A note about geography: The modern state of Greece (or Hellas) did not come into existence until the 1830s, and occupies only a fraction of the territory once identified as the land of the Greeks. The region the Greeks called Anatolia (the modern state of Turkey) was as important to Classical Greek and Byzantine civilization as was the Balkan Peninsula.
As is true for all of the topics in an introductory course, but especially this one, there is a wealth of literature and a world of information that this brief discussion does not begin to mention. Where possible, I have provided links to other relevant web sites.
Greece is one of the last places one would have expected to find a civilization, particularly one as rich and complex as that of the Greeks. Greece is a land of mountains, fertile valleys, and the sea. The mountains tend to isolate one region of Greece from another and limits the regions open to cultivation. Thus, the one essential for civilization--agricultural surplus--was not as readily available as in Mesopotamia or Egypt.
But the ocean, while isolating Greeks from one another by land, tended to open them up to the world. Unable to sustain a large population by normal agriculture, the archaic Greeks turned to specialized agriculture--olives and grapes--to produce marketable commodities. Trade turned them outward, made them interested and involved with the rest of the world. Babylon, Assyria, and Persia looked at the world as something to be conquered. The Nile civilizations looked at the broader world as something to be ignored if possible. The Greeks, however, tended to see the rest of the world as a potential market.
The most ancient civilizations in Greece was virtually unknown to us until 1870 when a German millionaire named Heinrich Schlieman, who was obsessed with the stories of the Illiad--so much so that he named his children Agamemnon and Andromache--started digging around in Anatolia and on the Greek mainland. Most scholars of his day dismissed the Iliad as fiction. There was no more point in looking for it than for Atlantis. Schleiman found it. More importantly, he discovered the ancient cities of Mycenae and Tiryns, and a civilization no one suspected--the Mycenaean,dating from 1600 to 1100 BCE. The Trojan war took place late in the era, around 1300 BCE.
Sometime before 2000 BC these proto-Greek speaking people, began to infiltrate the Greek mainland. By 1600 BC their wealth and culture rivaled that of the older civilization on Crete. They buried their dead with fabulous gold treasures--Schleiman was sure he had found the death mask of Agamemnon--but they were still small players compared to the civilizations of Mesopotamia and of the Hittites in Asia Minor.
About 1200 BC this Mycenaean Civilization collapsed for no apparent reason. The Dorians--barbaric Greeks--have been blamed, but more likely perhaps was climactic change--drought. At any rate, from 1100 to 800 BC the entire region seems to have been plunged into a state of semi-barbaric chaos. People forgot how to write, forgot much of their technology, they abandoned their cities and the whole of Greece became a wasteland of nomadic wanderers isolated from one another by the mountains and rugged coastland of Greece.
An even older civilization on the island of Crete was discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. Excavating the ancient city of Knossos, he discovered the Minoan or Cretan civilization, dating from 2600 to 1200 BCE.
We know that the kings of Knossos ruled an extensive naval empire from wondrous palaces on Crete--complete with flush toilets, and writing. They borrowed their written languages from Egypt and Mesopotamia. Minoan pottery has been found throughout the eastern Mediterranian. A series of earthquakes, volcanic activities, and invasion by the sea people--the Philistines of the Bible--brought Minoan civilization to an end around 1100, leaving a great many questions. It is not altogether clear how much impact the Minoans had on the development of Classical Greek civilization.
Around 800 BC Greece seems to have become overpopulated. The land could never have supported a large population, but over the centuries the forests had been cut down--which thus caused the soil to wash away. Clearcutting a steep hill is not good forestry practice. The hillsides of modern Greece were not always rocky and barren, but once the forests were gone, they were impossible to replace.
Facing overpopulation, the Greeks began establishing colonies throughout the Mediterranean world. Some colonies were trading stations, others independent city-states with an agricultural base of their own. Colonization did not create an empire. Trade creates its own ties. Occasionally, individual cities would send out colonies and become a metropolis, a mother city, but the ties remained economic and informal between the metropoli and their colonies in Italy, Sicily, North Africa, France, and Spain. The Mediterranean did not become a Greek lake, for the Greeks did not dominate it politically like the Romans would.
When we talk about Greece here we are really only talking about a collective geographic and cultural and linguistic unity. Isolated, competitive, and independent, Greece would not be united until forced to do so by the threat of Persian conquest. Instead, the basic political unit was the polis, the city-state, of which there were about 800 in ancient Greece.
Every Polis was different. Athens and Corinth were among the largest, but even they had only a few thousand citizens. A polis would generally be a city, sometimes fortified, and the farmland and villages that surrounded it. It might have trading partnerships around the Mediterranean--like Corinth, or it might be fiercely independent--like Sparta. Physical isolation made it difficult for any one polis to dominate more than a small region.
Traditionally, most poleis had been dominated by the landed aristocracy, leaders of tribal, and family groups. Trade and commerce tended to undercut the power of family and landed elites, however, and tended to allow a single tyranos, tyrant, to emerge. Tyrants were supported by the newer merchant classes against the landed classes. Although not necessarily tyrannical in the modern sense, enough were to give the word its present meaning.
Greek military organization tended to undercut any truly unpopular tyranny. Theirs was the first truly organized combat. Earlier armies had fought like armed mobs, with only a modicum of organization. Thus, heroes were likely to emerge, and, like David in the Old Testament, turn their fame to political advantage. But an army of heroes is quite difficult to control.
The Greeks, fighting in relatively small numbers, made the most of their numbers by organizing their fighting men into tight units called phalanxes, literally formations. Each hoplite (or infantryman) carried a short spear (not a javilin which is thrown) and a shield. With the shield the hoplite protected his left while his neighbor protected his right. (Spartan mothers would send their sons off to war with the admonition, come home carrying your shield or carried on your shield. No greater dishonor was imaginable than to drop ones shield) Lined up, marching in step, a phalanx could be a fierce sight. No cavalry charge could break up a disciplined phalanx, because horses would not charge into the spears. When two phalanxes met, they poked and pushed each other until one side broke and started to run. If one person broke, the whole formation came apart, and the right flank was always the weakest. Soldiers would be lined up in as many as eight ranks, the strongest in front. When one fell, another could step forward to take his place.
Only a citizen could bear arms in the phalanx, and only if he could afford his weapons. There was no room for heroes. Battles were won by teamwork.
Thus, the military organization tended to create a rough equality among citizens of the poleis. Non-warriors such as women, non-citizens, and the poor, tended to lose political and social power. Both Athens and Sparta, though vastly different, shared this concept of military-political organization.
There was one nice thing about being a Spartan: one always knew exactly where he or she stood, what one's purpose was and what one was supposed to do. Sparta was. . . orderly.
The vast majority of the people living under Spartan rule were helots. They had been a free people, the Messenians but in the 7th and 8th centuries their towns had been conquered by Sparta. Messenian land had been co-opted by the city and divided among the Spartan citizens to support them. The land and helots still belonged to the city, so the helots were something like state slaves. They were a constant source of tension in Spartan society, regularly threatening rebellion. In order to keep the helots in line, the Spartiate, the small minority of male Spartan citizens, had to devote their entire lives to maintaining the status quo.
There was also a somewhat smaller class of free, non-citizens called the perioeci, people who lived around the city.
The Spartiates made up only about three percent of the city's population. Citizens were able to vote at age 30, but I would still hesitate to call them free, for they, more than the other classes, existed to serve the state.
At birth, the parents would notify the gerousia, the council of elders, 28 in all, one of whom would inspect the child. If it were strong and healthy, the parents would be allowed to raise the child. Otherwise, the baby would be taken to a nearby hill and exposed to the elements. Sparta could not afford to raise up men and women who would not be able to contribute to the city.
Spartan childrearing was, well, Spartan. Under age six, children wore very few clothes which they probably did not mind. At age six, a boy would leave the company of women to live in barracks with other boys his age. They were given very slim rations and expected to steal whatever else they needed to eat. The only shame was in getting caught or in not being strong if punished. There were stories of Spartan boys who died under punishment. They also were taught military discipline, obedience, toughness and endurance.
At age 20 they joined the Army, which would effectively be their career until disabled or age 60.
They could abduct a wife at age 20, but could not live with her until age 35 or so, which had a predictable--and eventually disastrous--effect on fertility rates.
The Spartans, after the reforms of Lycurgus in the 8th century, used iron money rather than gold or silver. Lycurgus hoped to discourage Spartans form foreign trade and from dabbling in luxuries. They built no wall around their city. The Spartans were the walls. As one Spartan pointed out to an Athenian friend, lots of Spartan bones were bleaching near Athens, but no Athenian bones were buried on Spartan soil.
And one Athenian, after sharing a Spartan meal, said he knew why the Spartans did not fear death. With food like that, what there to live for? Sparta had little need for an empire, although in the 500s they started to dominate the Peloponnese.
If Sparta were a land power, Athens was a sea power. They seem, on the surface, to be polar opposites, but were they in fact so different?
In the 600s Athens was dominated by the old aristocracy, but in 632 BC Cylon tried to become tyrant. He failed and was forced to flee, but the attempt suggests that in Athens, as in Sparta, the old order was falling and family rule and tradition were no longer in force.
621: Draco instituted a code of extremely rigid laws from which the term laws draconian is derived.
594: Solon was elected archon, ruler for a year. His reforms madepolitical classification a matter of wealth, not birth, thus increasing the number of voters in the ecclesia. His support came from artisans and merchants rather than the landed wealth of the old nobility. In the century that followed, Athens seesawed between aristocratic rule and tyranny. Tyrants were supported by the poor and middle class.
499: Athens supported a revolt by Ionian Greeks against Persian rule. Persia saw itself at the rightful ruler of the world and decided it was time to do away with these annoying Greeks across the Hellaspont.
492: Persia made an initial attack by ship, to little avail. Storms intervened and the fleet was forced to return.
490: Persia launched a more massive attack, directly on Attica, the plains of Athens. This was clearly an attack on all of Greece. Athens sent to Sparta for help, but the Spartans, busy with a religious festival were delayed. They took these things seriously. Nobody would miss a good fight for no reason. Athens faced an overwhelming Persian enemy at Marathon. The Persians, using their ships, wanted to pin down the army at Marathon and take the city at their leisure. But the Athenian general, Miltiades, saw an opportunity. Rather than retreat for a last stand within the walls of Athens, why not defeat an overwhelming enemy here, then go and fight the ship-borne forces at Athens. It was an exceedingly risky move, but it worked. Phidippides ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to deliver the message, but died of exhaustion once his mission was accomplished.
Yet Persia was still going to be an enemy, and would return. For once, Greece would have to unite. Themistocles, urged Athens to invest in a navy, essentially leaving land warfare to Sparta. The organization of Greek city states was called the Hellenic League.
480: the Persian king Xerxes marched a massive Persian army across the Hellaspont--using a pontoon bridge-- to invade the mainland.
At Thermopylae, 300 Spartans and 5,000 Thespians stop the Persian advance, until the Persians found a way around. The defenders are killed to the last man. But they had bought the rest of Greece time to prepare, and once again, at Plataea and Mycale, the Persian army was pushed back.
Unfortunately, the Persian threat tended to turn Athens, birthplace of democracy, into an empire of sorts, dominating her neighbors through the Delian league, ostensibly a defensive league against Persia, but becoming a vehicle of Athenian power. During the 400s, the age of Pericles, Athens--destroyed in the war--emerged as the artistic, architectural, philosophical, mercantile center of the world. Naturally, it was hated by everyone else.