Overview of Ancient Greece essays

Overview of Ancient Greece essays For the Greeks, humanity was what mattered, and humans where, in the words of the philosopher Protagoras, the measure of all things. The humanistic world view led the Greeks to create the concept of democracy (rule by the demos, the people) and to make seminal contributions in the fields of art, literature, and science. The Greek exaltation of humanity and honoring of the individual are so completely part of modern Western habits of the mind that most people are scarcely aware that these ideas originated in the minds of the Greeks. Even the gods of the Greeks, in marked contrast to the divinities of the Near East, assumed human forms whose grandeur and nobility were not free from human frailty. Indeed the only difference was that they were immortal. It has been said the Greeks made their gods into humans and their humans into gods. Humans becoming the measure of all things, in turn must represent, if all things in their perfection are beautiful, the unchanging standard of the best. The perfect individual became the Greek ideal. The Greeks, or Hellenes (Hell eenes), as they called themselves, appear to have been a product of the intermingling of Aegean peoples and Indo-European invaders. They never formed a single nation but instead established independent city-states or poleis (singular polis); the Dorians of the North and the Ionians from the West coast of Asia Minor. Political development differed from polis to polis, although a pattern emerged. Rule was first by kings, then by nobles, and then by tyrants who seized power. At last, in Athens, 2500 years ago, the tyrants were overthrown, and democracy was established. In 776 BC, the separate Greek speaking states held their first ceremonial games in common at Olympia. The later Greek states calculated their chronology from these first Olympic Games - the first Olympiad. From then on, despite their differences and rivalries, the Greeks all regard...