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)