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)