Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece was not a country but a world of several hundred small city-states, each with its own laws, coins and gods, scattered around the Aegean and, through colonies, from Marseille to the Black Sea. They shared a language, Homer's poems, the Olympic Games and the oracle at Delphi, and they fought each other constantly. The period runs from the eighth century BCE, when the city-states took shape after a dark age and the alphabet, the Games and the epics appeared, to 146 BCE, when Rome destroyed Corinth and made Greece a province.

Its peak was the fifth century BCE. Athens had become a democracy in 508 BCE, with every male citizen voting in the assembly and serving by lot in its courts. In 490 the Athenians beat a Persian landing at Marathon, and in 480, after the Spartans died at Thermopylae, the Greek fleet destroyed the Persian navy at Salamis. The fifty years that followed were the golden age: Athens led an empire of allies, built the Parthenon from 447, and produced the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the history of Herodotus and Thucydides, the sculpture of Phidias and the questions of Socrates. Its silver 'owls' were the dollar of the Mediterranean.

The golden age ended in war between the two great powers. The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta lasted, with a pause, from 431 to 404 BCE, when Athens surrendered and pulled down its walls. Five years later the restored democracy executed Socrates. The fourth century belonged to Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, and then to Macedon: Philip II crushed Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338, and his son Alexander conquered the Persian Empire before dying at Babylon in 323. Greek became the language of cities from Egypt to Afghanistan, but the free city-state was finished.

Alexander's generals carved his conquests into kingdoms that fought for two centuries, while a new power grew in the west. Rome defeated Macedon, dissolved it, and in 146 BCE sacked Corinth and ended Greek independence; the same year it destroyed Carthage. The Romans, who conquered Greece, were conquered by its culture: they copied its statues, learned its philosophy and wrote their epics in its metres.

Its legacy is most of the furniture of Western thought. Democracy, philosophy, history, theatre, the Olympic Games, geometry, the atom, the alphabet we use, the orders of columns on every bank and courthouse, and the habit of arguing about politics in public all come from these small cities. The Parthenon still stands over Athens, and the words 'politics', 'economy', 'physics' and 'mathematics' are Greek.