The Greek World

Many cities, one people

The ancient Greeks never formed a single state. They lived in hundreds of independent city-states scattered around the Aegean and along the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, often fierce rivals — yet they thought of themselves as one people, the Hellenes, united by a common language, the poems of Homer, the Olympic Games, and the great shared sanctuaries such as Delphi and Olympia. Everyone who did not speak Greek they called barbaroi, barbarians.

The polis

The characteristic Greek institution was the polis, the independent city-state: a town with its surrounding farmland, governing its own affairs, worshipping its own patron deity, and fielding its own citizen army. Athens and Sparta were the greatest, but Corinth, Thebes, Miletus, and scores of others each jealously guarded their independence. It was within the intense civic life of the polis that Greek philosophy, drama, and politics were born.

Sea and land

Mountainous and broken into small plains and islands, the Greek landscape encouraged this fragmentation into small communities, while the sea bound them together and drew them outward in trade and colonization. From Ionia in the east to Magna Graecia in the west, the Greek world was a maritime civilization strung along coastlines.

The ages of Greece

Historians divide its long history into broad ages — the Bronze-Age Mycenaeans, a Dark Age of decline, the Archaic rebirth, the Classical flowering of Athens and Sparta, and the Hellenistic age that followed Alexander — before Greece passed under Rome and, in time, became the heart of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire.