Chapter 3: The Development of Greek Society and Culture

Greece in the Bronze Age

Geography and Settlement

Hellas, as the Greeks still call their land, encompassed the Greek peninsula, the islands of the Aegean Sea, and the lands bordering the Aegean, an area known as the Aegean basin.
The major regions of Greece were Thessaly and Macedonia in the north, and Boeotia and the large island of Euboea in the center.
Immediately to the south of Boeotia was Attica, an area of thin soil in which olives and wine grapes flourished.
Still farther south, the Peloponnesus, a large peninsula connected to the rest of mainland Greece by a very narrow isthmus at Corinth.
The geographical fragmentation of Greece encouraged political fragmentation.
Communications were poor, with rocky tracks far more common than roads.

The Minoans

On the large island of Crete, Bronze Age farmers and fishermen began to trade their surpluses with their neighbors, and cities grew, housing artisans and merchants.
Rulers in several cities of Crete began to build large structures with hundreds of interconnected rooms.
The archaeologists who discovered these huge structures called them “palaces,” and they named the flourishing and vibrant culture of this era Minoan, after a mythical king of Crete, Minos.
Few specifics are known about Minoan political life except that a king and a group of nobles stood at its head.
Minoan life was thought to be peaceful and wealthy.
Minoans appear to have worshipped goddesses far more than gods.
Beginning about 1700 b.c.e. Minoan society was disrupted by a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on nearby islands, some of which resulted in large tsunamis.
The eruption on Thera was long seen as the most important cause of the collapse of Minoan civilization.

The Mycenaeans

As Minoan culture was flourishing on Crete, a different type of society developed on the mainland.
This society was founded by groups who had migrated there during the period after 2000 b.c.e., and its members spoke an early form of Greek.
By about 1650 b.c.e. one group of these immigrants had raised palaces and established cities at Thebes, Athens, Mycenae, and elsewhere.
These palace-centers ruled by local kings formed a loose hegemony under the authority of the king of Mycenae, and the archaeologists who first discovered traces of this culture called it Mycenaean.
As in Crete, the political unit in Mycenaean Greece was the kingdom, and the king and his warrior aristocracy stood at the top of society.
The Mycenaean economy was marked by an extensive division of labor, and at the bottom of the social scale were male and female slaves.
Palace scribes kept records with a script known as Linear B, which scholars realized was an early form of Greek and have learned to read.
Mycenaean kingdoms appear to have fought regularly with one another.
Contacts between the Minoans and Mycenaeans were originally peaceful, and Minoan culture and trade goods flooded the Greek mainland.
Between 1300 and 1100 b.c.e. various kingdoms in and beyond Greece ravaged one another in a savage series of wars that destroyed both the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.
The fall of the Minoans and Mycenaeans was part of what scholars see as a general collapse of Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean.
This collapse appears to have had a number of causes: internal economic and social problems, invasions and migrations by outsiders, changes in warfare and weaponry, and natural disasters which reduced the amount of food and contributed to famines.
Mycenaean Greeks joined the migrating Sea Peoples and probably settled in Canaan.
These factors worked together to usher in a period of poverty and disruption that historians of Greece have traditionally called the Dark Age (ca. 1100–800 b.c.e.).
The Bronze Age Collapse led to the widespread and prolonged movement of Greek peoples, both within Greece itself and beyond.

Homer, Hesiod, and the Epic

The Greeks had epics, poetic tales of legendary heroes and of the times when people believed the gods still walked the earth.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are the most important.
Most scholars think they were composed in the eighth or seventh century b.c.e., with the Iliad appearing earlier than the Odyssey.
The Iliad recounts the tale of the Trojan War of the late Bronze Age.
Ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the Trojan War was a real event embellished by poetic retelling, but by the modern era most people regarded it as a myth.
Homer’s Odyssey recounts the adventures of Odysseus, a wise and fearless hero of the war at Troy, during his ten-year voyage home.
Both of Homer’s epics portray engaging but flawed characters who are larger than life, yet human.
The men and women at the center of the stories display the quality known as arête, that is, excellence and living up to one’s fullest potential.
Greeks also learned about the origin and descent of the gods and goddesses of their polytheistic system from another poet, Hesiod, who most scholars think lived sometime between 750 and 650 b.c.e.
Hesiod made the gods the focus of his poem, the Theogony.
By combining Mesopotamian myths, which the Hittites had adopted and spread to the Aegean, with a variety of Greek oral traditions, Hesiod forged a coherent story of the origin of the gods.

The Development of the Polis in the Archaic Age

The most important political change in this period was the development of the polis, a word generally translated as “city-state.”
With the polis, the Greeks established a new type of political structure.

Organization of the Polis

The polis was more than a political institution; it was a community of citizens with their own customs and laws.
The poleis that emerged after 800 did not have kings but instead were self-governing.
The physical, religious, and political forms of the polis varied from place to place, but everywhere the polis was relatively small, reflecting the fragmented geography of Greece.
Poleis developed from Dark Age towns, which were centers of administration, trade, and religion.
The countryside was essential to the economy of the polis and provided food to sustain the entire population.
The city’s water supply came from public fountains, springs, and cisterns.
All poleis, with one exception, did not have standing armies. Instead they relied on their citizens for protection.
The backbone of the army was the heavily armed infantry, or hoplites, ordinary citizens rather than members of the elite.
Hoplites wore bronze helmets and leather and bronze body armor, which they purchased themselves.
They marched and fought in a close rectangular formation known as a phalanx.

Governing Structures

Each Greek polis had one of several different types of government.
Monarchy, rule by a king, had been prevalent during the Mycenaean period, but afterward declined.
Sporadic periods of violent political and social upheaval often led to the seizure of power by one man, a type of government the Greeks called tyranny.
Tyrants generally came to power by using their wealth or by negotiating to win a political following that toppled the existing legal government.
Democracy translates as “the power of the people” but was actually rule by citizens, not the people as a whole.
Greek democracy did not reflect the modern concept that all people are created equal, but it did permit male citizens to share equally in determining the diplomatic and military policies of the polis, without respect to wealth.
Oligarchy, which literally means “the rule of the few,” was government by citizens who met a minimum property requirement.
Many Greeks preferred oligarchy because it provided more political stability than democracy did.
Although oligarchy was the government of the prosperous, it left the door open to political and social advancement.

Overseas Expansion

The increase in population created more demand for food than the land could supply.
The resulting social and political tensions drove many people to seek new homes outside of Greece.
Greeks from the mainland and Ionia traveled throughout the Mediterranean, sailing in great numbers to Sicily and southern Italy, where there was ample space for expansion.
In Sardinia they first established trading stations, and then permanent towns.
From these new outposts Greek influence extended to southern France.
Colonization changed the entire Greek world, both at home and abroad.
In economic terms the expansion of the Greeks created a much larger market for agricultural and manufactured goods.
Colonization presented the polis with a huge challenge, for it required organization and planning on an unprecedented scale.
The colonizing city, called the metropolis, or “mother city,” first decided where to establish the colony, how to transport colonists to the site, and who would sail.
The metropolis collected and stored the supplies that the colonists would need both to feed themselves and to plant their first crop.
Colonization spread the polis and its values far beyond the shores of Greece.

The Growth of Sparta

Sparta became the leading military power in Greece.
To expand their polis, the Spartans did not establish colonies but set out in about 750 b.c.e. to conquer Messenia.
This conflict, called the First Messenian War by later Greek historians, lasted for twenty years and ended in a Spartan triumph.
The Spartans appropriated Messenian land and turned the Messenians into helots, unfree residents forced to work state lands.
Residents of coastal areas and the hills surrounding Messenia became a third group, known as periokoi, who were free but had no political voice in the running of Sparta.
In about 650 b.c.e. Spartan exploitation and oppression of the Messenian helots, along with Sparta’s defeat at the hands of rival polis, lead to a massive helot revolt that became known as the Second Messenian War.
Finally, after some thirty years of fighting, the Spartans put down the revolt.
The plan for the new system in Sparta was attributed to the lawgiver Lycurgus, who may or may not have been an actual person.
According to later Greek sources, political distinctions among Spartan men were eliminated, and all citizens became legally equal.
Governance of the polis was in the hands of two hereditary kings who were primarily military leaders.
To provide for their economic needs, the Spartans divided the land of Messenia among all citizens.
In the system attributed to Lycurgus every citizen owed primary allegiance to Sparta.
Suppression of the individual together with emphasis on military prowess led to a barracks state.
Their military training never ceased, and the older men were expected to be models of endurance, frugality, and sturdiness.
Spartans expected women in citizen families to be good wives and strict mothers of future soldiers.
With men in military service much of their lives, women in citizen families owned land and ran the estates and were not physically restricted or secluded.
Along with the emphasis on military values for both sexes, the Spartan system served to instill in society the civic virtues of dedication to the state and a code of moral conduct.

The Evolution of Athens

Like Sparta, Athens faced pressing social, economic, and political problems during the Archaic period, but the Athenian response was far different from that of the Spartans.
Instead of creating a state devoted to the military, the Athenians created a state that became a democracy.
In 621 b.c.e. Draco, an Athenian aristocrat, under pressure from small landholders and with the consent of the nobles, published the first law code of the Athenian polis.
Yet the aristocracy still governed Athens oppressively, and the social and economic situation remained dire.
Despite Draco’s code, noble landholders continued to force small farmers and artisans into economic dependence.
One person who recognized these problems clearly was Solon, an aristocrat and poet.
Solon condemned his fellow aristocrats for their greed and dishonesty.
Around 594 b.c.e. the nobles elected Solon chief archon, or magistrate of the Athenian polis, with authority over legal, civic, and military issues.
Solon immediately freed all people enslaved for debt, recalled all exiles, canceled all debts on land, and made enslavement for debt illegal.
Solon allowed non-nobles into the old aristocratic assembly.
Although Solon’s reforms solved some immediate problems, they did not satisfy either the aristocrats or the common people completely, and they did not bring peace to Athens.
During the sixth century b.c.e. the successful general Pisistratus declared himself tyrant.
Under his rule Athens prospered, and his building program began to transform the city into one of the splendors of Greece.
Athens became more democratic under the leadership of Cleisthenes, a wealthy and prominent aristocrat who had won the support of lower-status men and became the leader of Athens in 508 b.c.e.
Cleisthenes created the deme (deem), a unit of land that kept the roll of citizens, or demos, within its jurisdiction.
The democracy functioned on the idea that all full citizens were sovereign.
In 487 b.c.e. the election of the city’s nine archons was replaced by reappointment by lot, which meant that any citizen with a certain amount of property had a chance of becoming an archon.
Legislation was in the hands of two bodies, the boule, or council, composed of five hundred members, and the ecclesia, the assembly of all citizens.

War and Turmoil in the Classical Period

The Persian Wars

In 499 b.c.e. the Greeks who lived in Ionia unsuccessfully rebelled against the Persian Empire, which had ruled the area for fifty years.
In 480 b.c.e. the Persian king Xerxes I (r. 485–465 b.c.e.) personally led a massive invasion of Greece.
Under the leadership of Sparta, many Greek poleis, though not all, joined together to fight the Persians.
The first confrontations between the Persians and the Greeks occurred at the pass of Thermopylae, where an outnumbered Greek army, including three hundred top Spartan warriors, held off a much larger Persian force for several days.
The Greeks at Thermopylae fought heroically, but the Persians won the battle after a local man showed them a hidden path over the mountains so that they could attack the Greeks from both sides.
At the same time as the land battle of Thermopylae, Greeks and Persians fought one another in a naval battle at Artemisium off Boetia.
The wars provided a brief glimpse of what the Greeks could accomplish when they worked together.
By defeating the Persians, the Greeks ensured that they would not be ruled by a foreign power.
Among the thoughtful Greeks who felt prompted to record and analyze these events was Herodotus, who traveled the Greek world to piece together the rise and fall of the Persian Empire.

Growth of the Athenian Empire

The defeat of the Persians created a power vacuum in the Aegean, and the Athenians took advantage of the situation.
Led by Themistocles, the Athenians and their allies formed the Delian League, a military alliance aimed at protecting the Aegean Islands, liberating Ionia from Persian rule, and keeping the Persians out of Greece.
The Delian League was intended to be a free alliance under the leadership of Athens, but as the Athenians drove the Persians out of the Aegean, they also became increasingly imperialistic.
The aggressiveness of Athenian rule also alarmed Sparta and its allies.
Relations between Athens and Sparta grew more hostile, particularly when Pericles(ca. 494–429 b.c.e.), an aristocrat of solid intellectual ability, became the leading statesman in Athens.
In 459 b.c.e. Sparta and Athens went to war over conflicts between Athens and some of Sparta’s allies.
The war ended in 445 b.c.e. with a treaty promising thirty years of peace, and no serious damage to either side.
The treaty divided the Greek world between the two great powers, with each agreeing to respect the other and its allies.
Peace lasted thirteen years instead of thirty.
Athens continued its severe policies toward its subject allies and came into conflict with Corinth, one of Sparta’s leading supporters.
In 432 b.c.e. Pericles persuaded the Athenians to pass a law that excluded the Megarians from trading with Athens and its empire, a restriction that would have meant economic disaster for the Megarians.
In response the Spartans and their allies declared war.

The Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesian War lasted a generation and brought in its wake disease, famine, civil wars, widespread destruction, and huge loss of life.
During the first Spartan invasion of Attica, which began in 431 b.c.e., cramped conditions within the walls of Athens nurtured a dreadful plague that killed huge numbers, eventually claiming Pericles himself.
Under the non-aristocratic Cleon, the Athenians counterattacked and defeated the Spartans, though Cleon was killed.
Recognizing that ten years of war had resulted only in death, destruction, and stalemate, Sparta and Athens concluded the Peace of Nicias in 421 b.c.e.
The Peace of Nicias resulted in a cold war.
In 416 b.c.e. the Athenians sent a fleet to the largely neutral island of Melos with an ultimatum: the Melians could surrender or perish.
The Melians resisted, so the Athenians conquered them, killed the men of military age, and sold the women and children into slavery.
The cold war grew hotter, thanks to the ambitions of Alcibiades(ca. 450–404 b.c.e.), an aristocrat, a kinsman of Pericles, and a student of the philosopher Socrates.
He convinced the Athenians to attack Syracuse, the leading polis in Sicily, which would cut off the grain supply from Sicily to Sparta and its allies, allowing Athens to end the war and become the greatest power in Greece.
The disaster in Sicily ushered in the final phase of the war, which was marked by three major developments: the renewal of war between Athens and Sparta, Persia’s intervention in the war, and the revolt of many Athenian subjects.
The year 413 b.c.e. saw Sparta’s declaration of war against Athens and widespread revolt within the Athenian Empire, both supported by Alcibiades, who had defected to Sparta.
The strain of war prompted the Athenians in 411 b.c.e. to recall Alcibiades from exile.
In 405 b.c.e. Spartan forces destroyed the last Athenian fleet at the Battle of Aegospotami, after which the Spartans blockaded Athens until it was starved into submission.
In 404 b.c.e., after twenty-seven years of fighting, the Peloponnesian War was over.

The Struggle for Dominance

The decades after the end of the Peloponnesian War were turbulent ones.
The chief states — Sparta, Athens, and Thebes — each tried to create a political system in which it would dominate.
From 400 to 386 b.c.e. the Spartans fought the Persians for Ionia, a conflict that eventually engulfed Greece itself.
After years of stalemate the Spartans made peace with Persia and their own Greek enemies.
The result was a treaty, the King’s Peace of 386 b.c.e. in which the Greeks and Persians pledged themselves to live in harmony.
The Spartans were not long content with this situation, however, and decided to punish cities that had opposed Sparta during the war.
In 378 b.c.e. the Spartans launched an unprovoked attack on Athens.
Together the Thebans and the Athenians created what was called the Second Athenian Confederacy, a federation of states to guarantee the terms of the peace treaty.
The two fought Sparta until 371 b.c.e., when due to growing fear of Theban might, Athens made a separate peace with Sparta.
Thebes defended itself until later that year, when the brilliant Theban general Epaminondas(ca. 418–362 b.c.e.) routed the Spartan army on the small plain of Leuctra and in a series of invasions eliminated Sparta as a major power.
The defeat of the once-invincible Spartans stunned the Greeks, who wondered how Thebes would use its victory.
Epaminondas, also a gifted statesman, immediately grappled with the problem of how to translate military success into political reality.
He concluded alliances with many Peloponnesian states but made no effort to dominate them.
His premature death at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 b.c.e. put an end to his efforts, however.

Phillip II and Macedonian Supremacy

While the Greek states exhausted themselves in endless conflicts, the new power of Macedonia arose in the north.
Macedonia had strong ties to the Greek poleis, but the government there developed as a kingdom, not a democracy or oligarchy.
The kings of Macedonia slowly built up their power over rival states, and in 359 b.c.e. the brilliant and cultured Philip II ascended to the throne.
With decades of effort he secured the borders of Macedonia against invaders from the north, and he then launched a series of military operations in the northwestern Aegean.
In 338 b.c.e. he won a decisive victory over Thebes and Athens that gave him command of Greece.
After his victory, Philip led a combined army of soldiers from Macedonia and from many Greek states in an attempt to liberate the Ionian Greeks from Persian rule.
Before he could launch this campaign, however, Philip fell to an assassin’s dagger in 336 b.c.e.
His young son Alexander vowed to carry on Philip’s mission, and he would succeed beyond all expectations.

Classical Greek Life and Culture

Athenian Arts in the Age of Pericles

In the midst of the warfare of the fifth century b.c.e., Pericles turned Athens into the showplace of Greece.
He appropriated Delian League funds to pay for a huge building program to rebuild the city that had been destroyed during the Persian occupation in 480 b.c.e., and to display to all Greeks the glory of the Athenian polis.
The Athenians normally hiked up the long approach to the Acropolis only for religious festivals, of which the most important and joyous was the Great Panathenaea, held every four years to honor the virgin goddess Athena and perhaps offer sacrifices to older deities as well.
Once the procession began, the marchers first saw the Propylaea, the ceremonial gateway whose columns appeared to uphold the sky.
The development of drama was tied to the religious festivals of the city, especially those to the god of wine, Dionysus.
Drama was as rooted in the life of the polis as were the architecture and sculpture of the Acropolis.
The polis sponsored the production of plays and required wealthy citizens to pay the expenses of their production.
Many plays were highly controversial, containing overt political and social commentary, but the archons neither suppressed nor censored them.
Conflict was a constant element in Athenian drama, and playwrights used their art in attempts to portray, understand, and resolve life’s basic conflicts.
Aeschylus(525–456 b.c.e.), the first of the great Athenian dramatists, was also the first to express the agony of the individual caught in conflict.
In his trilogy of plays, The Oresteia, Aeschylus deals with the themes of betrayal, murder, and reconciliation, urging that reason and justice be applied to reconcile fundamental conflicts.
Sophocles(496–406 b.c.e.) also dealt with matters personal and political.
His most famous plays are Oedipus, the King and its sequel, Oedipus at Colonus.
Oedipus the King is the tragic story of a man doomed by the gods to kill his father and marry his mother.
With Euripides(ca. 480–406 b.c.e.) drama entered a new, and in many ways more personal, phase.
To him the gods were far less important than human beings.
Writers of comedy treated the affairs of the polis and its politicians bawdily and often coarsely.
Best known are the comedies of Aristophanes(ca. 445–386 b.c.e.), an ardent lover of his city and a merciless critic of cranks and quacks.
Like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Aristophanes used his art to dramatize his ideas on the right conduct of the citizen and the value of the polis.

Household and Work

The Athenians, like other Greeks, lived with comparatively few material possessions in houses that were rather simple.
Larger houses often had a dining room at the front where the men of the family ate and entertained guests at drinking parties called symposia, and a gynaeceum (also spelled gynaikeion), a room or section at the back where the women of the family and the female slaves worked, ate, and slept.
Country dwellers kept oxen for plowing, pigs for slaughtering, sheep for wool, goats for cheese, and mules and donkeys for transportation.
Even in the city, chickens and perhaps a goat or two roamed the courtyard along with dogs and cats.
Cooking, done over a hearth in the house, provided welcome warmth in the winter.
Baking and roasting were done in ovens.
Meals consisted primarily of various grains, especially wheat and barley, as well as lentils, olives, figs, grapes, fish, and a little meat.
The Greeks did not eat much meat, but on special occasions, such as important religious festivals, the family ate the animal sacrificed to the god.
In the city a man might support himself as a craftsman — a potter, bronze-smith, sailmaker, or tanner — or he could contract with the polis to work on public buildings.
Men and women without skills worked as paid laborers but competed with slaves for work.
Slavery was commonplace in Greece, as it was throughout the ancient world.
Slaves were usually foreigners and often “barbarians,” people whose native language was not Greek.
Slaves received some protection under the law, and those who engaged in skilled labor for which they were paid could buy their freedom.

Gender and Sexuality

The available sources suggest that women rarely played notable roles in public affairs, and we know the names of no female poets, artists, or philosophers from classical Athens.
Only she was in charge of the household and the family’s possessions, yet the law gave her these rights primarily to protect her husband’s interests.
Women in Athens and elsewhere in Greece, like those in Mesopotamia, brought dowries to their husbands upon marriage, which went back to their fathers in cases of divorce.
In ancient Athens the main function of women from citizen families was to bear and raise children.
The ideal for Athenian citizen women was apparently a secluded life in which the only men they saw were relatives and tradesmen.
In the gynaeceum women oversaw domestic slaves and hired labor, and together with servants and friends worked wool into cloth.
Women personally cared for slaves who became ill and nursed them back to health, and cared for the family’s material possessions as well.
Among the services that some women and men sold was sex.
Women who sold sexual services ranged from poor streetwalkers known as pornai to middle-status hired mistresses known as palakai to sophisticated courtesans known as hetaerae, who added intellectual accomplishments to physical beauty.
Same-sex relations were generally accepted in all of ancient Greece, not simply in Sparta.
In classical Athens part of a male adolescent citizen’s training might entail a hierarchical sexual and tutorial relationship with an adult man.
Women were generally seen as inferior to men, dominated by their bodies rather than their minds.
Along with praise of intellectualized love, Greek authors also celebrated physical sex and desire.
Sappho’s description of the physical reactions caused by love—and jealousy—reaches across the centuries.
Same-sex relations did not mean that people did not marry, for Athenians saw the continuation of the family line as essential.
Sexual desire and procreation were both important aspects of life, but ancient Greeks did not necessarily link them.

Public and Personal Religion

The Greeks were polytheists, worshipping a variety of gods and goddesses who were immortal but otherwise acted just like people.
Migration, invasion, and colonization brought the Greeks into contact with other peoples and caused their religious beliefs to evolve.
Greek religion was primarily a matter of ritual, with rituals designed to appease the divinities believed to control the forces of the natural world.
Processions, festivals, and sacrifices offered to the gods were frequently occasions for people to meet together socially, times of cheer or even drunken excess.
By the classical era the primary gods were understood to live metaphorically on Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece.
Zeus was the king of the gods and the most powerful of them, and he was married to Hera, who was also his sister.
The Greeks also honored certain heroes.
A hero was born of a union of a god or goddess and a mortal and was considered an intermediate between the divine and the human.
A hero displayed his divine origins by performing deeds beyond the ability of human beings.
Herakles (or Hercules, as the Romans called him) the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene, was the most popular of the Greek heroes.
The polis administered cults and festivals, and everyone was expected to participate in what were events similar to today’s patriotic parades or ceremonies.
Even highly educated Greeks sought the assistance of fortune-tellers and soothsayers.
Along with public and family forms of honoring the gods, some Greeks also participated in what later historians have termed mystery religions, in which participants underwent an initiation ritual and gained secret knowledge that they were forbidden to reveal to the uninitiated.
Many people flocked to the annual ceremonies and learned the mysteries, which by the fourth century b.c.e. appear to have promised life after death to those initiated into them.
Another somewhat secret religion was that of Dionysus, the god of wine and powerful emotions.
Greeks also shared some public Panhellenic festivals, the chief of which were held at Olympia in honor of Zeus and at Delphi in honor of Apollo.
The festivities at Olympia included athletic contests that have inspired the modern Olympic games.
The Pythian games at Delphi were also held every four years and emphasized musical and literary contests as well as athletic prowess.
Both the Olympic and the Pythian games were unifying factors in Greek life, bringing Greeks together culturally as well as religiously.

The Flowering of Philosophy

Greek thinkers, based in Ionia, are called the Pre-Socratics because their rational efforts preceded those of the Athenian.
They took individual facts and wove them into general theories that led them to conclude that, despite appearances, the universe is actually simple and subject to natural laws.
Drawing on their observations, the Pre-Socratics speculated about the basic building blocks of the universe.
Thales (ca. 600 b.c.e.) thought the basic element of the universe was water, and Heraclitus(ca. 500 b.c.e.) thought it was fire.
Democritus (ca. 460 b.c.e.) broke this down further and created the atomic theory, the idea that the universe is made up of invisible, indestructible particles.
The culmination of Pre-Socratic thought was the theory that four simple substances make up the universe: fire, air, earth, and water.
The stream of thought started by the Pre-Socratics branched into several directions.
Hippocrates (ca. 470–400 b.c.e.), became the most prominent physician and teacher of medicine of his time.
He appears to have written several works, and his followers wrote many more.
These medical writings became known as the “Hippocratic corpus.”
Hippocrates sought natural explanations for diseases and seems to have advocated letting nature take its course and not intervening too much.
The Sophists, a group of thinkers in fifth-century-b.c.e. Athens, applied philosophical speculation to politics and language, questioning the beliefs and laws of the polis to understand their origin.
They believed that excellence in both politics and language could be taught.
Socrates (ca. 469–399 b.c.e.), whose ideas are known only through the works of others, also applied philosophy to politics and to people.
His approach when exploring ethical issues and defining concepts was to start with a general topic or problem and to narrow the matter to its essentials.
He did so by continuously questioning participants in a discussion or argument through which they developed critical thinking skills, a process known as the Socratic method.
Socrates was viewed with suspicion by many because he challenged the traditional beliefs and values of Athens.
Most of what we know about Socrates, including the details of his trial and death, comes from his student Plato (427–347 b.c.e.), who wrote dialogues in which Socrates asks questions and who also founded the Academy, a school dedicated to philosophy.
Plato developed the theory that there are two worlds: the impermanent, changing world that we know through our senses, and the eternal, unchanging realm of “forms” that constitute the essence of true reality.
According to Plato, true knowledge and the possibility of living a virtuous life come from contemplating ideal forms — what later came to be called Platonic ideals — not from observing the visible world.
Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) also thought that true knowledge was possible, but he believed that such knowledge came from observation of the world, analysis of natural phenomena, and logical reasoning, not contemplation.
Aristotle thought that everything had a purpose, so that to know something, one also had to know its function.
His interests embraced logic, ethics, natural science, physics, politics, poetry, and art.
Plato’s idealism profoundly shaped Western philosophy, but Aristotle came to have an even wider influence; for many centuries in Europe, the authority of Aristotle’s ideas was second only to the Bible’s.
The broader examination of the universe and the place of humans in it that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle engaged in is widely regarded as Greece’s most important intellectual legacy.