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.
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.
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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