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Ancient Greece - 1200-300BC
Following a period of sporadic incursions and large movements of people, demographic and economic changes in the eighth century B.C. led to overseas colonisation, spreading the Greek language and culture across the Mediterranean and Black seas.
The first culture of Aegean civilization on the Greek mainland is named Mycenaean for the palace at Mycenae on the Pelopónnisos. Scholars call the Mycenaeans the "earliest Greeks" because they are the first people known to have spoken Greek. They flourished around 1600-1100 BC, and by about 1400 BC had become very prosperous. Excavations of Mycenaean graves have revealed that they buried their dead with gold jewellery, bronze swords, and silver cups. Like the Minoans, the Mycenaeans lived in independent communities clustered around palaces and ruled by kings.
The Mycenaeans were a race of warriors that enabled them to conquer the Minoans, but their eagerness to fight directly contributed to their downfall. By 1200 BC, they were warring with each other and embarking on overseas raids. This warring led to their downfall, the populations of their once-mighty cities dwindled rapidly until there were no urbanised culture left on the Greek mainland. Most of these cities were eventually destroyed and all the great craftsmen faded away when the cities could no longer support them.
Greek Dark Ages (c1200-750BC)
The five centuries of the Dark Ages (also called the Greek Middle Ages), refers to the period between the fall of the Mycenaean civilization and the re-adoption of writing in the eighth or seventh century BC. After the Trojan Wars, the Mycenaeans went through a period of civil war, the country was weak and a tribe called the Dorians took over. Some speculate that Dorian invaders from the north with iron weapons laid waste to the Mycenaean culture, but there has been no archaeological evidence to prove this. What is known is that many Greeks returned to a nomadic lifestyle in small tribal groups, or took to sea and migrated to the Aegean islands. They abandoned writing and most crafts and allowed their large commercial network to dissipate. Prior to this time, they had been extensively trading with Asia Minor.
Archaic Period (750-500BC)
This refers to the period in which the beginnings of Greek monumental stone sculptures and other developments in the naturalistic representation of the human figure are found. During the Archaic Age, the Greeks developed the most widespread and influential of their new political forms, the city-state, or polis, which was administered by the aristocracies. There followed a period of Greek colonisation of Southern Italy and Sicily.
Classical Period (500-336BC)
The Classical period of ancient Greek history is fixed between about 500 BC when the Greeks began to come into conflict with the kingdom of Persia to the east, and the death of the Macedonian king and conqueror Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. In this period Athens reached its greatest political and cultural heights: the full development of the democratic system of government under the Athenian statesman Pericles; the building of the Parthenon on the Acropolis; the creation of the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides; and the founding of the philosophical schools of Socrates and Plato.
Hellenistic Period (336-146BC)
The Hellenistic Period refers to the time between the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great and the establishment of Roman supremacy, in which Greek culture and learning were pre-eminent in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. It is called Hellenistic (Greek, Hellas, "Greece") to distinguish it from the Hellenic culture of classical Greece.
During this time, Greek culture and power extended itself across the known world. While the classical age of Greece produced great literature, poetry, philosophy, drama, and art, the Hellenistic age "hellenised" the world. At the root of Hellenism were the conquests of Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander. However, the Macedonians did more than control territory; they actively exported Greek culture: politics, law, literature, philosophy, religion, and art. Exporting culture was a new idea, and more than anything else this would deeply influence all the civilisations and cultures that would later arise: the Romans, the Christians, the Jewish diaspora, and Islam.
After Alexander's death in 323, there was a half-century of wars, mostly in Asia Minor. During the 2nd century BC after the kingdoms had been weakened by war, some mainland Greeks appealed for help from the region's growing superpower, Rome.
The Romans had already taken over the areas in Italy and the western Mediterranean where Greeks had lived for centuries and saw the appeal for help as a chance to increase their power further. They intervened against the kingdoms and told the Greeks they were once again free, but the Romans meant that the city-states were free to govern themselves so long as they did what Rome wanted. The Greeks rebelled and a Roman army destroyed the city of Corinth in 146 BC. Thereafter Roman governors presided over mainland Greece. Within about a hundred years, Rome conquered the remaining Hellenistic kingdoms and their Greek cities. Egypt, under Queen Cleopatra, was the last to fall, in 31 BC.
Roman Greece (31 BC-AD 395)
In time, however, Greece became reconciled to Roman rule. Emperors increasingly honoured leading Greeks by choosing them for the Roman senate and presenting lavish gifts to the cities, such as a Pan-Hellenic festival created by the emperor Hadrian in AD 131. This attention increased tourism to Greece's famous sites and religious shrines. Students from abroad flocked to its distinguished universities, especially in Athens. The peace created by the empire gave people more time for cultural activities, and Roman interest in Greek culture peaked in the 2nd century AD. Greek writers such as Plutarch and Lucian wrote new types of imaginative literature, including in-depth biography, social satire, and science fiction.
Greece's reputation as a cultural centre radically changed its economy, leading many people to move from the country to the cities to work in the tourist industry. Places that attracted tourists greatly prospered. The Greeks' prosperity ended when civil war, earthquakes, and epidemic disease crippled the empire in the 3rd century AD. Germanic raiders, the Heruli, plundered Greece from 267 to 270, severely damaging Athens. The emperors Diocletian (284-305AD) and Constantine the Great (306-337AD) restored order, but the Roman Empire remained unstable. In 330 Constantine created a new capital for the Roman Empire. The new capital, named Constantinople, was built on the site of Byzantium (modern Istanbul), a Greek city reduced to a village in 195AD after it had supported a failed rebellion.
The picture is a statue of Homer and is available to buy.
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