History
c. 800 – 480 BCE
After the long Dark Age that followed the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, Greece revived from about 800 BCE in the period historians call the Archaic. Population grew, trade flourished, and the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet to write their own language — the script in which the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer were first set down.
These centuries saw the polis take shape as the basic unit of Greek life. Land hunger and trade drove a great wave of colonization that scattered Greek cities from the Black Sea to southern Italy and across Asia Minor. At home, aristocratic rule gave way in many cities to populist strongmen called tyrants, and then, in Athens, to the first reforms — those of Solon and Cleisthenes — that would lead toward democracy.
It was in Archaic Ionia, at Miletus, that philosophy itself began, when Thales and his successors first sought a natural first principle of things in place of myth. Pythagoras carried the new wisdom west to Croton in Magna Graecia. The period closed with the rise of Persia, whose conquest of the Ionian cities provoked the revolt that led to the great wars of the next age.
PLATO SCROLL