History of Greek

The ancient name of Greece is Achaea. The Achaeans are the Greeks of whom HOMER sang. The roots of European civilization lie in Greece, but the beginning of Greek greatness, hidden from us by lack of written records, can, to some extent be revealed by ARCHAELOGY (Crete, Troy). A number of city communities had already come into being when we get our first picture of Greece. In Greek world, the Mycenaean empire continued to about 1200 B.C. Then until 1000 B.C. the story of Greece is obscure. Greek-speaking tribes had already come into Achaea about 2000 B.C. (during the Greek Bronze Age). The later Mycenaeans (Achaeans) of Homer's story were undoubtedly Greek-speaking. Their age was one of restless activity; in it seven princes banded together to destory Thebes (about 32 miles N.W. Of Athens) and later, probably in the 12^th century B.C., the might of Achaea besieged Troy. But the Achaean power was soon to end, then, by the invasion of the northern Dorians, about 1100-1000B.C. The Greeks now had long iron swords, iron pointed spears, round shields with a central boss, bronze armour, helmets with crest and plume, hauberk of mail, greaves on their legs, studded belt of bronze and leather. They had war-chariots. They burnt their dead. The fusion of north and south was probably one cause for Greek greatness. The Athenians and Ionian's were artists, traders, sailors: they retained southern characteristics. Spartans were warriors, and their art was music and song: they had northern ideas. The rise of Athens was a great leap in civilization: it took place in the 5^th century B.C., and by it Persia was defied and defeated. Athens was a free republic from 507 B.C. At the end of the 6^th century the Ionian's (Greeks of Asia Minor) rose in revolt against the oppression of their Persian masters, and Athens and her neighbor, Eretria, went to their help and burnt Sardis, a Persian capital in Asia Minor. In 492 Darius, king of the Medes and Persians, sent a great army to invade Greece by land, with ships coasting alongside, but the fleet was wrecked off Mount Athos. In 490 B.C. Darius tried again. He planned to engage the Athenians on the north coast of Attica and thus to catch Athens undefended. But at Marathon the Persian archers were swept into the sea by the Athenians, who then speedily returned home to defend Athens. The Themistocles prevailed upon the Athenians to build ships, which they did. In 480 B.C. Xerxes, now king of Persia, decided to attack Athens again. Where his army had to cross the sea in the Dardanelles a bridge was built; where the ships had to pass Mount Athos a canal was dug. At Thermopylae the Spartans failed to hold the pass, but the Persian fleet was damaged by storm. To defend the isthmus Athens was abandoned, and the Persians burnt it. But the sea-fight off Salamis, with Xerxes sitting on the hill above to see his naval victory, ended in the destruction of the Persians again sacked Athens, but Spartans and Athenians inflicted a land defeat on the Persians, and they withdrew for ever (479 B.C.)

Athens was rebuilt. She was a democratic republic. Great men in all departments of life were there to help, so that in art and politics Greece as a great power dominated its world for a time. From 460 B. C. she pursued an imperialistic policy, co-operating in the confederacy of Delos for the protection of Ionian cities and indeed dominating it and building an empire upon it. Athens attacked Cyprus and overran Boeotia, but in 477 B.C.she was defeated at Coronea (in Boeotia) and thereafter abandoned land supremacy for that at sea. The inevitable Peloponnesian War with Sparta 431-404 ended in Athenian defeat. In Athens's century of greatness lived Miltiades, Thermistocles, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Pheidias, Pericles, Anaxagoras, Aristophanes. Herodotus, Thucydides, Polygnotus and Ictinus. Spartan domination lasted less than thirty years (404-371 B.C.). During this time the episode of XENOPHON'S Anabasis took place (from 401 B.C.). Thebes and Athens joined forces against Sparta, and Thebes defeated Sparta at Leuctra (371 B.C.) and became the uneasy leader among Greek states. In 362 B.C.the Battle of Mantinea was fought between Thebans under Epaminondas and the Spartans and Athenians. Epaminodas was killed in the hour of victory, and thereafter Theban power waned. In Macedonia, Philip II, having become a strong king, attacked and defeated a mixed Greek army at Chaeroneia in 338 B.C. The following year he was elected president of an all-Greek union to march against the Persians. In 336 Philip was murdered and his son ALEXANDER THE GREAT became king. He conquered the known world, but on his death the empire fell to pieces. Out of it in the next generation three great kingdoms emerged: Macedonia, war-like and turbulent, under various short dynasties; Asia; huge and wealthy, under the Seleucids, and Egypt under the Ptolemys. In all three, language and civilization were Greek. The Hellenic race still lives in modern Greece. Conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C., her pagan learning continued until Justinian closed the Athenian schools of philosophy in A.D. 529. The Goths under Alaric (A.D. 396) ravaged Greece. Slavs conquered it and, in part, people it. Norman invaders took it, and in the 11^th century Harold Hardrada of Norway entered Athens in triumph. In the 13^th and 14^th centuries there were Frankish dukes of Athens. In 1456 it fell to the Turks, and with a brief Venetian interlude they held it until 1830, when it regained independence, which was broken by Turkish sovereignty from 1897 to 1913. Since then Greece has been a sovereign state with growing prestige.