From the first palaces of Minoan Crete to the last Roman emperors in Constantinople — the full three-thousand-year history of the Greeks, every significant individual, every decisive event, every idea that shaped the world, each entry with inline citations and direct links to trusted sources.
Continue through the eras in order for a continuous account of Greek history.
Contents: Cycladic islanders, Minoan Crete and the palace of Knossos, the eruption of Thera, Mycenaean citadels, Linear A & Linear B, the Trojan War, and the collapse that ended the Age of Heroes (c. 3200–1100 BC).
Open the Bronze Age →Contents: The "Greek Dark Ages", the return of literacy with the Phoenician alphabet, Homer's epics, Hesiod, the rise of the polis, and the great westward and eastward colonization movement (c. 1100–700 BC).
Open the Dark Ages →Contents: The rise of tyrants and lawgivers (Solon, Cleisthenes), the Spartans and the birth of their military state, the first Olympic Games, coinage, lyric poetry, the birth of philosophy (Thales to Pythagoras), and the Ionian world (c. 700–499 BC).
Open the Archaic Age →Contents: The Ionian Revolt, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea, and the defeat of Xerxes as told by Herodotus (499–479 BC).
Open the Persian Wars →Contents: The Delian League, Athenian democracy and empire, Pericles, the Parthenon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, the Sophists, Socrates, the Parthenon sculptures, and the birth of history-writing (478–431 BC).
Open the Golden Age →Contents: The conflict that tore Greece apart — Pericles' strategy, the plague, Brasidas, Alcibiades, the Sicilian Expedition, and final defeat as recorded by Thucydides and Xenophon (431–404 BC).
Open the Peloponnesian War →Contents: The crisis of the fourth century, the rise of Thebes under Epaminondas, and how Philip II united Greece under Macedonian hegemony (404–336 BC).
Open the Rise of Macedon →Contents: Alexander's conquest of Persia and India, his successors (the Diadochi), the kingdoms of the Ptolemies, Seleucids and Antigonids, and the Hellenistic culture, science and art that followed (336–31 BC).
Open the Hellenistic Age →Contents: The Roman conquest of Greece, the province of Achaea, the survival of Greek learning, the rise of Constantinople, and the end of the Greek world (146 BC–AD 1453).
Open Roman Greece →Contents: A complete directory of every significant Greek — mythical founders and heroes, kings and tyrants, lawgivers and statesmen, generals and admirals, philosophers and scientists, playwrights and poets, historians and orators, from Homer to the Byzantine emperors — with dates, role and achievement.
Browse Every Person →Contents: A chronological register of the decisive events — foundations, wars, battles, treaties, revolutions, reforms, plagues, games and destructions — from the earliest settlements to the fall of Constantinople.
See Every Event →Contents: The achievements that define Greece's eternal legacy — philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, theatre, history, art, architecture, the Olympics, and democracy.
Read the Legacy →This encyclopaedia is compiled from established scholarly and reference works. The primary online source is the World History Encyclopedia (worldhistory.org), which is reviewed for educational use by Oxford University and others, alongside the Perseus Digital Library, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Livius encyclopedia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum. Direct links to every cited page are given throughout the text.
https://www.worldhistory.org/greece/https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/https://iep.utm.edu/https://plato.stanford.edu/https://www.livius.org/https://www.britishmuseum.org/collectionhttps://www.metmuseum.org/toah/To those who do not know their history, such things appear marvellous; but wherever the sequence of events is retraced, wonder gives way to certainty.— Herodotus, The Histories, Book I (trans. A. D. Godley, Perseus Digital Library)