Peter Haugen

World History For Dummies


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and its governor shall give back to him everything that he has lost.”

      ABCs IN BC

      Throughout this book, you find references to Greeks who lived between about 479 and 323 BC. Their ideas shaped world civilization, leading to modern science, shaping influential schools of philosophy and religion, and setting precedents for democratic government.

      Before I get to these Classical Greeks in this section, you need to know about their world, which is ancient but not as ancient as the earliest Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations.

      Building a Persian Empire

      By the seventh and sixth centuries BC, the Middle East had been crawling with civilizations great and small for centuries. Before the Persians rose up and asserted themselves, they were ruled by another conqueror: the Medes. Famous for crack-shot archery, the Medes came from Media. Media (also spelled Medea) was in northern Iran.

      In 512 BC, Cyrus, a young Persian king from the Achaemenid family, got tired of paying tribute to his grandfather, the king of the Medes. Cyrus gathered up his troops and turned the tables on Gramps, after which he built the Achaemenid Persian Empire. This empire ruled western Asia for two centuries, taking in an area stretching from western India to North Africa and even into Eastern Europe. Around 500 BC, one of the empire’s greatest kings, Darius I, built a 1,500-mile highway from Susa in Iran to Ephesus in Turkey, with stations providing fresh horses on the way for messengers (much as the Pony Express did in America in the 19th century AD).

      Also in Turkey, the independent-minded Ionian Greeks in coastal city-states stood up to the Persians. Originally from Greece, across the Aegean Sea, these Ionians spoke Greek; organized their society along Greek lines; and looked to Greece, not Persia, as their homeland. With support from mainland Greek cities such as Athens, they rebelled against Persian rule in 499 BC. Darius I sent an army to punish Athens for helping the revolt, setting off the Persian Wars. Although the Greeks eventually won, bad feelings remained and flared up again more than 150 years later, when Alexander the Great headed the Greek forces.

      Growing toward Greekness

      Both civilizations were predecessors and possibly ancestors of the Classical Greeks — called Classical not because of their taste in music (Mozart wouldn’t be born for a long, long time), but because so much of what they thought, said, and wrote has survived. Classical Greek ideas, literature, and architecture — not to mention toga parties and those cool letters on the fronts of fraternity and sorority houses — are still around in the 21st century AD.

      By routes direct and indirect, the Greeks — especially their philosophical approach to examining the world critically — spread all over the Mediterranean and then down through history, profoundly influencing successive cultures.

      Adapting to the lay of the Greek land

      Sea and mountains cut up the Greek homeland, separating people instead of bringing widespread populations together. Yet Greek growers gathered for trade, and from marketplaces, they built cities in mainland valleys and on isolated islands. Greek citizens gathered and lived in these independent cities, and they did something unusual for this stage of history: They talked openly about how the independent city-state (called a polis) should be run.

A city-state is an independent city, not politically part of a larger country. Many city-states, however, ruled broader lands. Athens, one of the best-known Greek city-states, became capital of an empire in the fifth century BC. The Greeks were great sailors who founded new city-states not just in Greece and on the Aegean Islands, as shown in Figure 4-2, but eventually all over the Mediterranean Sea. They settled in places as far away as Sicily and southern Italy. These far-flung city-states were types of colonies in that they preserved and spread Greek language and culture, but they weren’t colonial in the political sense. That is, the remote city-states were often independent. If adventurers from the Greek city-state of Corinth founded a city-state hundreds of miles away, that new city-state wasn’t necessarily a Corinthian possession.

      Greek citizens, whether living in Greece, Turkey, or Italy, were free to an extent unheard of in imperial societies such as Persia’s. Most Greek citizens were small farmers for whom freedom meant being able to grow and market their crops without interference. Citizen was far from being a universal status, of course; one had to be a man (never a woman) of Greek parentage and language to be a citizen. (Foreigners who didn’t speak Greek, whose languages sounded like so much “bar bar bar” to the Greeks, were dismissed as barbarians.)

Map depicts the Greeks built independent city-states all over the Aegean and well beyond.

      FIGURE 4-2: The Greeks built independent city-states all over the Aegean and well beyond.

      Finding strength in common culture

      The Greek city-states built empires based on influence and alliance more than conquest, but they did fight one another. Sparta, famous for single-minded military ferocity, began the long, exhausting Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BC because Spartans objected to what they saw as imperialism on the part of Athens — especially under powerful Athenian leader Pericles. Sparta brought down Athens, center of learning and beauty, and Thebes tamed Sparta. (I talk about the Greek style of fighting in Chapter 16.)

      The 2006 film 300 introduces elements of fantasy into its depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, a landmark conflict of the Persian Wars. 300 depicts the king of Sparta and his tiny force of 300 troops standing up to the million-strong Persian army of Xerxes I.

      Making Alexander great

      The Greeks’ fierce, contentious independence made them vulnerable over the period