Early Greece
According to tradition, this blind storyteller composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Homer
By about 750 BCE this was the basic political unit of Greece: a self-governing community made up of a city and the countryside around it.
polis
In 490 BCE a much smaller Athenian force drove off invaders on this plain northeast of Athens, a battle remembered today in a 26-mile race.
Marathon
This leader so dominated Athens from 461 to 429 BCE that the period carries his name.
Pericles
This rugged kingdom just north of Greece had a cold climate, mountain villages, and shrewd, fearless kings.
Macedonia
Greeks used this word for traditional stories about gods who lived forever yet felt love, hate, and jealousy.
As trade expanded, newly rich merchants and artisans in some cities took power and formed this kind of government, ruled by a few.
oligarchy
In 480 BCE, 300 Spartans and their allies blocked a narrow mountain pass for three days until a traitor revealed a secret path around it.
Thermopylae
In this form of government, citizens rule directly and not through representatives; in Athens, male citizens made policy in an assembly.
direct democracy
At 23 he became king in 359 BCE and organized his troops into blocks 16 across and 16 deep, each armed with an 18-foot pike.
Philip II
This legendary ten-year siege of a city in Anatolia supposedly ended with a hollow wooden horse.
Trojan War
Around 725 BCE Sparta forced conquered peasants to stay on the land they worked and give up half of their crops; they outnumbered their masters eight to one.
helots
Smaller Greek ships with battering rams sank much of the Persian fleet in 480 BCE in a narrow channel near an island southwest of Athens.
Salamis
This form of Greek drama follows an important hero whose downfall is caused by a flaw, often excessive pride.
tragedy
this battle in 338 BCE, the Macedonians defeated Athens and Thebes, ending Greek independence.
Chaeronea
After sea raiders burned Greek cities around 1200 BCE, this less advanced Greek-speaking people took over, and no written records survive from the period that followed.
Dorians
At 18, young Athenian men began their military training by reciting this oath, promising to leave the city greater than they found it.
Ephebic Oath
Named for a sacred island, this alliance turned into an Athenian empire when Athens took over its treasury and built the strongest navy in the Mediterranean.
Delian League
Tried in 399 BCE for corrupting the youth and neglecting the city's gods, this thinker said that an unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
He became king at age 20, conquered lands from Greece to the Indus Valley in about 13 years, and died in Babylon in 323 BCE.
Alexander the Great
Around 1500 BCE the Mycenaeans borrowed their writing system and vase designs from this island civilization on Crete.
Minoans
Plutarch says the major emphasis in the education of Spartan boys was on a perfect form of this quality.
obedience
A plague killed perhaps one-third of Athens' people during this long conflict between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League, which ended in 404 BCE.
Peloponnesian War
In The Republic, Plato said the person with the greatest insight and intellect from the ruling class should be chosen as this kind of leader.
philosopher-king
This philosopher, who opened the Lyceum in 335 BCE, taught the young prince Alexander science, geography, and literature.
Aristotle