Peter Haugen - World History For Dummies

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.

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.)

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

Yet among free Greek citizens, the custom of asking questions — about the way the city was run, about the legends of their gods, or about the way nature works — led to exciting advancements. Inquisitiveness fueled philosophy and thought about nature. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, and even biology became issues to theorize about and problems to solve.

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.)

Yet the Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, and others in Greek city-states never forgot that they were Greeks; they spoke dialects of the same language, worshipped the same gods, and grew up hearing the epic poems of Homer. ( The Iliad and The Odyssey were a combination of holy scripture, Star Wars-type saga, and World History For Dummies of the time.) Different city-states also gathered for athletic competitions (the original Olympics). When Greeks were threatened by barbarians, as in the wars against the mighty Persian kings Darius I in 490 BC and his son Xerxes I in 480 BC, the city-states worked together, if only temporarily.

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.

The Greeks’ fierce, contentious independence made them vulnerable over the period between 359 and 337 BC as a king to their north, Philip of Macedon, used a combination of military force and aggressive diplomacy to muscle in on successive city-states. Macedon (the Macedonian region of modern Greece) wasn’t a mighty empire like Persia, but a small, mountainous country. Yet the Greeks failed to unite against Philip. He conquered, coerced, and negotiated peace treaties with individual city-states until he was in position to set himself up as protector of Greece. Philip formed the city-states into a league that helped his son put together the biggest empire yet.

Philip planned to lead the Greeks against Persia as payback for Persia’s invasions of more than a century before, but he was murdered before he could mount the expedition. Some historians say that his wife, Olympias, paid the killer so that her son, Alexander, could succeed his dad. Nineteen-year-old Alexander, well educated in war and philosophy (one of his tutors was the Athenian philosopher Aristotle), joined her in killing other candidates for the throne of Macedon.

His power at home secure, Alexander quickly disabused the Greeks of any notion that they would have an easy time resisting him, nearly destroying Thebes in the process (not to be confused with the ancient Egyptian capital also called Thebes).

Director Oliver Stone’s 2004 film Alexander , starring Colin Farrell in the title role, is an ambitious attempt to trace Alexander the Great’s entire life, from his difficult relationship with Philip and his complex feelings for his mother through his greatest conquests and beyond. As always with movies, it’s more entertainment than education.

In a career marked by one victory after another, Alexander the Great built an empire beyond the limits of what had been the known world. By the middle of 331 BC, Alexander and his Macedonian-Greek army defeated two great Persian forces, the second led by King Darius III.

Although he was a brilliant, fearless, and inventive warrior, Alexander didn’t do it all by force or ingenuity. The Egyptians, conquered earlier by the Persians, gladly chose Alexander as their leader instead. When the young conqueror marched into Mesopotamia, ancient cities opened their gates to him and took him as king. When Darius III was out of the way (murdered by his own men), the Persians fell down before Alexander and made him feel almost as though he were a god. He liked that treatment, but his officers didn’t.

Alexander marched on beyond the frontiers of Persia, clashing with Afghan tribes, founding cities, and crossing the Himalayas. In India, his forces prevailed against the battle elephants of King Porus. Finally, his troops refused to go any farther. Returning as far as Babylon, Alexander died of a fever (perhaps malaria) at age 32 in 323 BC.