Overview
Democracy, philosophy, theater, historiography, and the Olympic Games all trace their beginnings to Greece, which is why it is so often called the wellspring of much of Western civilization. Yet Greece’s own history is far longer than the classical age alone, stretching unbroken into the present.
The major eras
The story begins with the Bronze Age palace civilizations of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece in the 2nd millennium BC, followed by a dark age and then the rebirth of the city-states (poleis) in the Archaic period, with colonization around the Mediterranean, the alphabet, and Homer. In the Classical age (5th–4th century BC) the mainland repelled the invasions of the Persian Wars, and Athens under Pericles produced its democracy, the Parthenon, tragedy, and philosophy — before the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and the rise of Macedon under Philip II and Alexander the Great, whose conquests spread Greek culture across Asia in the Hellenistic age. Rome conquered Greece in 146 BC, yet, as Horace famously put it, captive Greece took her rough conqueror captive, and Greece then spent eleven centuries in the East Roman (Byzantine) world, whose language and church were Greek. Nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule (1453–1821) ended with the War of Independence (1821–1829). Modern Greece grew from a small kingdom through territorial expansion, the Asia Minor catastrophe and population exchange of 1923, occupation and civil war in the 1940s, and a military junta (1967–1974), joining the EU in 1981 on the way to today’s republic.