Ancient Greece

Athens grew from a Bronze Age citadel on the Acropolis into the largest and most famous city of Classical Greece. Named after its patron goddess Athena, it united the whole region of Attica under one government.

Its experiment with democracy, in which male citizens voted directly on laws and on war and peace, made it unique. After the Persian Wars its fleet made it the leader of the Delian League, and the wealth that flowed in paid for the Parthenon and supported a golden age of drama, philosophy and art.

Sparta lay in the fertile valley of Laconia in the southern Peloponnese. Its citizens, the Spartiates, depended on the labour of the helots, a large enslaved population whose constant threat of revolt shaped Spartan life.

Boys left home at seven to enter the agoge, a harsh state education in endurance, obedience and fighting. Spartan women enjoyed unusual freedom for the Greek world, owning property and exercising outdoors. Ruled by two kings at once, together with a council of elders and five annually elected ephors, Sparta was admired across Greece for its stability and its formidable army.

Corinth controlled the isthmus and two harbours, one facing west toward Italy and one east toward the Aegean. Ships could even be hauled across the isthmus on the diolkos, a paved trackway built around 600 BC, saving a long and dangerous voyage around the Peloponnese.

The city grew rich on trade and on its famous painted pottery, founded colonies including Syracuse and Corcyra, and hosted the Isthmian Games in honour of Poseidon. Rome destroyed Corinth in 146 BC, but Julius Caesar refounded it a century later, and it became a busy Roman city once more.

Thebes was one of the great centres of Mycenaean Greece and the setting of many famous myths, including the stories of Cadmus, Oedipus and the birth of Dionysus. Its tragic royal house gave Sophocles and Aeschylus some of their most powerful material.

In the fourth century BC the general Epaminondas and the elite Sacred Band, a unit of 150 pairs of soldiers, defeated the Spartans at Leuctra in 371 BC, ending Spartan supremacy. A generation later Thebes fell to Macedon, and in 335 BC Alexander the Great razed the city after a revolt, sparing only the temples and the house of the poet Pindar.

Olympia was never a city but a sanctuary set among olive groves where the rivers Alpheios and Kladeos meet in the western Peloponnese. At its heart stood the Temple of Zeus, built around 460 BC, which housed Phidias’ gold and ivory statue of the god, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Every four years athletes from across the Greek world gathered for the Olympic Games, protected by a sacred truce. Winners received only a crown of wild olive, but they returned home as celebrities. The Games ran for more than a thousand years before ending in the late fourth century AD.

According to myth, Zeus released two eagles from opposite ends of the earth, and they met at Delphi, which became known as the navel of the world, marked by a carved stone called the omphalos. Apollo was said to have claimed the site by slaying the serpent Python.

Cities and kings consulted the oracle before founding colonies, going to war or making laws, and they filled the sanctuary with treasuries and statues as thanks. The Pythian Games, second only to the Olympics, were held here in honour of Apollo, with contests in music and poetry as well as athletics.