Homework Help: Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece may be Greek to you (sigh), but actually, what happened in Greece thousands of years ago still affects you every single day. Before you could read articles like this you had to learn the alphabet first, and our alphabet can be traced back to the ancient Greek one. In fact, the word alphabet comes from 'alpha' and 'beta', the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. The Greeks also invented theatre, started the Olympic Games and calculated how the planets moved. Some people think they may have even created the first computer, which is pretty impressive. The reason Greeks had lots of time to discuss their latest theories and dream up new inventions was because many of them had slaves, captured from numerous wars, to carry out the household tasks.

 

Clever thinking Socrates, one of the famous philosophers

In 800 BC Ancient Greece began to emerge from the Dark Ages. Culture started to flourish, writing was rediscovered, grand buildings were designed and new ideas about the world and the planets were discussed by the famous philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. An invention by Archimedes, called the Archimedes Screw, was so clever that it is still used in Egypt today to get water from rivers onto the crops. Doctors started to understand that a healthy diet, exercise, medicine and surgery helped people get well. Before then, it was believed that the gods and godesses worshipped by the Greeks were the cause of all illnesses, and so they tried to cure themselves by making sacrifices to the gods.

 

Mythical talesPoseidon, the god of the sea

These advances didn't mean that the Greeks stopped believing in their many gods, such as Zeus, the king of gods, Poseidon, the (rather grumpy) god of the sea, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. They created beautiful temples for worshipping the different gods. A famous one is the Parthenon, a temple found at the Acropolis in Athens. This was dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, war and Athens. There are lots of exciting myths and legends from those ages, including the Trojan Horse, Jason and the Argonauts and the slaying of the petrifying Medusa.

 

Survival of the fittestStatue of Leonidas in Thermopolis, Greece

While this was all going on, there were yet more developments. Greece became split into self-governing city states, introducing the first type of democracy. These states were known as polis, which is where we get our word 'politics' from. Ones you may have heard of are Athens, the largest, and Sparta, where children were trained from a young age to be soldiers. They were fearsome fighters, with weak children being left to die in the mountains so only the strong survived, and even then they were treated harshly, supposedly to toughen them up for war.

 

People power

Over in Athens life was a little less scary. In 593 BC a man called Solon set up an assembly to make laws, elect officials and banish unpleasant people. This meant the people ruled themselves, with a whopping 6000 citizens having to be present at assemblies for decisions to be made. It wasn't a true democracy though, because only men born in Athens were known as citizens. So all slaves, foreigners and women were left out. 

In 146 BC the Greeks were defeated by the Romans, and so the Roman period began. The Romans admired much of the Greek way of life, copying their architecture and art, and so the Greek culture remained very important for many more years – and is still very influential today.