The History Of Ancient Greece – Michael Scott does not work for, consult with, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The financial crisis facing modern Greece makes daily headlines. At the same time, ancient Greece also captivates our attention. Juliette Binoche is Antigone, and Helen McCrory is Medea.
The History Of Ancient Greece
The Almeida Theater in London kicked off its Ancient Greek season with an event titled “Why the Greeks Matter”. The Greeks are the stars of the British Museum’s current exhibition, Defining Beauty. To top it all off, the team behind the exceptionally successful Hunger Games franchise has announced the fast-tracking of an epic movie version of Homer’s Odyssey. What made stars, theater, television, filmmakers, and audiences so excited about ancient Greek drama and epic all of a sudden?
Ancient Greek Temples
I am an academic specializing in ancient Greece and Rome, so I fully endorse this renewed interest in the unusual flow of this ancient Mediterranean culture. But I, at the same time, am intrigued why Ancient Greece is now on everyone’s lips. One simple answer might be that thanks to the financial dilemmas facing modern Greece, which means the country is clearly in the crosshairs of global attention. But I think our current turn to ancient Greece touches a more fundamental nerve in modern society.
My experience with writing and presenting television documentaries about the ancient world is that it is very difficult to get a program on ancient Greece commissioned by ancient Rome or ancient Egypt already. People are more likely to ‘get’ ancient Rome, and feel it as a real, interconnected part of history (especially in the UK due to the Roman conquest). On the one hand, Egypt is seen as completely different, exotic, and therefore also interesting. These cultures are easy to classify.
But Greece? What is Greece all about? Sitting bearded philosophers discussing ideas? A world of broken shafts and oil-slicked athletes? A continuous cycle of civil war punctuated by moments of heroic death-loving Spartans?
It was all of these things. Indeed, in many ways, it is impossible to deal with ancient Greece because Greece was such a diverse world: its politics, cultures, martial styles, artistic traditions, and dialects largely fragmented among more than 1,000 city-states, numerous tribal and royal groupings spread out over a landscape pierced and divided by mountains. To the endless parts of the islands on the shore of the Aegean Sea.
Where Was Ancient Greece Located?
This diversity of culture means that we simply cannot classify the Greeks in the same way as the Romans or the Egyptians. We can’t get a clear direction of what made them tick and how to contact us. That’s why, in recent years, unlike Gladiator or the commercially successful Spartacus TV series, all films set in ancient Greece have failed to garner real acclaim at the box office (think Troy, Alexander).
Movies set in the world of Greek myth (think Clash and Wrath of the Titans) have done well, but mostly because they’re portrayed as a fantasy world that can look like we want it to. It was the same story with the hugely successful 300 movie – ancient Greek history for sure – but it was shot in a graphic novel style so that it looked like a fantasy world.
The Greeks are famous for providing us with an amazing legacy through politics, language, drama, philosophy, science, art and architecture. But what unites all of these things is the spirit of discovery.
Greece has often been an uncomfortable place for me with my money: a raging bloc of uneasy competition and uncertainty. But this also made it a place where challenging the status quo and accepted wisdom was common. And this is the constant challenge of what we think we know and believe is, to me, the greatest legacy of the Greeks. I think this indifferent spirit has now caught our attention again.
Philosopher Kings Of Ancient Greece
The ancient play Antigone is about the struggle of men and women, duty and love, obstinacy and receptivity, and the individual and society. He challenges us to ask what is right, and how we should judge and be judged in turn. Medea is about love, revenge, justice and public morality. It forces us to watch a mother kill her children to avenge their wayward father, and dare us to argue that this action is wrong.
And the Odyssey? It’s a story of one man against the gods – you can see why people are drawn to the Hunger Games. But it’s more than that – it’s about heroism, faith, perseverance, growing and finding your way home, finding your place in the world. And in doing so, it shines a spotlight back on us: Do we really know who we are? Are we comfortable in and with our world?
At a time when more and more people seem to be losing their sense of identity and belonging within our increasingly chaotic world, perhaps a film about finding oneself, in a dip in ancient Greek myth, is just what is needed. And in 507 BC, the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms he called democratia, or “rule by the people” (from demos, “the people,” and kratos, or “power”). It was the first known democracy in the world.
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Ancit Greece (Greek: Ἑλλάς, romanized: Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th-9th centuries BC to D of classical antiquity (
600 AD), which comprises a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other regions. Most of these regions were formally united only once, for 13 years, under the empire of Alexander the Great from 336 to 323 BC (although this excludes a number of Greek city-states devoid of Alexander’s state in the western Mediterranean, around the sea Lions, Cyprus and Cyraica). In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era.
Nearly three centuries after the collapse of the Late Bronze Age of Mycenaean Greece, Greek urban poles began to form in the eighth century BC, marking the beginning of the Archaic period and the colonization of the Mediterranean basin. This was followed by the Age of Classical Greece, from the Greco-Persian Wars to the 5th and 4th centuries BC, which included the Golden Age of Generations. The conquests of Alexander the Great led to the spread of the Hellenistic civilization from the western Mediterranean to the Central Asian region. The Hellenistic period was marked by the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean by the Roman Republic, and the annexation of the Roman province of Macedonia into Roman Greece, and later the province of Achaia under the Roman Empire.
The Gods Of Ancient Greece: More Than Just Myth?
Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a strong influence on ancient Rome, which carried a version of the
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