Overview of ancient Greece | World History | Khan Academy

I am now going to give an overview of ancient Greece. In future videos, we're going to go into a lot more depth on a lot of these events and ideas, but this one is to give you context on the big picture.

Just to start, let's begin with the name Greece. It turns out that the Greeks do not call where they live Greece; neither did the ancient Greeks. They called it Elas. The word Elas comes from Ellen. This comes from Ellen, who is this legendary figure viewed as the progenitor of the Greek people. You could kind of view him as the father of the Greek people.

It's not well established in the historical record when Ellen actually existed, but this is where we get the name Elas from, and it's very important. Do not confuse this Ellen, who was a man, with Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy was a different person. When I was a child and I heard about Hellenic things, or the Hellenic period, or the Helens, I was like, "Oh, maybe that's something to do with Helen of Troy." No, that's referring to the Greek progenitor Ellen.

So that's where the word Elos comes from, and ideas like Hellin, which is the Greek people, or Hellenic, which is referring to something that is Greek, or the Hellenistic period, which we'll talk about in many videos from now. This is a period of Greek influence—not just over Greece and the Anatolian Peninsula, but over Persia and Egypt.

With that out of the way, let's now talk about the big arc of history of ancient Greece. It's believed that the Greek Peninsula has been settled by human beings for thousands and thousands of years. As time goes on, we'll hopefully understand more and more about them.

My timeline right over here starts with Minoan Greece, or it starts with the end of Minoan Greece. In other videos, we might talk more about the Minoan Empire. As that Empire falls, we enter into the Greek Dark Ages. The reason why it's called the Dark Ages is there's not a lot of historical record of this period, roughly between 1100 BCE and 800 BCE.

Now there's one event, and I'll kind of say that with a slight emphasis or question, that is worth noting here: the Trojan War? Around 1200 BCE. Once again, there's not a strong historic record for the Trojan War, but it is a famous war that was chronicled by Homer. Even Homer, we don't know if he really existed or whether he was an entire literary tradition, but it was chronicled in The Iliad and in The Odyssey. Again, this was chronicled many hundreds of years later, and even Homer is a semi-legendary figure.

When people talk about the Trojan Wars or you see movies about it, we're talking about something that, if it happened the way it happened, it's on the order of 1200 BCE. Now, as we exit the Greek Dark Ages, that's when we start to have some of the institutions that we now identify with the ancient Greeks get established.

You have the Oracle at Delphi, often known or referred to as the Oracle of Delphi. This is where leaders of the Greek city-states went for direction to understand what was likely to happen, to get prophecies. This institution, the Oracle at Delphi, lasts through this entire period, I have on my timeline, into Roman rule for over 1,000 years. The Oracle of Delphi is a very prominent figure in influencing Greek leaders.

Around the same time, you also have the Olympic Games held at Olympia, where people compete to show their athletic prowess. This ancient Olympic Games continues on for over 1,000 years. Our modern Olympics are just kind of a flash in the pan, which was obviously modeled after the ancient Olympics compared to how long this lasted.

When most people think of Greece, they're actually talking about Classical Greece. This is the Classical period right over here, and we're going to do videos on a lot of these events. It's roughly the period between the Persian invasions that were successfully put off and the rise of Alexander and the fall of Alexander. That’s where you have all of these ideas of Greek democracy really coming to the surface.

Pericles, the statesman of Athens, had the influence to really help democracy flourish under his leadership. During his leadership, you have the Acropolis and the Parthenon—these famous icons of Greek culture—being established. Once again, this is in this period right over here.

This is also the period that we associate with the famous Greek philosophers. These lines right over here are the lives of Socrates and Plato, who was Socrates' student and established the famous Academy. Aristotle, who was Plato's student and the famous tutor of Alexander the Great.

Now, as I mentioned, you had these city-states, and the ones that are worth mentioning—or all of them are worth mentioning—but I have in this diagram the most significant city-states of ancient Greece that you'll hear a lot about. We talked about the Oracle at Delphi, the Olympic Games at Olympia. A lot of the conversation tends to focus around Sparta and Athens. You'll also hear a lot about Corinth and Thebes.

Sparta is famous for its militaristic society. It's often glorified, but it's also worth noting that they were significant slave owners at different parts of Spartan history. They had somewhere between seven and 20 slaves for every Spartan. Athens is famous for its philosophy. It's famous for being the birthplace of democracy. It's famous for its art and its architecture. All of these areas are famous for their architecture, but it's also worth noting that during the Golden Age of the Athenian Empire, they were also pretty brutal in putting down rebellions and, in some ways, subjugating different people.

So it depends on how you want to view things, and we're going to have a lot of videos on all of these topics. At that time, we talk about these city-states. Even though they shared a common language and common culture, went to the Olympic Games, and sent folks to the Oracle of Delphi, they were independent states.

It wasn't until you have Philip of Macedonia in the 4th century, right over here, where he starts to really unify these Greek city-states, culminating with his son Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great not only unifies Greece, but he takes over the Persian Empire and really kind of, with his death—and he has a very short life—ushers in the Hellenistic period.

This is where you have Greek culture influencing that entire region—not only Greece, not only the what was the Persian Empire, but the Middle East, Egypt. That whole region gets influenced by Greek culture. Greece, at the, I guess you could say at the end, finally gets under Roman control. It depends which date you want to use, but in the middle of the 2nd century BCE is when Greece itself falls to Rome. Other parts of, I guess you could say, the Hellenistic world finally succumb to Rome. For example, Ptolemaic Egypt in the first century BCE.

Even then, even when it becomes part of the Roman Empire, it influences the Roman Empire very, very heavily. Now, other things that you will hear us talk about when we discuss the Greeks, besides their democracy and philosophy, are the wars. It's worth noting what Greek warriors looked like.

This is a depiction of hoplites, which are Greek citizen soldiers in ancient Greece. You'll also hear about a phalanx. A phalanx is the formation where they marched very tightly together. When archers came, they would put all their shields up, and they would almost be like this armored tank. It was a very effective method of warfare.

Another word that you will hear associated with Sparta and those slaves is helots. Those were the names of those slaves, and they weren't owned by individuals; they were actually owned by the state. Some of the other cities here, Corinth, will come up a lot. It has a very strategic location in the Isthmus of Corinth. Notice, to get from the mainland, or I guess into the Peloponnesian Peninsula, you have to go through this isthmus.

Thebes, right here, was a significant rival to Athens at different periods of Greek history. It was the dominant city. Now, the last thing I want to mention is there's just a ton of culture that comes from the Greeks and a lot of words that we even use today.

For example, the word "Draconian," which is used for something that's very harsh, comes from Draco's law, which came in the 7th century BCE from Athens. He was an Athenian legislator who composed a very harsh series of laws; that's where "Draconian" comes from. When people say something is "Spartan," they kind of imagine it's something that's very basic, or you just have the necessities, coming from the idea of Spartan culture that everything revolved around military necessity.

Even the word "laconic," which means someone who does not speak much and says just enough to get their meaning across, comes from the region where Sparta is, Laconia. The Spartans were famous for their kind of very terse speech. Famously, when Philip of Macedon was threatening the Spartans and saying, "If you don't come on to my side, I'm going to do this and that to you. If you don't become part of my kingdom, my Empire, I'm going to do this to your city; I'm going to do that to your people," the Spartans' famous reply was "If."

This is kind of a good example of laconic speech. With that one word, they were able to convey a lot. So I'm going to leave you there, and in the next few videos, we're going to go into some depth on this. But it's important to realize that when people talk about ancient Greece, they're talking about a large span of history.

Most of what we associate with ancient Greece—the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Persian Wars, the great Greek philosophers—most of that is associated with the Classical period, often associated with the Golden Age, which is right around here. Well before this period, the Greeks weren't all, you know, these philosophers sitting around in togas. They might have been wearing togas, but in these earlier periods, they were more adventurers and conquerors, and they might have been in small villages. Eventually, those evolved into the city-states that especially in Athens and Sparta had their golden age in this period right over here.