Democracy · Philosophy · Mathematics & Science · Medicine · Theatre · History · Art & Architecture · The Olympic Games
The word demokratia ("rule of the people") and the institutions it names were the creation of Athens in the late 6th century BC, above all through the reforms of Cleisthenes (508/507 BC). The principle that sovereignty belongs to the citizen body, exercised through the Assembly of all citizens, the Council of Five Hundred (chosen by lot), the law-courts (manned by citizen juries), and public pay for office, made Athens the first and most participatory democracy in history. Democracy was extended and perfected in the 5th century by Ephialtes and Pericles. Though limited (excluding women, slaves and foreigners), Athenian democracy was the direct ancestor of the modern concept of government by the people. Its failure, chronicled by Thucydides, also taught the Greeks — and us — the fragility of free institutions (World History Encyclopedia, "Athenian Democracy," worldhistory.org/Athenian_Democracy/).
The Greeks invented philosophy: the systematic, rational inquiry into the nature of reality, knowledge and ethics conducted by argument rather than myth. It began in the 6th century BC in Ionia with Thales (c. 585 BC) and the Milesians, who sought natural explanations for the world; developed through the pre-Socratics (Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus); was given its classic questions by Socrates (the examined life, the method of questioning); and received systematic form by Plato (the Forms, the Academy) and Aristotle (logic, ethics, physics, the Lyceum). The schools of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds — Stoicism (Zeno of Citium), Epicureanism (Epicurus), Skepticism and Neoplatonism — carried the tradition through antiquity. Every later philosophy, in the West and in much of the Islamic world, descends from this Greek beginning (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu).
Greek mathematics established the deductive method and the concepts we still use. Thales is credited with the first geometric proofs; Pythagoras and his school discovered the relationship of the sides of a right-angled triangle (the "Pythagorean theorem") and the mathematical basis of musical harmony; Hippocrates of Chios worked on the quadrature of lunes; Plato’s Academy made mathematics the model of certain knowledge (the motto "let no one ignorant of geometry enter"); and Euclid (c. 300 BC) codified the whole subject in his Elements, the most influential textbook in history. Apollonius of Perga wrote on the conic sections, and Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) founded the mathematics of areas and volumes and of the lever, and discovered his principle of buoyancy. The Greeks also introduced the alphabet numerals and, ultimately through the Alexandrian school, contributed to the development of astronomical and trigonometrical methods (World History Encyclopedia, "Euclid," worldhistory.org/euclid/).
Greek science sought natural, testable explanations. In astronomy, Eudoxus and Callippus modelled the planetary motions; Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 BC) proposed that the Earth orbits the Sun; Hipparchus (c. 150 BC) founded scientific astronomy, invented trigonometry, catalogued the stars and discovered the precession of the equinoxes; and Ptolemy (c. AD 150) wrote the Almagest, the definitive ancient geocentric model. Eratosthenes measured the Earth’s circumference. The Antikythera mechanism (c. 205–60 BC) — a geared bronze instrument that calculated the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets — is the world’s first known analog computer. In biology and physics, Aristotle and Theophrastus founded systematic natural history and botany, and Archimedes laid the foundations of mechanics and hydrostatics. The Greeks first proposed the atomic theory (Leucippus and Democritus) and invented the very idea of a rational, law-like cosmos (World History Encyclopedia, "Antikythera Mechanism," worldhistory.org/Antikythera_Mechanism/).
Greek medicine, above all the school of Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460–370 BC), broke from magic and superstition to found the rational, clinical tradition: careful observation, the theory of the four humours, prognosis, and professional ethics preserved in the Hippocratic Oath, still sworn by physicians today. In the Hellenistic world the anatomists Herophilus and Erasistratus of Alexandria performed the first systematic dissections of the human body and identified the brain as the seat of intelligence and the role of the nerves. The physician Galen (AD 129–c. 216) synthesised the whole tradition into a system that dominated Western and Islamic medicine for fifteen centuries. The very emblem of medicine, the staff of Asclepius, comes from the Greek god of healing (World History Encyclopedia, "Hippocrates," worldhistory.org/Hippocrates/).
The theatre — tragedy, comedy and satyr-play, performed before the whole citizen body in the festivals of Dionysus — was a Greek invention. Thespis (6th century BC) is traditionally the first "actor" (giving us the word thespian); Aeschylus added the second actor and the trilogy; Sophocles the third actor; Euripides brought psychological and social realism; and Aristophanes created the biting political satire of Old Comedy (later refined into the New Comedy of Menander). The great open-air Theatre of Dionysus at Athens, the stage machinery, the chorus, the very words theatre, drama, tragedy, comedy, scene, orchestra, music all descend from Greek practice. Greek plays are still performed and studied worldwide as the origin of Western drama (World History Encyclopedia, "Greek Theatre," worldhistory.org/Greek_Theatre/).
The Greeks invented history as a discipline. Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), the "father of history," transformed inquiry (historia) into the systematic account of past events and peoples. Thucydides (c. 460–400 BC) established the rigorous, source-critical, analytical method that modern historians still follow, insisting on recording events "as they truly happened" for "a possession for all time." Xenophon, Polybius, and (in biography) Plutarch continued the tradition. The very word "history" is Greek, and the Western discipline of historical writing descends directly from these Greeks (World History Encyclopedia, "Herodotus," worldhistory.org/Herodotus/).
The Olympic Games, held every four years from 776 BC in honour of Zeus at Olympia, were the greatest of the Greek festivals and the model for the modern Olympics revived at Athens in 1896. They were a sacred truce of sport that united the whole Greek world; winners earned olive wreaths and eternal glory; and the four-year Olympiad became the Greek system of dating time. The ancient games, which included running, wrestling, boxing, pankration (a brutal all-in contest), the pentathlon and chariot-racing, were abolished in AD 393 by the Christian emperor Theodosius I. The modern Olympic Games, founded by Pierre de Coubertin and first held in Athens in 1896, explicitly revived the Greek ideal (World History Encyclopedia, "Olympic Games," worldhistory.org/Olympic_Games/).
The Greeks gave the world the three classical orders of architecture — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian — whose columns, entablatures and proportions shaped the temples, public buildings and civic monuments of every later age, from Rome to the Renaissance to the present day. The Parthenon (447–432 BC) and the Acropolis of Athens are its greatest monuments. In sculpture, the Greeks progressed from the stiff archaic kouroi (youths, c. 600 BC) to the perfected naturalism of the 5th century (the Phidian style) and the expressive realism of the 4th century (Praxiteles, Scopas, Lysippus) and the Hellenistic age (the Nike of Samothrace, Venus de Milo, Laocoön). The Greek ideal of the beautiful, balanced, rational human body became the standard of Western art. Greek pottery, vase-painting and mosaic likewise set forms — black-figure, red-figure — that all later arts drew upon (Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org/toah).
By adding vowels to the Phoenician consonantal script (c. 800 BC), the Greeks created the first true alphabet and the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets in use across the modern world. The Greek literary achievement is immense: the epics of Homer and Hesiod, the lyric poetry of Sappho and Pindar, the drama of the tragedians and comedians, the oratory of Demosthenes and Isocrates, the history of Herodotus and Thucydides, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the Hellenistic poetry and scholarship, and the New Testament itself — a vast body of writing, in a language of precise vocabulary and grammar, that became the medium of learning throughout the eastern Mediterranean for a thousand years and a key to all later Western thought (World History Encyclopedia, "Alphabet," worldhistory.org/alphabet/).
The legacy of ancient Greece is not a museum piece but a living inheritance. Western philosophy, science, mathematics, medicine, theatre, historiography, democracy, the Olympic ideal and the very grammar of Western art and language are Greek in origin or in name. Through Rome, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Greek ideas were transmitted, translated and transformed, and they shape how we think, govern, heal, build and create to this day. As the poet Shelley wrote, "We are all Greeks — our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece."
The medical system of Hippocrates and Galen rested on a theory that dominated medicine for more than two millennia: the theory of the four humours. According to this system, the body contains four fluids — blood, phlegm, yellow bile (choler) and black bile (melancholy) — and health consists in their proper balance. An excess or deficiency produced the temperaments and the diseases; treatment aimed to restore balance through diet, exercise, purging, and the letting of blood. The theory (which owes its systematic form to the Hippocratic writers of the 5th–4th centuries BC and was codified and expanded by Galen) explained illness in natural terms — an enormous step away from the supernatural — and it shaped European and Islamic medicine until the anatomical discoveries of the 16th–19th centuries gradually overturned it. Yet the Greek method — careful observation, case-history, prognosis, the holistic view of the patient, and the ethical duty of the physician enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath — remains the foundation of clinical medicine. Even our language preserves the theory: the words "temperament," "choleric," "phlegmatic," "sanguine" and "melancholic" all derive from the four humours. Greek medicine also produced the corpus of the Hippocratic Corpus, the earliest surviving systematic medical writings, and established medicine as a learned, natural science — the direct ancestor of the modern profession (World History Encyclopedia, "Hippocrates," worldhistory.org/Hippocrates/).
The Greek alphabet, created about the 8th century BC by adding vowel signs to the Phoenician consonantal script, was more than a writing system — it was the instrument of every Greek achievement. It made literacy cheap and attainable (Greek became one of the most widely literate ancient societies for a period), enabling the recording of laws, literature, philosophy, science and history — and, in time, the New Testament. The Greek alphabet gave rise, directly or indirectly, to the Latin, Cyrillic and other alphabets, and thus to the writing systems of the great majority of the world’s languages. The Greeks also developed their own numeral systems: the older Attic (Acrophonic) numerals, used for accounts and inscriptions, and the later alphabetic (Ionian) numerals, in which the letters of the alphabet stood for numbers (alpha=1, beta=2, etc.), with separate signs for the tens and hundreds. These were the systems used to write the mathematics of Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy — the ancestors of modern arithmetic and algebra, whose notation (a cursive, positional form of the Ionian numerals, adapted by the Arabs) evolved into the numerals and zero-system we use today. And the very concept of proof, the heart of Greek mathematics, transformed human reasoning: to "demonstrate" (“to show by reason”) a proposition became the mark of certainty, the standard to which all later science aspired. The instruments of writing and number — alphabet, numerals, proof — are among the most fundamental and enduring gifts of Greece to the world (World History Encyclopedia, "Greek Numerals," worldhistory.org/Greek_Numerals/).
https://www.worldhistory.org/Athenian_Democracy/https://www.worldhistory.org/euclid/https://www.worldhistory.org/Antikythera_Mechanism/https://www.worldhistory.org/Hippocrates/https://www.worldhistory.org/Greek_Theatre/https://www.worldhistory.org/Herodotus/https://www.worldhistory.org/Olympic_Games/https://www.worldhistory.org/alphabet/https://iep.utm.edu/https://plato.stanford.edu/The unexamined life is not worth living.— Socrates, as reported in Plato's Apology (trans. — see Perseus: worldhistory.org/plato/)