How did ancient Greece achieve its distinctive character? For more than a thousand years after 2000 bce, when Greek-speaking invaders began to filter in from the north, changes in Greece closely paralleled what was happening elsewhere. The initial invasions, for example, were part of a general expansion of herdsmen from the grassy steppes of Eurasia that brought Aryans to India, Persians to Iran, Hittites to Anatolia, and Slavs, Germans, Latins, and Celts to other parts of Europe. The newcomers had the advantage of warlike habits arising from the necessity of protecting their flocks and herds from raiders and from attacking neighbors in retaliation. Moreover, these warrior tribesmen had a superior diet, thanks to the milk and milk products they consumed, making them bigger and stronger than the grain farmers they displaced.

Dry summers prevail in most of Greece and are bad for grass, so the invaders had to depend more on grain farming and to cut back on herding by sending flocks to high mountain pastures in summer. This brought Greek society into line with the contemporary scene in western Asia, where steppe invaders had overrun somewhat larger populations of farmers and the urban centers they supported. Accordingly, by about 1600 bce, closer encounters with centers of civilization in Crete, Egypt, and western Asia brought familiarity with royal government, bronze weapons and armor, chariots, writing, and monumental stone construction to Greece. Mycenae became the principal seat of wealth and power, where a massive lion gate and large beehive tombs attest to the greatness of the kings for whom they were built. Rural taxpayers, sometimes conscripted for work on such buildings, together with booty from sea raids along the shores of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean sustained the kings of Mycenae and rulers of a handful of similar fortress-palaces in other parts of Greece. But chariots as well as bronze weapons and armor were scarce and expensive, so fully equipped warriors remained very few. Hence, about 1200 bce, when a second wave of Greek-speaking invaders, known as Dorians, armed with comparatively cheap and abundant iron weapons, advanced from the north, the superior number of their fighting men overwhelmed the old order of society. The newcomers promptly destroyed and abandoned Mycenae and the other palace-fortresses of Greece.

The Homeric Ideal of Individual Heroism

With these invasions, a ruder, more egalitarian age dawned. Writing disappeared, so did monumental building. But bards who recited their poems to the sound of a lyre kept memories of the Mycenaean past at least dimly alive, especially among descendants of pre-Dorian Greek-speakers, known as Ionians. Soon after 700 bce Homer gave lasting form to this oral tradition by composing a pair of epic poems. One, the Iliad, described a critical episode during a sea raid that Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, perhaps (even probably), led against the city of Troy; its twin, the Odyssey, recounted the perilous return of Odysseus from Troy to his home in Ithaca. Homer’s poems were soon written down in a new alphabetic script imported (with adjustments) from Phoenicia, and they became fundamental to subsequent Greek assumptions and ideas about how men ought to behave. Homer’s heroes seek and attain glory by risking death in war, knowing ahead of time that sooner or later they will be defeated and die. Moreover, according to Homer, the gods play games with men, favoring some, defeating others whimsically; yet the very fact that the gods were immortal meant that they could not be truly heroic by risking life and limb. Instead, according to Homer, they were often merely spiteful and were ultimately subject to Fate—the nature of things—mysteriously spun out in detail by enigmatic, silent supernatural beings. Oddly, therefore, by risking everything, heroic humans surpassed the gods, at least morally, while sharing with them a common subordination to Fate.

Caryatids, sculpted female figures serving as architectural supports, take the place of a columns or pillars on many ancient Greek buildings.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates (469–399 bce)

This unusual twist diminished the power of priests and conventional religion among the ancient Greeks and opened a path to all sorts of speculation seeking to anatomize Fate and penetrate more deeply into the nature of things, including, ere long, the nature of human society and of morals. No other ancient civilization centered so much on merely human affairs or unleashed human imagination and reasoning from sacred traditions so recklessly. That is why in later times urban populations among whom local versions of sacred doctrine had worn thin from too many encounters with persons of different religious background so often found Greek high culture powerfully attractive.

The critical difference hinged on the emergence of phalanx warfare among the Greeks. Beginning about 650 bce, well-armored farmers, trained to keep in line so each man’s shield helped to protect the man next to him, proved superior to disorganized personal combat of the sort Homer had celebrated. When such men, equipped with spears and swords, arrayed themselves six ranks deep to form what the Greeks called a phalanx, their concerted charge easily swept less disciplined and closely packed opponents before it. Once this simple tactic proved uniformly successful, every Greek city had to maintain and if possible increase the size of its phalanx to be able to protect itself against its neighbors.

Greece and Colonies at 500 bce

Since fighting farmers had to arm themselves for the phalanx with income from the family farm, radical steps were necessary to prevent them from losing their land by going into debt to richer landowners. In Sparta, a (perhaps mythical) lawgiver named Lycourgos (Lycurgus) was credited with setting up a system of military training that required the “equals,” as Spartan citizens officially called themselves, to live in barracks between the ages of 20 and 30, practicing military skills and eating together. Family life became correspondingly marginal. Conquered helots in neighboring Messenia supplied the equals with the food they consumed, so Spartan citizens, specialized for war, became an unusual kind of upper class by exploiting the helots collectively. Prolonged military training soon made the Spartan phalanx superior to others, and by 490 bce Spartans had compelled most other city-states of southern Greece to become their allies.

Athens, the other city whose internal history mattered most in later times, never attained internal stability to compare with Sparta’s under the Lycourgan constitution. In 594 bce, for example, Solon, after being elected chief magistrate with extraordinary powers, set out to check the decay of the Athenian phalanx by canceling debts and prohibiting debt slavery. But Solon’s efforts to invoke justice and “good law” did not make friction between rich and poor disappear. Half a century later a noble usurper, Peisistratus, seized power by force of arms and with popular support, then exiled his rivals so that his sons retained control until 510 bce. Two years after their forcible overthrow, another nobleman, Cleisthenes, instituted a more democratic regime in Athens. Rivalry between democratic Athens and Sparta’s mix of radical equality among a citizen elite and harsh repression of disfranchised helots became overt only after the Persian invasion (490–489 bce), when a precarious alliance of about twenty Greek cities, led by Sparta, managed to defeat the imperial army of perhaps sixty thousand men that Xerxes I, king of Persia and ruler of the largest empire Asia had yet seen, led against them. This surprising victory proved to the historian Herodotus (d. c. 425 bce) that free men, obedient to law, fought willingly and therefore better than unfree Persians subjected to a king. More generally, the victory gave an enormous fillip to Greek self-confidence and inaugurated what in retrospect seemed a golden age of creativity, concentrated especially in Athens.

The Acropolis, with the Parthenon at the top, is perhaps the best-known symbol of ancient Greece.

At the time, however, uncertainty and divided councils prevailed and ceaseless warfare continued to disturb civil society. Those who lived through that tumult would surely be surprised to know how reverently later generations looked up to their accomplishments. For in Athens, self-government by elected magistrates and an assembly in which all citizens could vote provoked perpetual dispute, and war mobilization required ever increasing effort. New thoughts and new dilemmas distracted people in private and public life, while sculpture, architecture, drama, history and philosophy all attained what later generations recognized as classical expression.

This remarkable efflorescence of Greek, and especially of Athenian, civilization was sustained by an expanding market economy. Greek cities began to mint silver, copper, and even iron coins in small denominations, so everyone could buy and sell items of common consumption. Expanding markets, in turn, allowed specialized producers to achieve new levels of efficiency, thus enriching society at large. The most significant of these was specialized farming of olives (for oil) and of grapes (for wine). Beginning not long before 600 bce, production of wine and oil for sale spread ever more widely through southern and central Greece, wherever climate and soil allowed. That was because olive oil and wine commanded a ready market throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastlands, where barbarian chieftains mobilized local peoples to supply grain, fish, timber, and other raw materials in exchange for the wine and oil they desired. For a long time terms of trade strongly favored the Greeks, so that the yield from an acre of land under vines or olive trees could be exchanged for far more grain than the same land in Greece could produce. As a result, throughout the classical age commercially specialized farming in Greece sustained free and more or less equal citizens far more comfortably (and in larger numbers) than could have been done by raising their own grain locally. In western Asia cities drew grain from their immediate hinterlands in the form of unrequited rents and taxes, but in Greece ships allowed cities to draw grain and other resources from far greater distances, in return for the oil and wine their farmer-citizens brought to market each year.

Export of specialized artisan products—decorated Greek vases for example—supplemented this fundamental agricultural and raw-materials pattern of exchange. Artisans, too, specialized and rapidly improved the quality and quantity of their output. Thus, for a few generations, increasing wealth and skill concentrated in a few commercial cities, of which Athens was the most active. Eventually, when farmers in other parts of the Mediterranean learned how to raise olives and vines, Greeks lost their initial advantage. Greek rural prosperity waned correspondingly, and the expansive buoyancy of the classical age, when Greek population and wealth grew steadily, soon faded away. Yet it was political contradictions inherent in polis ideals of heroism and justice that brought an abrupt end to the Greek classical age in 338 bce, when a semibarbarian conqueror, Philip of Macedon, deprived Greek cites of their cherished freedom. Until then, Greek freedom triumphed on every front, restlessly, ruthlessly, amazingly.

Immediately after their victory over the Persians, Athens and Sparta went their separate ways. Athens had played a conspicuously heroic part in the Persian War. When Xerxes overran their city, Athenians fled to the island of Salamis nearby and refused to surrender. Athenian triremes (the specialized Greek fighting ship that relied on rams, affixed to the ships’ prows, to sink enemy ships) then helped to defeat the Persian fleet in the straits separating Salamis from the Attic mainland (480 bce), compelling Xerxes to withdraw from Greece with most of his army before the Persian remnant suffered final defeat at Plataea the next year. Thereupon, the Athenians chose to keep their fleet in action and continued the war by sending naval expeditions to liberate Greek cities from Persian rule around the shores of the Aegean and beyond. Peace did not come until 448 bce, by which time Athens had built an empire, first freeing cities from the Persians and then taxing them to help support the Athenian fleet that “liberated” them. Spartans at first held back, fearful of helot revolt at home and dismayed by the sudden surge of Athenian power.

Within Athens, the fleet’s annual campaigns swiftly altered internal balances. Citizens whose surplus younger sons lacked enough land to be able to buy armor and serve in the phalanx now had an attractive way to make ends meet by rowing in the fleet for a small wage, supplemented every so often by hauls of booty. In winter, when the fleet went ashore and stayed home, they were free to attend meetings of the assembly, whereas farmers, scattered across Attica, only attended when an unusual crisis arose. This gave a decisive advantage to property-less citizens and assured continuation of the aggressive overseas ventures upon which they had come to depend for a living. For a couple of generations, farmers served contentedly in the phalanx in summer when there was no work to be done in the fields, while a few wealthy aristocrats went along with the democracy, playing their own specialized part by refraining from conspicuous consumption in private life and competing instead for the honor of using their wealth for various public purposes, like equipping a trireme or financing one of the tragic performances that honored the god Dionysos (Dionysus).

Ancient Greek vase painting often depict mythological characters, divine and human.

Despite rapid population growth, Athenian citizens remained comparatively few. War losses were substantial, and about a dozen colonies, dispatched to consolidate their emerging empire, also removed several thousand landless citizens. At the city’s maximum, in 431 bce, adult male citizens numbered somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000, of whom as many as 20,000 drew salaries from the state for rowing in the fleet and for other forms of public service, such as serving on juries in the law courts. The total population of Attica was probably between 250,000 and 350,000 persons, almost half of whom were disfranchised foreigners and slaves. So as in Sparta, many though not all Athenian citizens had become militarized “equals,” disciplined to row and maneuver their triremes more swiftly and accurately than others, just as years of training allowed Spartan soldiers to prevail on land.

While the Athenian democracy thus concentrated on warfare, trade and artisan work fell mainly into the hands of resident foreigners. Slaves, too, played an important economic role as miners of newly discovered veins of silver ore in Attica. Silver from those mines financed the two hundred Athenian triremes that fought at Salamis; the mines also supplied silver for the Attic drachmae that soon became a standard currency throughout most of the Mediterranean coastlands.

Athens’s combination of economic and military power, based on oil and wine exports, other far-ranging market exchanges, and the personal participation in war by farmer-soldiers in the phalanx and landless rowers in the fleet, was unmatched elsewhere. Athenian polis-wide collaboration always remained somewhat precarious, but under Pericles, who dominated the city’s politics between 445 and 429 bce, the Athenians indeed converted Homeric individual heroism into collective heroism on behalf of their polis. Rich and poor alike pursued honor more than personal gain, and their willing cooperation brought unusual success.

Yet that success was profoundly ambiguous, since victorious Athenians became collective tyrants, suppressing the freedom of others. Accordingly, most Greeks (including some Athenians) came to feel that Athenian democratic and imperial policies were profoundly unjust. Invoking the “freedom of the Greeks” against unjust tyrants, whether home grown or coming from abroad, became and remained a heartfelt protest, long after the enlarged scale of war had made the freedom of separate cities unsustainable.

Sparta, where collective heroism dated back to Lycourgos, soon took the lead in challenging the emerging Athenian Empire. Two bouts of war ensued. The first, waged on and off between 460 and 445 bce, turned out to be a draw; but the next Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce), as the Athenian historian Thucydides called it, ended in the overthrow of Athenian Empire and democracy. Yet the victorious Spartans were compromised from the start, as they prevailed only after accepting Persian money to finance the creation of the mercenary fleet they needed to defeat the Athenians at sea. The scale and intensity of these struggles altered Greek society very rapidly. Fighting became professionalized and commercialized; both Athens and Sparta hired troops and sailors from outside the polis to supplement armies and navies of citizens. Within Athens, rich and poor parted company when conspirators twice (411 and 404 bce) overthrew the democracy. To be sure, democracy was soon restored in Athens, at least in form; but the solidarity between rich and poor in pursuit of collective greatness never came back. Instead, independent farmer-citizen-soldiers gave way to mercenaries, while Athens, and Greek society everywhere, divided more and more sharply between landowners and dependent tillers of the soil.

Simultaneously, commercial prosperity subsided as the Greeks lost their primacy in producing oil and wine for overseas markets. Politics changed to match, allowing larger landed property holders to monopolize what long remained vivacious political struggles among themselves at home and with neighboring cities. After 404 bce, the victorious Spartans quickly became even more unpopular than Athenians had been, before meeting defeat in 371 bce by the Thebans, who were in turn overthrown by Philip of Macedon in 338 bce. To keep the peace, Philip made himself commander-in-chief of a Hellenic league of cities. His son, Alexander, after ruthlessly suppressing a revolt, led a combined Macedonian and Greek army against the Persians in 334 bce. His victories brought the Persian Empire to an end, and after his death in 323 bce, Macedonian generals set up kingdoms of their own in Egypt, Asia, and Macedon. Greek cities nominally regained their freedom but in fact remained bit players in continuing great power struggles until 31 bce, when the Romans unified the entire Mediterranean coastline and its hinterlands in a more lasting empire.

Long before 31 bce, Athenian art and literature of the classical age, 480 to 338 bce, had become familiar to wealthy Greeks everywhere. Precisely because the freedom of the polis was slipping away from their grasp, they cherished the Athenian literary heritage for showing how free men ought to conduct their affairs and lead a good life. Later on, Romans, too, shared a similar nostalgia, for their republican liberty was also a casualty of empire. Accordingly, Roman art and literature borrowed themes and ideas from their Greek predecessors, and the resulting amalgam was what, almost fourteen hundred years later, inspired Italian and other European humanists to revive ancient glories by teaching the young to read, admire, and emulate Greek and Roman literature and art.

The power and complexity of Greek thought, and its concentration in Athens between 490 and 338 bce, remains amazing. Reason, imagination, doubt, hope, and fear all play their part in classical Greek literary exploration of the human condition. Fate, gods, and men interact, surprisingly, often inscrutably. Above all, classical Greek writers remained in thrall to Homer, portraying human beings heroically confronting the world’s uncertainties. Greek sculptors also portrayed both men and gods in heroic human form, and attained greater visual accuracy than art traditions of Asia or elsewhere had done before. Greek monumental architecture remained simple, featuring columnar façades and straight geometrical rooflines. But subtle curvature and proportion please modern eyes as much as they presumably did when first constructed. In later centuries, classical Greek styles of sculpture and architecture spread widely across Europe and Asia; they still affect many of our public buildings.

Alexander the Great; Aristotle; Art—Ancient Greece and Rome; Herodotus; Homer; Macedonian Empire; Plato; Thucydides; Trading Patterns, Mediterranean