Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece was never a single unified state. It was a fractious collection of independent city-states — poleis — scattered across the Greek mainland, islands, and coastal Anatolia. What bound them together was a shared language, shared gods, and shared cultural events like the Olympic Games. What drove them apart was everything else: politics, ambition, and an almost pathological attachment to local autonomy.

Yet this fragmented world produced an astonishing concentration of intellectual and cultural achievement. In the span of a few centuries, Greeks invented democratic government, developed formal logic and philosophy, wrote the foundational texts of Western literature, made breakthroughs in mathematics and astronomy, and created artistic traditions that influenced every subsequent civilization they touched. Athens alone, a city smaller than many modern suburbs, produced Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, and Pericles — within a single lifetime.

The Greek world's influence expanded dramatically under Alexander the Great, whose conquests spread Greek language and culture from Egypt to the borders of India. The Hellenistic civilization that followed blended Greek traditions with those of the ancient Near East, creating a cosmopolitan culture that Rome would eventually inherit and transmit to the modern world.