Greece
......The first civilizations to develop in Europe were extensions of the early civilizations of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and Egypt. Europe's earliest major culture was the Minoan civilization of Crete, the largest of the Greek islands. Minoan culture was strongly influenced by Egypt. Minoan civilization is the source of the Greek myth about the hero Theseus who entered the labyrinth (a maze) and slayed the Minotaur (half bull and half man).
......Greece is a mountainous and rocky peninsula with little good farmland, but its long irregular coastline and its numerous islands provided fine harbors. Many Greeks turned to the sea to make a living by fishing and trading. Greeks established colonies and dominated trade in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Seas. Greek communities isolated by mountains developed into independent self-governing city-states that often fought one another. The leading city-states were Sparta with its strong military government and Athens, the present-day capital of Greece. The Greeks had a polytheistic religion; their major gods lived on Mount Olympus.
......Greece is best known for its classical civilization of 500 to 300 BC. Classical Greek culture, particularly that of Athens, is famed for its beautiful arts, architecture, philosophy, theater, Olympic games, and for creating the first democracy. Classical Greece is generally considered the principal source of Western Civilization.

The Iliad and the Odyssey
......Modern people still read literature from ancient Greece including the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic (meaning long and heroic) poems by Homer. The Iliad takes place during the Trojan War when the Greeks used a large wooden horse with soldiers hidden inside to defeat the defenders of Troy in Asia Minor, now Turkey. The Odyssey recounts the adventures of the hero Odysseus who had to overcome many obstacles during his 10-year voyage home from the war in Troy. These poems are the first literary works of Western Civilization.
......The heroes of Greek myths such as the Iliad and the Odyssey served as models of excellence for the ancient Greeks. In both poems, brain power can overcome physical strength. Homer's poems were later the inspiration for a great outpouring of literature during the Greek classical age.

Persian Wars
......Centered in present day Iran, the Persian Empire stretched from the Middle East to India; it was the largest empire the world had yet seen. The Persians tried to add Greece to their empire in the 400s BC, but the Greeks united long enough to defeat them. At the Battle of Marathon, Greeks repelled a larger invading force of Persians, and legend says a Greek soldier ran nearly 26 miles from the battlefield to Athens where he died after delivering news of the victory. This legend is the basis for the modern marathon foot race.
......In fighting ten years later (480 BC), the Persians again invaded Greece and managed to defeat 300 brave Spartan warriors and their allies defending the narrow pass at Thermopylae, which permitted the massive Persian army to march on Athens. The people of Athens fled to the nearby island of Salamis as the Persians conquered and burned their city. The Persian king Xerxes had his throne placed on a hill where he could watch his fleet of some 700 warships destroy the Greek navy of about 300 ships. Instead, Xerxes watched in horror as the Greeks lured his navy into a narrow strait that prevented many of the Persian ships from joining the battle. The Greeks won this decisive sea battle, and the Persian Wars soon ended. Because the victory at Salamis preserved Greek culture from foreign domination, some historians have called this "the battle that saved Western Civilization."

Parthenon
......A statesman named Pericles became the political leader of Athens following the Persian Wars. Although the wars had ended, Persia remained a military threat, and other Greek city-states paid money to Athens for protection. Pericles used this income to rebuild his burned-out city and to finance the construction of magnificent new buildings including the Parthenon. The Parthenon is a temple built to honor Athena, goddess of wisdom and war and the patron goddess of Athens. The Parthenon is the main building on the Acropolis, a high point in Athens that was the center of Athenian life and a fortress against attack.
......Although the Parthenon is now in ruins, it is famed for its beauty and proportion. It is probably the most influential building in the history of Western architecture. The Parthenon has served as a model for important buildings in much of the world including the Lincoln Memorial in the United States. Like all classical Greek temples, the Parthenon was built with closely spaced columns that left little interior space.

democracy
......The Greeks established a new kind of society by inventing the polis*. The polis was an association of free male citizens who served as the soldiers who defended their city-state from attack, and they managed the government. The polis chose leaders to govern the city-state for a limited period of time, often a year. This approach was quite different from other ancient societies in which government was headed by a king for life, and the people were separated by class into a small group of the rich and a large group of the poor.
......The democratic principals developed in the polis reached their greatest extent during the rule of Pericles in Athens where every citizen was expected to participate in government; Athens was ruled by the many, not the few. Democracy is a form of government in which power lies with the people who may exercise that power directly as they did in ancient Athens where all citizens could vote on new laws. Or, power may be exercised indirectly through elected representatives as we do in the United States. ("Democracy" comes from the Greek word for "the people.")
......Although Athens had a number of imitators, democracy was far from universal among the Greek city-states, and even in Athens citizens were a minority of the population because women, slaves, and foreign-born persons did not qualify as citizens.

humanism
......The ancient Greeks considered human beings to be the center of existence. Unlike other ancient cultures that were deeply concerned with religion, gods, and the afterlife, the philosophy and arts of classical Greece were more concerned with the value of human beings on earth. This emphasis on humans can be seen in Greek art that portrayed the human body realistically. Art of the classical Greek period was much more realistic than the stiff, formal art of earlier eras such as the art of ancient Egypt and of preclassical Greece.
......Greeks strived for excellence in the way they conducted their daily lives. They believed that reason was the true source of knowledge and that a wise person was the best person: reason, not emotion, should rule our lives. This concern with human life, and the effort to improve humanity through reason, is called humanism. Greek humanism emphasized order in daily life, nothing in excess, a balance between extremes known as "The Golden Mean." In school, for example, both the body and the mind were trained. Some two thousand years later, Greek humanism would help shape the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Europe.

Socrates (SOCK-ruh-tees)
......Talented artists and thinkers were drawn to Athens during the Age of Pericles. One of the best known was the philosopher Socrates. He was famed for saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates encouraged his students to question accepted wisdom including government policies.
......But, the golden age of Athens was about to end as Athens went to war with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. Early in the fighting, a plague of typhoid fever killed a third of the residents of Athens including Pericles. After 27 years of warfare, Athens was defeated and went into decline. Socrates was condemned to death by the citizens of Athens for neglecting the gods and corrupting the morals of the young. Many historians believe, however, that Socrates was made a scapegoat for the decline of Athens after its defeat by Sparta.
......Socrates did not leave behind written works; his philosophy was carried forward by his students including Plato, who was deeply troubled by the death of his friend Socrates. It caused him to question democracy; Plato warned that clever leaders could easily manipulate citizens who knew little about the important issues of the day. Plato established a school called The Academy, the first real university. His most famous student was the philosopher Aristotle whose ideas would dominate Western scientific thought for centuries to come.

Hellenistic Civilization
......Despite the decline of Athens, Greece would again take the center stage of history with the conquests of Alexander the Great, a young man from the mountainous northern region of Greece called Macedonia. Alexander's tutor was the philosopher Aristotle, and his father was Philip of Macedon, who succeeded in conquering all of Greece in 322 BC, ending the independence of the Greek city-states. After his father died, Alexander took control of Greece at the age of 20, but Alexander wanted more.
......Alexander succeeded in conquering Egypt and much of the ancient world, extending his empire and Greek culture all the way to India. In the process, he defeated Greece's old enemy, the Persian Empire. Alexander never lost a battle, but he became sick with fever and died at the age of 32. His empire fell apart and was divided among his top generals. After his death, a new culture emerged known as Hellenistic civilization, a blend of Greek, Persian, Egyptian and Indian influences that flourished for centuries. Hellenistic civilization takes its name from Hellas, the Greek word for Greece.
.......Ptolemy (TALL-uh-me) was the Macedonian general who took control of Egypt following the death of Alexander. The Ptolemy dynasty ruled Egypt for three centuries ending with the reign of Queen Cleopatra who used her relationships with Roman leaders Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony to try to keep Egypt strong and independent. It wasn't to be. Upon her death Egypt was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and thus a Greek woman was the last pharaoh of Egypt.
.......Art of the Hellenistic period tended to be more fanciful and emotional than the pure and balanced forms of the Classical world. Art historians sometimes apply the terms derivative or decadent to Hellenistic art, although a number of Hellenistic works are admired today, and many viewers might find them more compelling than the less showy classical forms.
.......Alexandria, Egypt was one of many cities founded by and named after Alexander the Great. Alexandria became the center of learning of the Hellenistic world. It was home to a great research center and library that housed the collected knowledge of the ancient world in an estimated one-million papyrus scrolls. The spirit of inquiry at Alexandria is personified by chief librarian Eratosthenes, who combined careful observation with a bit of experimentation and geometry to accurately calculate the circumference of the earth. Some 16 centuries later, Christopher Columbus mistakenly believed the earth was one-third smaller. If Columbus had known what Eratosthenes knew, Columbus might never have attempted to sail west around the earth to reach Asia.

ancient Rome
.......Rome succeeded Greece as the major power in the Mediterranean. Rome carried forward Greek ideas and contributed its own influences to help shape Western Civilization. The Romans adopted many aspects of Hellenistic culture; their gods, arts, and architecture resembled those of the classical Greeks. The Roman writer Virgil wrote a founding myth for the Romans inspired by Homer's epic about the Trojan War. According to Virgil's Aeneid, the Trojan prince Aeneis fled with survivors from the sack of Troy and journeyed to Italy where they found a new sacred home destined to one day rule the world.
.......The Romans were a practical and hard-working people, and Rome's sturdy farmers made good soldiers. Rome was only a small town on the Tiber River when Athens was at the height of its glory, but Rome grew to become a strong city-state at about the time of Alexander the Great. At first, kings ruled Rome, and then about 500 BC, the Roman Republic was established with a law-making body called the Senate. Every year the Senate chose two of its members to serve as co-rulers, or consuls. For a time Rome had a form of democracy, although wealthy upper-class families held more than their fair share of political power. Later, during a time of turmoil in the republic, Julius Caesar seized control of the government. His successors took the title of emperor.
......At its height, the Roman Empire completely encircled the Mediterranean Sea, extending from the Middle East to the British Isles. Rome added Greece to its empire in 146 BC. Rome's central position in the Mediterranean made it an ideal location for building a large Mediterranean empire and international trading network. It was said, "All roads lead to Rome." The empire had a strong central government that produced massive public works including paved roads, government buildings, baths, sports arenas, and aqueducts. The Romans established a uniform legal system that was enforced throughout the empire and formed the basis for western legal tradition. The Romans eventually replaced their pantheon of Greek-inspired gods with the single God of the Christians, thus extending Christianity across the empire and establishing it as a major world religion.
.......As the years passed, the Roman Empire weakened and was divided into two parts with Rome serving as capital in the west, and Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) as the capital in the east. Rome and the western empire fell to nomadic invaders, the so-called barbarians, in the late 5th Century AD. The eastern part of the empire, however, lived on for another thousand years under a different name, the Byzantine Empire, where Greek replaced Latin as the official language.

the classical period
......Many historians agree that ancient times began with the creation of the world's first civilizations in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China beginning about 3500 BC, and ancient times ended with the fall of three great classical civilizations some 4,000 years later. When people in the Western world speak of the classical period, they are usually referring to ancient Greece and Rome. But in a larger sense, a classical period is when any civilization undergoes advancement in several fields such as government, religion, the arts, or science. It is a time when a culture develops distinctive features that help to define it far into the future.
......The three great classical civilizations of India, China, and the Mediterranean created larger empires than had existed before, and each made lasting contributions to the future. All three suffered from internal weaknesses before falling to nomadic invaders by about 500 AD, marking the end of ancient times and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
.......Still, each of these classical civilizations had its own distinctive character. The Mauryan and Gupta dynasties gave India religious philosophies that focused on union with a universal spiritual force and de-emphasized the concerns of this life. The Qin and Han dynasties left China with a tradition of strong central governments headed by powerful rulers and a Confucian philosophy that promoted order, respect, and learning. Greece and Rome gave Western Civilization a humanistic philosophy concerned with improving life through reason, along with traditions of citizen involvement in government and rule by law.
.......Curiously, one century during the early classical period seems to have been especially "radioactive," as a modern commentator put it. During the 5th Century BC, when Socrates was teaching at the Agora in Athens, Buddha was also teaching in India, and Confucius was teaching in China.

*Many words in the English language are based on the Greek; geography, philosophy, and history are examples. Polis is the root for our words police, policy, politics, metropolis, and the capital city of Indiana: Indianapolis.