greece

Minoans:

• Zeus and Europa fall in love + have Minos

• Zeus curses Minos bc he sacrificed 2nd place bull instead of best one

• Minos’s wife falls in love with a bull and they have Minotaur, half-man half-bull (curse)

• Minotaur eats kids so Minoans place a tax on Athens for trade: 7 boys and 7 girls for bull in order to keep trading

• King Aegeus loses son Theseus but finds him

• Theseus learns about child tax and offers himself so he can save the kids

Myceneans:

• Troy (Trojan war)
• Spartan king Menelaus loses wife Helen to trojan prince Paris which starts Trojan war resulting in downfall of Troy
• Mycenaean King= Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus who helps him fight Troy
• Myrmidons- Achilles’s army against Troy
• Odysseus King of Ithaca who recruits Achilles
• King Priam of Troy children: Hector (fighter), Cassandra (cursed to know future but no one believes), Paris (cursed to cause downfall of Troy)
• Paris and golden apple: chooses Aphrodite as most beautiful and she offers him most beautiful for his wife
• Achilles’s downfall: heel bc only place not immortal

Dark Ages: Dorian invaders, 400 yrs of chaos

Classical Greece

• olympics start in 776
• polis= greek city-state w/ indiv. govt.
• sparta
  • devoted to military; kids trained from young age
  • slept in barracks from 6-60
  • less devotion to gods, lived under powerful king
  • only ppl born to Spartan parents = citizens
  • treated all citizens equally (women)
• athens
  • hegemon- most powerful city-state
  • center of culture and education
  • philosophy, art (Parthenon)
  • developed democracy
  • ppl voted on laws and kept 1 person in power

Greek and Persian War

• Athens angers Darius (persian king) by helping Ionian resistance
• Sparta and Athens kill Darius’s messengers; form alliance called Delian League against Persia
• Darius sees as act of war and sends troops to Greece to fight Battle of Marathon; greek victory; NIKE
• Xerxes (Darius son) sends army and navy against Greeks
• Leonidas (king of Sparta) is told he must die for Sparta to live so he takes troops to Thermopylae to give Greece time to strategize
• Persians go to Athens + burn it but it’s already evacuated
• Xerxes sends a navy but Themistocles thinks of battering rams on ships and Greeks win war

Peloponnesian War

• Pericles works to rebuild Athens art, philosophy, theater, Parthenon using money from Delian league, taxing Sparta in exchange for safety
• Sparta rebels and forms Peloponnesian League against Athens
• Sparta wins

Macedon

• King Philip and Olympia have Alexander
• Olympia kills Philip so Alex can be king
• Alex taught by Aristotle
• conq’s everything making biggest empire by 33
• Hellenized (makes Greek) everything

Contributors of Greece

• Socrates- questions everything
• Plato- higher form than us
• Aristotle- invented logic
• Sophocles- Oedipus (kill dad and marry mom)
• Euripides- Medea (helps husband Jason but he betrays her so she kills king, future wife, and own kids)
• Aristophanes-Lysistrata (women want to stop war, go on sex strike, fail a lot, tells them to keep strong)