Greek History
Greece was a collection of many city-states scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Sea shore. During the 5th century B.C., Greece was dominated by two main powers: democratic Athens and the military oligarchy of Sparta. The Greeks invented democracy. By the 4th century B.C., there were many Greek democracies. Greece in those times was not a single political entity but rather a collection of many separate polies or cities. The cities that were not democracies were either oligarchies or monarchies called tyrannies in cases where the sole ruler had usurped power by force rather than inheritance. Athens was the most stable of the democracies. The history of the Greeks is one of philosophers, politics, and conflicts.
Wars were very common in ancient Greece. The city-states of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes, were always fighting each other over their borders. Often they would get together in leagues to fight as allies. Although there were many wars in ancient Greece, among the most famous were the Trojan War, the Persian war, and the Peloponnesian war.
The Trojan War was a war waged, according to legend, against the city of Troy in Asia Minor by the armies of the Achaeans, following the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta by Paris of Troy. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in a cycle of epic poems of which only two, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, survive intact. The Iliad describes an episode late in the war and the Odyssey describes the journey home of one of the Greek leaders, Odysseus. Different versions of the war were elaborated by later Greek poets. By modern times both the war and city were widely believed to be mythological.
The Persian wars were a series of wars between the Greek world and the Persian Empire that started about 500 B.C., and lasted until 448 B.C. The conflict began when Persia occupied some Greek colonies in Asia Minor. Greece responded by defending the colonies. Persia commanded by...
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