The Greek City-States

Ancient Greece never became a nation but was divided into many small city-states with Athens probably the only city-state with more than 20000 citizens.
Only in a few cases did a city-state push its holdings beyond very narrow limits. Athens held the whole plain of Attica, and most of the Attic villagers were Athenian citizens. Sparta made a conquest of Laconia and part of Messenia.
Similar city-states were found all over the Greek world, which had early flung its outposts throughout the Aegean Basin and even beyond.
The western shores of Asia Minor were fringed with Greek colonies, reaching out past the Propontis (Sea of Marmara) and the Bosporus to the northern and southern shores of the Euxine, or Black, Sea. In Africa there were, among others, the colony of Cyrene, now the site of a town in Libya, and the trading post of Naucratis in Egypt. Sicily too was colonized by the Greeks, and there and in southern Italy so many colonies were planted that this region came to be known as Magna Graecia (Great Greece). Pressing farther still, the Greeks founded the city of Massilia, now Marseilles, France.
Separated by barriers of sea and mountain, by local pride and jealousy, the various independent city-states never conceived the idea of uniting the Greekspeaking world into a single political unit. Many influences made for unity a common language, a common religion, a common literature, similar customs, the religious leagues and festivals, the Olympic Games but even in time of foreign invasion it was difficult to induce the cities to act together.

From The Kings to Democracy

During the 8th and 7th centuries BC kings disappeared and cities were ruled by a few (oligarchy) wealthy landowning nobles, the "eupatridae," or wellborn. However, the rivalry among these nobles and the discontent of the oppressed masses was so great that soon a third stage appeared.
The third type of government was known as tyranny. Some eupatrid would seize absolute power, usually by promising the people to right the wrongs inflicted upon them by the other landholding eupatridae. He was known as a "tyrant." Among the Greeks this was not a term of reproach but merely meant one who had seized kingly power without the qualification of royal descent. The tyrants of the 7th century were a stepping-stone to democracy, or the rule of the people, which was established nearly everywhere in the 6th and 5th centuries. It was the tyrants who taught the people their rights and power.
By the beginning of the 5th century BC, Athens had gone through these stages and emerged as the first democracy in the history of the world. Between two and three centuries before this, the Athenian kings had made way for officials called "archons," elected by the nobles. Thus an aristocratic form of government was established.
About 621 BC an important step in the direction of democracy was taken, when the first written laws in Greece were compiled from the existing traditional laws. This reform was forced by the peasants to relieve them from the oppression of the nobles. The new code was so severe that the adjective "draconic," derived from the name of its compiler, Draco, is still a synonym for "harsh." Unfortunately, Draco's code did not give the peasants sufficient relief. A revolution was averted only by the wise reforms of Solon, about a generation later (see Solon). Solon's reforms only delayed the overthrow of the aristocracy, and about 561 BC Pisistratus, supported by the discontented populace, made himself tyrant. With two interruptions, Pisistratus ruled for more than 30 years, fostering commerce, agriculture, and the arts and laying the foundation for much of Athens' future greatness. His sons Hippias and Hipparchus attempted to continue their father's power. One of them was slain by two youths, Harmodius and Aristogiton, who lived on in Greek tradition as themes for sculptors and poets. By the reforms of Clisthenes, about 509 BC, the rule of the people was firmly established.
Very different was the course of events in Sparta, which by this time had established itself as the most powerful military state in Greece (see Sparta). Under the strict laws of Lycurgus it had maintained its primitive monarchical form of government with little change (see Lycurgus). Nearly the whole of the Peloponnesus had been brought under its iron heel, and it was now jealously eyeing the rising power of its democratic rival in central Greece.
During this period the intellectual and artistic culture of the Greeks centered among the Ionions of Asia Minor. Thales, called "the first Greek philosopher," was a citizen of Miletus. He became famous for predicting an eclipse of the sun in 585 BC.
Persia, the great Asian empire of the day, had been awakened to the existence of the free peoples of Greece by the aid which the Athenians had sent to their oppressed kinsmen in Asia Minor. The Persian empire mobilized its gigantic resources in an effort to conquer the Greek city-states.

Athens an Empire after defeating the Persian invaders

The Athenian statesman Themistocles had seen that naval strength, not land strength, would in the future be the key to power. "Whoso can hold the sea has command of the situation," he said. He persuaded his fellow Athenians to build a strong fleet larger than the combined fleets of all the rest of Greece and to fortify the harbor at Piraeus.
The Athenian fleet became the instrument by which the Persians were finally defeated, at the battle of Salamis in 480 BC. Within three years after Salamis, Athens had united the Greek cities of the Asian coast and of the Aegean islands into a confederacy (called the Delian League because the treasury was at first on the island of Delos) for defense against Persia. In another generation this confederacy became an Athenian empire.
Athens was transformed into an imperial capital. The population increased fourfold or more, as foreigners streamed in to share in the prosperity. The learning that had been the creation of a few "wise men" throughout the Greek world now became fashionable. Painters and sculptors vied in beautifying Athens with the works of their genius. Even today, battered and defaced by time and man, these art treasures remain among the greatest surviving achievements of human skill. The period in which Athens flourished, one of the most remarkable and brilliant in the world's history, reached its culmination in the age of Pericles, 460-430 BC. The citizen body of Athens attained a higher average of intellectual interests than any other society before or since.


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