History of Ancient Greece

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Perspective

The history of ancient Greece begins with its origins in Crete and Mycenae. It became a Mediterranean civilization that stretched from its Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BCE to the end of classical antiquity in AD 600. It comprised a loose collection of city-states and other territories that was unified only once, from 336 to 323 BCE, under Alexander the Great.

After the collapse of Bronze Age Mycenae, Greek city-states began to form in the 8th century BCE. This brought in the Archaic period and the spread of Greek colonies throughout the eastern Mediterranean. This was followed by the age of Classical Greece, beginning with the Greco-Persian Wars and ending in the 4th century BCE. The end of Greece’s Classical Era was immediately followed by the Byzantine period and the Early Middle Ages. But Greek civilization endured in the conquests of Alexander the Great, which spread Hellenistic civilization eastward to Central Asia. The Hellenistic kingdoms were in turn conquered by the Roman Republic, and large parts of Greece were annexed to the Roman Empire.

Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on ancient Rome, which carried a version of it throughout the Mediterranean and much of Europe. For this reason, Classical Greece is generally considered the cradle of Western civilization, the seminal culture from which the modern West derives many of its founding archetypes and ideas in politics, philosophy, science, and art.