plays and even references to actresses appearing on stage, which was quite explicitly banned by the Greeks in Athens. All drama was performed with actors wearing masks which had exaggerated frozen features that could be visible to audiences far and away. Theater was open-air, and lighting as far as we can tell was minimal to non-existent. The most well known bit of stagecraft is the devices they used to lower godlike beings on the stage, almost always hoisted from above the action on the dais, leading to the phrase Deus ex Machina.

Eventually, the Ancient Greek world developed other forms of literature and writing, including the proto-novel, or the Ancient Romance. Five survive to the present: Chariton's Callirhoe (mid-1st century), Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon (early 2nd century), Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century), Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Tale (late 2nd century), and Heliodorus of Emesa's Aethiopica (3rd century) but many others are believed to have existed.

For examples of ancient Greek plays, myths, and similar, see the Works Produced By section below. If myths and theater aren’t your thing, and you are more of a sports person, Greece has you covered. The Olympics are most famous, held at Olympia every 4 years in honor of Zeus, but there were a number of similar competitions, some of which included cultural competitions such as poetry in addition to athletics. While the events (wrestling, javelin throw, chariot race, etc.) were largely based on military skills, athletic competition required a different set of skills and physical build then soldiering, Athletes would have needed a lot of support and money to train for the competitions.

Today Classical Mythology endures as a fountain of storytelling and tropes. Even after the rise of Christianity, the richness of Greek myths, the charismatic larger than life heroes, the cool monsters and magical beings, the world-building remains an eternal part of global popular culture. This makes it a bit difficult however to assess what Greek Religion was like because at one point Ancient Greeks absolutely believed that Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, Athena, Hermes, Dionysos/Bacchus were real and active figures to fear/venerate/worship. These were figures to whom sacrifices were made. At one point this was actual Human Sacrifice under the Minoans and maybe some other parts of Greece. In times of practice, the community would nominate a figure, called the Pharmakos (or Scapegoat) to be sacrificed to the gods, and the Pharmakos was seen as a remedy for ills (and the word Pharmacy, a place for getting medicine, derives from Pharmakos). Eventually it became animal sacrifices. And religion to the Ancient Greeks was Serious Business, no less than it was to monotheistic faiths who came later.

Like most polytheistic faiths, worship and practice varied across time/region/culture. Different cities focused on different gods, and different families likewise had their own patron deity. Religious practice, as is documented, is quite similar to contemporary worship of Hinduism in contemporary India. People visited temples, shrines, offered flowers to the statues of gods and goddesses, muttered hymns and prayers, and in many instances carried out major religious festivals where more intensive rituals, offerings and festival activities were conducted. Today many of these temples and shrines endure in white marble but a great many of them would be painted in the Ancient World in bright gaudy color which would fade and then be repainted again on other occassions, much as it is with temples in India. Religious worship did not always follow the patterns laid out in the surviving epic texts. The Greeks venerated Homer's epics but did not truly see them as religious texts or scriptures. And to the extent such things existed, they haven't survived. Rather practice was based on rites, rituals, and oral traditions.

The major gods were venerated (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Athena, etc.) but there were also lesser known deities (eg. Hecate, Thanatos, Prometheus). Greek heroes such as Heracles and Theseus also had temples dedicated to them. The Temple of Theseus in Athens was reportedly a sanctuary for runaway slaves who could not be harmed if they took shelter there. These religions had a wide array of powerful to less powerful gods to spirits: the Greek version of this includes the standard Olympian gods (Zeus, Aphrodite, etc), Cthonic gods who lived underneath the earth. Poseidon was the god most popular among sailors and was worshipped largely in coastlines on either side of the Ionian Sea. The Horse was the symbol of Poseidon, and the Trojan Horse of the myths was in fact supposed to be a symbol offering tribute to Poseidon.

The Greeks believed in the afterlife and developed the idea of the underworld, which could be accessed through Ploutonions, small structures found across the Mediterranean world which resemble portals over holes or other cavities and chasms. Whether Greeks believed that a literal underworld existed over these chasms is impossible to name. Contrary to popular belief, Pluto is not in fact a Latin name for Hades but one of many Greek names attributed to the most feared and respected of all gods, the god of death who was also the god of wealth, owing to the vast number of riches accrued thanks to the ferryman Charon who collected fare from people who entered the underworld. Greek funerary rites required the people who were either cremated or buried to have their eyes covered with coins so that they could pay the ferry to Charon for passage over the rivery styx. Everyday and every moment people were dying, and every time Hades grew rich, so business was booming, baby. The journey to the underworld was a common feature of Greek myths and stories, to the point that the Ancients developed a name for this genre, katabasis (journey to the underworld or lower depths).

Religious practice manifested themselves in other ways, in popular festivals and mystery religions, of which the most famous are the Eleusinan Mysteries (that was actively proscribed and targeted by various state authorities) and the rites of Bacchus. These were sometimes regarded as potential subversive gatherings by mysterious figures, other times seen as sex cults, other times regarded as glorified scams not very different from New Age cults of the 20th Century. There were number of festivals centering on well known mythological scenes of which the most famous revolved around the abduction of Persephone by Hades. There was an entire women's only festival, the Thesmophoria, centered around Demeter spending her alloted time every year with Persephone. Religious controversies were far from unknown in the Ancient World, and often it had deadly consequences. Alcibiades was accused of destroying or desecrating the Phallus stones of Hermes statues around Athens, highly prized and sacred objects, and this was one of the factors that led him to defect to Sparta. Intellectually, near the end of the 400s BCE, there were a number of figures in Athens who started questioning the nature of religious beliefs, including Diagoras of Melos. A slave brought to Athens after Melos was sacked in a punitive campaign (i.e. the Melian Dialogue), Diagoras fell into a group of figures called the Atomists who argued that reality was material rather than metaphysical and perhaps the polytheistic pantheon was simply a metaphor for natural weather events. This ideas led to persecution and further exile from Athens showing that such views were an extreme minority.

At the same time, polytheistic practice evolved over time and never fully remained static. Under Alexander, who was deeply pious, Greek religion syncretized across the Mediterranean World and with Persia. Alexander fused Zeus with Ammon, and worshipped the gods Zeus-Ammon. The Ptolemaics developed worship of Serapis who was a fusion of Greek and Egyptian myths. Similar fusion happened across the entire stretch of Alexander's conquests, and in the Graeco-Roman world, this would lead to the developments of all kinds of new religious beliefs and practices, including but not limited to Neoplatonism, Gnosticism (originally "pagan" before fusing with Jewish and Christian, and later Islamic beliefs), Manicheanism, Sol Invictus among others, before the final conversion into Christianity (whose theology was inarguably influenced by writers and thinkers in previous belief systems).

Athens

Most of our writing from Archaic and Classical Greece comes from Athens, so it remains not merely the best known ancient Greek city, but the proverbial Greek city. This tends to distort our understanding of history a bit, since Athenian writers make assumptions and have a worldview which other cities might not share, but historians have to use what is available. Athens from the Mycenaean period to far into Roman times was among the most populated and powerful of the Greek city states. No other polis came close. Athens emerged as a city in Mycenaean times, though records are scarce, so we don’t know much about what they were doing at the time. It declined along with the rest of the Mycenaeans but seems to have recovered around 800 BC. As we follow the history once written sources reappear, Athens’s government develops into one where common people have more power, with the full-on emergence of democracy most often considered to be in 508 BC after the overthrow of the third in a series of tyrants.

The city-life of Athens is richly documented. It's known for the Agora, somewhere between a marketplace, a public square, and a civic forum. In the agora, you had the atmosphere that today you would find in a bazaar in Dubai, Muskat, Damascus. A lot of people calling out prices of goods and commodities. It was also a place where you had town criers or public announcers declaring important news and events. Athenian female citizens were cloistered in their homes and could only wear veils in public and denied rights of movement and interaction granted to men. This segregation of the genders is the major aspect that differentiates Athens from Rome. While Rome was patriarchal, its culture did not extend beyond political rights and women and men were allowed rights of assembly and interaction in public without any emphasis on cloister. Some historians however have raised doubts about the extent to which this was actually enforced in practice. The evidence against this is the case of Aspasia, the most well-known female resident of Athens in the Classical Period. Foreign born, coming from Miletus, Aspasia was a metic woman (the Greek word for foreigner and outsider, which unfortunately was repurposed in French to become an anti-semitic slur in the 19th Century), and she became known as a courtesan and lover of Pericles, and virtually his "common-law" wife, ergo the nearest thing Athens had to a First Lady. She was considered extremely intelligent and wise by some, but other times referred to in gendered terms as either a prostitute or a Lady Macbeth type, and evidence suggests that Aspasia did enjoy a prominent public profile. At the same time, as a foreigner, Aspasia never had Athenian citizenship and depended entirely on Pericles. The suggestion is that the "foreign" non-citizen resident and transient population of Athens (who for the most part constituted a sizable majority of the city) did provide women with more rights for public interaction than native full citizen women. But beyond point evidence is limited. As well documented as Athens is, it's nowhere as well documented as Ancient Rome in later centuries.

The city was vertically divided. The most famous part of Athens, the Akropolis (literally meaning "Old City") was located at the top of a hill on which rested the Parthenon and a famous statue of Athena covered in gold, sculpted by the great Phidias. The poorer part of Athens lived in the swampy parts of the city. The city had walls which protected it from a siege and these walls extended west, creating a small corridor and thoroughfare which led to the Port of Piraeus. The small island of Salamis was on the isthmus on the West, and the famous naval Battle of Salamis was fought and won there.

It's important to emphasize that Athens was a city-state, and later a city-state empire. The domain of Athens extended beyond its long walls and covered the Attika Peninsula. The wealth of Athens derived from the Silver Mines of Sounion located further south of the city.

Sparta

In pop culture, this is the land of tough, hardened soldiers. Often described as a foil to Athens, Sparta was opposite in some ways, though within the same systems as all Greek city states had. Sparta seems to have formed during the Greek dark ages. We don’t have as many sources describing Sparta as Athens (and several of these sources are Athenian), but still a good amount compared to other areas. For much of the classical period, Sparta seems to have been the most powerful of city states in Greece. It was involved in overthrowing the tyrants that lead to Athens’s democracy, The Peloponnesian war is described by historian Thucydides as caused by Spartan fear of Athens's rising power (the “Thucydides trap” is a name for a similar situation causing a war in other times and places.), its involvement in the Persian wars seems to be about maintaining leadership in Greece. Spartan land armies could get large due to the Peloponnesian League's armies and Sparta’s own population, and over the 500s they seem to have developed some improved combat organization. Sparta became very good at hoplite battles, though not so strong at other types of fighting.

Sparta itself is the name of the capital city of a State whose official title was Lakaedaemon or Lacedaemon, named after its mythological founder. Said state was located in the region called Lakonia / Laconia. The people were at various time referred to as Spartans (citizens of the city), Lacaedaemonians, or Laconians. The lambda logo on the Spartan shield (used in a lot of pop culture depictions) refers to Lakaedaemon. The literary tendency of Spartans for short and pithy phrases led to the word "laconic" to enter the language to refer to dry wit. Archaeologically, virtually nothing remains of Ancient Sparta. Further complicating matters, is that all the surviving writing about Spartans comes from Athenian historians (a lot of whom, being anti-democratic, were fairly sympathetic to Sparta for the most part, chiefly Xenophon a mercenary turned historian who had entered service to Sparta). Other sources derive from the Roman era, when Sparta was more or less a resort town for travelers seeking to see The Spartan Way in action resulting in locals putting on the equivalent of a Pro-Wrestling show or a carnival freak show for the amusement of their Latin overlords. Plutarch, a Greek historian writing in the First Century CE, more than five hundred years later, is also our source for Sparta.

Evidence suggests that Laconia was for the most part rural and agricultural with fairly little in the way of urbanization. The population was likely small. The society was organized in a strict caste system of true Spartiates (aristocrates) at the top, perioke or perioci occupying a middle ground of freedmen who were somewhat below full citizenship, and of course the helots, the lowest of the low, who endured the worst form of slavery documented in the Ancient World. Lakonia subjugated neighboring Messenia, and made most of its population into helots. Like caste systems around the world, there were also sub-castes and sub-divisions between interim positions and there was a lot of contradictions between how laws were proposed and actually enforced, but none of that should make one conclude that the system wasn't in fact oppressive and brutal.

Corinth

A city that is more famous in name than for any other features. Phrases like "rich Corinthian leather" (which to be sure is a case of "not rich, not Corinthian" though it might be leather) or Corinthian Marble and so on. Archaeologically Corinth is quite rich in ruins, and is the source for ruins like Akrocorinth (old Corinth) and the Temple of Apollo. The city was an ally of Sparta during The Peloponnesian War, and was politically quite oligarchical, and likewise being a port city it saw Athens as an economic rival. It's located on a narrow isthmus that connects to the Ionian Sea on one side, and the Aegean Sea on the other. A famous canal was constructed in the 19th Century that broke through the isthmus but in the ancient times the city had two harbors, one on the Gulf of Corinth, and the other on the Saronic Gulf. The city endured for ages as a major port city and was the last free port in Greece until the Roman Conquest, who subjugated the city to a legendarily brutal sack in 146 BCE because it had traded with Carthage. Legally, Corinth was free to trade with whoever it wished, especially after Carthage paid off reparations at the end of the Second Punic War, but the Romans believed that there was an unspoken and implicit embargo that forbade trade with anyone other than Rome and they felt that they needed to make an example of Corinth. The Roman sack of Corinth resulted in much destruction of ancient artefacts and structures, with reports of Roman soldiers using framed sculptures as impromptu boards for games reported in records. According to legend, the Romans melted so much of the city's Bronze statues that it led to a new kind of Bronze called Corinthian Bronze that was repurposed for other statues. But this is an exaggeration, though assuredly a lot of bronze work was destroyed.

Thebes

There's a Thebes in Egypt, and a Thebes in Greece. The one in Egypt's native name is Waset but the Greeks called it Thebes of the Hundred Gates and distinguished it from Thebes of the Seven Gates. In Greek Mythology, Thebes is an enduring city. The stomping grounds of Heracles and Tiresias, the kingdom of Oedipus Rex, his wife/mother Jocasta and their incest-children, the sons who fought each other, and their daughter Antigone who defied the city when they refused her wishes to bury them with honor. The historical Thebes has plenty of old ruins that suggest habitation and it perhaps occupied the place of the premier city before the rise of Athens, and then the status of the second city of Greece in terms of population and economy. After the Peloponnesian War, under the leadership of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, Thebes emerged as the capital of Boetia which became the most powerful state for about a few decades before the rise of Philip II. The worst thing that ever happened to Thebes was Alexander the Great. In response to a rebellion that had broken out after the death of his father, Alexander crushed Thebes and then ordered the city to be sacked and destroyed, making its citizens destitute refugees. It was an act of brutality that shocked many and one of the worst atrocities committed by Alexander. After the death of Alexander, one of his successor generals Cassander came to control Macedonia and he sponsored the rebuilding and resettling of Thebes, reviving the place though it never regained a shadow of what it once had.

Syracuse

Founded as a colony of Corinth, Syracuse is on the southeast coast of Sicily. It was founded in a particularly fertile region, and it became one of the highest population Ancient Greek cities.

If Athens was the biggest democracy and Sparta the most important Oligarchy, Syracuse is the major home of Tyranny, being mostly ruled by a succession of various tyrants (remember the ancient greek meaning for the term, autocrat/dictator equivalents who take over a system, this can include relatively successful rulers.), with occasional periods of more standard polis government in between. Tyrants in Sicily developed the famous Bronze Bull, Brazen Bull, or Sicilian Bull, a method of torture and execution that involved stuffing people into a large hollow edifice shaped like a bull. The outer shell was bronze and it was heated thereby boiling the person inside until they became charbroiled lumps of flesh. They were notorious for their arbitrary abuse of power. In one instance, Plato was travelling to the island and was forced into slavery by the reigning tyrant until his freedom was bought by a friend.

Syracuse had its share of philosophers and other cultural production (ike Archimedes described above.) but what it is most known for is its military history. Syracuse as the largest city on Sicily was able to exert control over large sections of the island. It was involved in several wars with Carthage over the island, in one of which the city attacked Carthaginian core territory and is described as seriously threatening the city of Carthage itself. It also faced an invasion by Athens during the Peloponnesian war, proverbially known as the Sicilian Expedition, the ancient world equivalent to the Vietnam War for 20th Century USA, with soldiers fighting conflicts against a hostile native population who didn't greet them as liberators as they were promised, and then sinking into a quagmire at great cost of money and men. The event permanently doomed the Athenian war effort. The city was ultimately besieged and destroyed in the Punic Wars. It was involved in starting the war: the threat it posed to some mercenaries drew Carthage and Rome into the war, who were too powerful at that point for Syracuse to do much fighting with, so the city largely stayed out of the fighting. During the second Punic war, Syracuse chose to side with Carthage, leading to a Roman siege and the destruction of the city.

Rhodes

Home of the original Colossus. Rhodes is one of the islands in the Aegean. It didn’t play a large part in Greek history during the archaic and classical periods, where it was under Persian control for a short time and was part of the Delian League/Athenian empire. Basically, a pretty normal Greek island.

It was after the Macedonian conquests that Rhodes emerged as a more important place. The government managed to navigate diplomacy between Alexander’s successors and remain relatively independent. The island became a trade and cultural center, with a strong navy, and a generally democratic leaning government similar to most Greek city states at the time, something of an Athens part 2.

The Colossus itself was built from metal weapons and other material left behind after an attempted invasion by Macedon, which had been fended off. The large statue was of the god Helios, and was placed somewhere near the harbor. Unfortunately, we don’t know much of any more details, because it fell down after a few decades, the fallen statue stayed in place for longer, but was after centuries of sitting around was scavenged for materials. As a result, pictures are speculative and a lot of this speculation is questionable, though we do know it was the largest statue of the time and obviously made a strong impression on a lot of people.

Rhodes would later ally with Rome during its wars in Greece, sending its navy to help with some battles. However, after the conquest of Greece, Rhodes evolved into part of the conquered province. Its cultural institutions remained strong, and it was a center of education for several centuries into the empire.

Alexandria (The Egyptian One)

Alexander founded a number of cities during his conquests called Alexandria, but this one in Egypt was easily the biggest and most important. Ptolemy, one of his generals, took over Egypt after Alexander died and made Alexandria the capital.

After the Peloponnesian War, Alexandria became the greatest city of Greece in economy, population, and cultural influence, exceeding Athens who faced a brain drain, where its best and brightest went to Alexandria instead. The city was founded on a grid pattern and became a model for urban planning and development in the Ancient World, establishing ideas like public squares and thoroughfares for vehicular traffic (i.e. chariots, and carts) that made it more spacious than Athens and even Rome, which were by contrast congested, narrow and small, made for walking. It was more or less the ancient equivalent of a city built to accommodate increasing public transport.

Under the Ptolemies, the city became famous for a series of monuments that have unfortunately been lost for good, giving Alexandria the poignant status of a city known across the world for architectural achievements that no longer exist but continue to haunt people's imagination. The most famous is the Pharos, the lighthouse of Alexandria which was for a while the tallest structure in the known world. This was a beacon lighthouse that illuminated across a wide distance. It was located on an island off the coast of the city itself and would be destroyed in an Earthquake with its ruins falling into the waters, and still located beneath the waves, as documented by underwater archaeologists. Within the city there was the Museon, a vast complex filled with studies of ancient texts and artifacts, that is today the model for museums (and the source of the name). The most famous part of the museum is the Library of Alexandria, aka THE Library, the one that inspired the creation of many such places across the Mediterranean (including ruins at Pergamom) and codified the idea of a library for many cultures subsequently. It was a real place filled with scrolls and papyri that Ptolemy mandated by law to collect/store/record. Ships alighting by Alexandria were investigated for books, which were confiscated and copied. The original went to the library; the copies were given to the owners. The Museon was a think tank in which the geographers Erastothenes fixed the circumference of the Earth, it was where Euclid wrote the Elements, and reportedly where Hero of Alexander developed a prototype for the Steam Engine which has been lost. Egyptian astronomers developed a system for recording dates that later inspired Julius Caesar's calendar, which after later modifications, is the one we use today. Such incidents, real or exaggerated is the source of Alexandria's mystique. The Library was subject to fires in the ancient world, much like other ancient cities. An especially devastating one occured during Caesar's occupation of the city and it probably led to destruction of a great deal of knowledge. However, the Librarians were diligent copyists, and copies of Alexandrian texts spread across other libraries and through such constant copies, many ancient texts have survived to the present day, using the library science developed at Alexandria (which they also invented). Another major tourist attraction was the Tomb of Alexander the Great, which was built in a special sarcophagus and stored in an ornate tomb connected to the palace of the Ptolemies. It too has been lost forever, as well as the tombs of the Ptolemies themselves, and that of Mark Antony and Cleopatra for that matter.

Alexandria's true wealth was its people. It boasted the most multicultural population of the Ancient World, bringing people across the Mediterranean in one place. It was home at one point to the largest Jewish population of its time, greater than the population in Jerusalem even before the time of Jesus Christ. Alexandrian Jews remained prosperous and influential for centuriest, famous for overseeing the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, called the Septuagint, and becoming a center for Gnosticism, a fusion of Jewish theology with Neoplatonism. In addition there were native Egyptians, as well as Greeks, and later Romans, in addition to which there were people from Canaan, North Africa, Gaul, and so on. It was the Mediterranean world writ large and it boasted a population around a million people in the time of Cleopatra, equal to Rome in that time. At the same time, the people of Alexandria often lived in segregated communities, not legally necessarily but more through pre-existing customs and there were distinct centers that rarely coalesced into a truly integrated culture a la New York City or London. The city was prone to riots and street violence across its entire history, often fought between communities against one another. One famous incident in the Late Roman Era, led to the brutal death of Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the last great pagan thinkers of the Library, and one of the very few female intellectuals of antiquity.

Caesar and later Augustus admired the city and modeled Rome in part on Alexandria's example. The city would continue to be prominent in the Roman era for centuries, being a center for Early Christianity. The Arabs conquered Egypt and Alexandria became prominent to Islam as well, and it remained a major city under the Ottomans and then in modern Egypt, where it enjoys a reputation as the most Western, most liberal and most cosmopolitan city of Egypt, and a major center of finance and tourism.

• Bull Leaping Fresco
• Laocoön and His Sons by a trio of sculptors from the Isle of Rhodes. It depicts the titular characters being bitten and strangled by snakes sent by the gods.
• Venus de Milo by Alexandros of Antioch. It's not certain whether she is a representation of Venus but is called that because of how she flaunts her sexual appeal.

• The Trojan Cycle, including the Homeric epics
  • The Iliad
  • The Odyssey
• The Batrachomyomachia
• The Theogony by Hesiod

• Classical Mythology

• Aeschylus
  • The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and Eumenides.
• Aristophanes
  • The Clouds
  • Lysistrata
• Euripides
  • Medea
  • Alcestis
  • Bacchae
  • Hippolytus
  • The Trojan Women
• Sophocles
  • Oedipus the King
  • Oedipus at Colonus
  • Antigone
  • A-Jax
  • The Women of Trachis
  • Electra (Sophocles)
  • Philoctetes

• Historie
• So far, alluded to in Hetalia: Axis Powers though Herakles/Greece's as yet unseen mother, Mama Greece. It's also implied that she eventually became the Byzantine Empire... only for her to die in Turkey's hands.
• Ulysses 31 is a Space Opera version of Greek myths, and one episode has 31st century Ulysses and his son Telemachus go back in time to Ancient Greece and meet their counterparts from that era.
• The prologue to Osamu Tezuka's Unico is set in Ancient Greece where the titular unicorn protagonist was owned by Psyche. During a Pet Competition held in Thessilsa, Unico gets separated from Psyche by Venus out of jealousy. "The Tale of the Fangs of Athens" chapter is set in Athens where Unico becomes a parental figure to an orphaned sphinx cub.The Greek motif is carried throughout the manga and other animated incarnations and the OEL Manga reboot series Unico: Awakening.
• Utae! Erinna by Futaba Sato

• 300
• Three, an intentional Spiritual Antithesis to 300.
• Asterix at the Olympic Games
• The Cartoon History of the Universe: Volumes 5-7, at any rate.
• Democracy: a graphic novel depicting how, well, Democracy was formed!
• Epicurus the Sage by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth.
• Mosaik No. 218-233 sees the Abrafaxe in Athens, Delphi and elsewhere on the eve of The Peloponnesian War. They meet Alcibiades, Socrates and Sophocles, but it is not all wine and roses - Abrax even becomes a slave and has to work building the Parthenon and in the Athenian silver mines.
• Erotocritos, a Comic-Book Adaptation of the novel of the same name, takes place in Ancient Athens, though the setting is so anachronical you wouldn't know it if it wasn't stated to you.

• 300
  • 300: Rise of an Empire
• The 300 Spartans
• Alexander
• Asterix at the Olympic Games

Myth-based:

• Clash of the Titans (1981)
• Clash of the Titans (2010)
• Helen of Troy
• Immortals
• Jason and the Argonauts
• The Odyssey (2026)
• The Return (2024)
• Troy
• Ulysses (1954)

• The Aeneid
• Gates of Fire: an epic retelling of the infamous battle told by the perspective of a Helot.
• The Metamorphoses
• David Gemmell's Lion of Macedon is a retelling of Alexander the Great (or, rather, his dad).
• The End of Sparta by Victor Davis Hanson is a novel about the deeds of the author's hero Epaminondas.
• Terry Pratchett's Pyramids and Small Gods both feature Ephebe, an Affectionate Parody of Athens and her philosophers, while Eric (as well as the videogame Discworld Noir) touches on The Trojan War.
• Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist series tells the story of a mercenary in Xerxes' army who does something to offend the gods, and is cursed with forgetting everything that happens more than a day ago, but who can see the gods. Wolfe "translates" place names (for example, Sparta is "Rope", and they fought the "Great King" at "Hot Springs"), lending a sense of immediacy, and distancing the book from the familiarity of the trope.
• The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley is a retelling of the Trojan War that gives the focus to the female characters.
• Mary Renault's mature period novels.
• Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon: Decidedly Non-Fiction.
• Thais of Athens is set during the classical period and the onset of Hellenism.
• Time Scout mentions Ancient Greece as the destination of a tourist gate, but only one brief scene features it and only two downtimers came through that gate.
• Spartan is a 1988 Italian historical fiction novel about two Spartan brothers: the elder brother is a Spartan paragon, the younger brother, Talos, was crippled and deformed at birth and abandoned by the parents due to the strict laws of Sparta, who obligates parents to abandon deformed infants. The younger brother is raised by the Helots, the Slave Race of Sparta, till the day he meets his long lost brother and a rivalry sparks...
• Alexander Trilogy: A book series about Alexander The Great.
• Conn Iggulden's "The Gates of Athens", the first entry of his "Athenian" trilogy, which covers the Battle at Marathon and the Battle at Thermopylae.
• Gods and Warriors is set in Archaic Greece (pre-Mycenaean).
• The Magic Attic Club book Megan in Ancient Greece has Megan go back in time to Athens during the classical period. She's not there long but is pretty upset that she's expected to stay inside most of the day and spin, and that her "cousin" Penelope and "Aunt" Cassia don't leave the house at all except for the festival.

• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
  • Xena: Warrior Princess: Though the series is also happening at the time of Ancient Rome. The writers never tried to respect chronology.
  • Young Hercules
• Jason and the Argonauts (2000)

• The backstory of the Arthurian Legend in Historia Regum Britanniae depicted Brutus and a group of Trojan exiles sailing from Italy to Britain to establish a new empire with New Troy (aka London) as the capital, which will set the stage for Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

• The Twilight Histories episode “The Winged Victory” takes place in a world where Rome fell into civil war, resulting in the lose of the Greek territories. The Greek city-states formed a confederation known as Pontus. By the time of the episode, the Romans are determined to reconquer Greece. Fortunately for the Greeks (though less so for you) you have been stranded in this world and are determined to give the Greeks a fighting chance by introducing steam engines, single-shot rifles, flame throwers, and gas lighting to Greece.
  • The miniepisode “Beyond the Indus” takes place in a world where Alexander The Great continued to push into India. Upon arriving, he and his army discover dinosaurs, who have been tamed by the Indians for food and as beasts of burden.
• Archaeostoryteller is a greek podcast entirely dedicated on covering stories (and sometimes, myths) from this time period.

• Creator/William Shakespeare wrote a few plays set in Ancient Greece:
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream: Albeit in a fantasy version of the setting.
  • Pericles, Prince of Tyre
  • Timon of Athens
  • Troilus and Cressida
• EPIC: The Musical, a retelling of the Odyssey by Jorge Rivera-Herrans.
• Faust: Second Part of the Tragedy: Faust and Mephisto are visiting Ancient Greece for a while, where Faust even marries Helen of Troy.

• Apotheon. The game's graphic style is inspired by Ancient Greek black-figure pottery.
• God of War: The first three games take place here.
• The Battle of Olympus
• Kid Icarus
• Empire Earth covers the founding of Athens by Heracles and his priest Kalkas (here a tribal chieftain) up to Alexander the Great.
• Age of Empires, as well as Age of Mythology; also, Rise of Nations has a tour through the "Classical Age"
• The Civilization series when playing as Greece. This is most apparent in VI where Greece is uniquely split between the Athenian and Spartan city-states and Macedon, allowing a game to be played with nothing but Greeks.
• The first and third games in the Hegemony Series. Hegemony: Gold covers the rise of Philip II of Macedon and the Peloponnesian War through 2 campaigns (Athenians and Spartans). Hegemony III covers the Greeks who reside in the south of what is now Italy, in the region the Romans called "Magna Graecia" ("Great Greece").
• Total War
  • Despite the title, Rome: Total War is set in an era still very much dominated by Greek culture, and the Successor States of Alexander the Great constitute a large portion of playable factions. The expansion campaign, Alexander, is a prequel which covers the conquests of the eponymous King.
  • The Wrath of Sparta expansion campaign to Total War: Rome II, which focuses on the Peloponnesian War.
• Titan Quest
• Zeus: Master of Olympus features most of the important city-states and events of Greek history, though it makes no attempt to disguise the presence of mythology (the Athens campaign features both the war against Persia and the centaurs). The sequel focuses on Atlantis, but still has an Allohistorical Allusion or two (the destruction of Atlantis is linked to the historical eruption of Thera, which is believed to have inspired the story in Plato's writings.
• Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is set between 431 and 422 BCE during the Peloponnesian War between the Athens-led Delian League and the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Additionally, the prologue is set in 480 BCE during the Battle of Thermopylae between the 300 Spartans (led by King Leonidas) and the Persian Army (led by Xerxes). Elements of Ancient Greek mythology such as Medusa and Pegasus are also incorporated into the story and the "Atlantis" DLC features the titular underwater city under the control of the Isu.

• PepsiaPhobia is about an Amazonian single mother and her son and their adventures in Ancient Greece.
• Odysseus the Rebel
• Prometheus!
• Amazoness!
• Rumors of War: Somewhere between the Late Bronze Age and the Classical Period, presumably in the Greek Dark Ages.
• In Sluggy Freelance, this is seemingly where the Holiday figures (Santa Claus, Tom Turkey, etc.) got their origins.
• Aisopos tells the story of the infamous storyteller.
• A-gnosis' comics, seemingly taking place in the (mythological) Bronze Age going by the fashions used.

• The French edutainment Confession Cam parody web-series Confessions d'Histoire:
  • The Cleopatra VII episode points out the Greek/Macedonian roots of her family, for she is often depicted as an "Ancient Egyptian Empire" queen while she wasn't.
  • There's a planned four parter about Alexander the Great. The first episode came out in December 2022, with notably Aristotle being interviewed about his days of tutoring of Alexander.

• Disney's Hercules and its animated spinoff series.
• The setting of the Cubby Bear cartoon "Fiddlin' Fun" is in times of Ancient Greece, with Cubby participating in a chariot race.
• The sixth episode of Il Était Une Fois..., "The Age of Pericles", covers this time period, from the Minoan Civilization to the death of Alexander the Great.
• Krapopolis