Greek History: every great leader, thinker and turning point, from Knossos to today

Minoan Crete and the Palace of Knossos (c. 1900 to 1450 BC)

The Minoans lived on Crete through the Bronze Age and built large palace complexes, of which Knossos was the best known. Many scholars think the palaces served religious and economic roles as well as political ones, and no clear image of a king has been identified in Minoan art. Arthur Evans began large-scale excavation at Knossos in 1900 and gave the culture its name, from the legendary King Minos. Evans rebuilt parts of the site in reinforced concrete and colour, and critics say some of this goes beyond what the evidence supports. Greek writers such as Thucydides remembered Minos as the first ruler known by tradition to have built a navy.

• The word Minoan is a modern label from Arthur Evans, and the people's own name for themselves is unknown. Egyptian texts name a land Keftiu, usually linked to Crete, but it is not known whether that was an outsider's name or their own.
• Knossos had drains, water channels and sloped surfaces to carry away rainwater and wastewater, and its palace covered about 20,000 square metres.
• Settlement on the hill of Kephala at Knossos goes back to about 7000 BC, thousands of years before the first palace.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.4 (Minos and the first navy), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Knossos; World History Encyclopedia: Minoan Civilization; Wikipedia: Knossos

Linear A and Linear B (Ventris, 1952) (c. 1800 to 1200 BC; Linear B deciphered 1952)

Linear A was used on Crete from about 1800 BC and has never been deciphered. Linear B, adapted from it around 1450 BC, wrote an early form of Greek on clay tablets at Knossos and on the mainland. Arthur Evans's team found the first large cache of Linear B tablets at Knossos on 5 April 1900. In 1952 the architect Michael Ventris announced that the language was Greek, and he worked with the philologist John Chadwick to confirm it. The tablets are mostly palace accounts of wool, grain, sheep and workers.

• Ventris had earlier agreed with Evans that the language could not be Greek. The evidence changed his mind.
• The tablets were records on unbaked clay. When fires destroyed the palaces, many of them were baked hard, which is why they survive.
• John Younger has calculated that the entire known Linear A corpus would fill only about 1.84 pages of letter paper, which is one reason it remains unread.

Sources: Linear B tablet PY Aa 85, Palace of Nestor at Pylos, National Archaeological Museum, Athens; World History Encyclopedia: Linear B Script; Wikipedia: Linear B; World History Encyclopedia: Linear A Script

Mycenae, the Shaft Graves and the Mask of Agamemnon (c. 1650 to 1250 BC; Mask found 1876)

Mycenae was a fortified Bronze Age centre in the Argolid. Two grave circles held rich burials: Circle B from about 1650 to 1550 BC, and Circle A from the 16th century BC, which was later enclosed by the citadel wall around 1250 BC. Heinrich Schliemann began digging in 1876 hoping to find Agamemnon's tomb and uncovered Grave Circle A. In Grave V he found a gold funeral mask now called the Mask of Agamemnon. It dates to the 16th century BC, so it predates the Trojan War of tradition by 300 to 400 years.

• The line 'I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon' is only said to have been telegraphed by Schliemann. The telegram that is known tells King George of Greece that he had found the tombs which tradition, through Pausanias, assigns to Agamemnon, Cassandra, Eurymedon and their companions.
• William Calder III and David Traill questioned whether the mask is genuine. It differs from the other masks: it is three-dimensional, with a full pointed beard, cut-out ears and eyes both open and shut. The dig itself was supervised for the Greek Archaeological Society by Panagiotis Stamatakis.
• Later Greeks believed the giant stones of the Mycenaean walls were raised by Cyclopes, so the style is still called Cyclopean.

Sources: Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.16 (Mycenae and the tombs of Agamemnon), Perseus Digital Library; Spencer P. M. Harrington, Behind the Mask of Agamemnon, Archaeology, July/August 1999; World History Encyclopedia: Mycenae; Wikipedia: Mask of Agamemnon

The Eruption of Thera (Santorini) (late 17th to mid 16th century BC (date debated))

The Minoan eruption of the volcano on Thera, now Santorini, rated VEI 7 and counts among the largest in human history. Pumice and ash buried the town of Akrotiri so completely that its buildings and wall paintings survived. Radiocarbon long pointed to the late 17th century BC, while archaeological dating, based on pottery and Egyptian chronology, points to about 1550 to 1480 BC. A 2018 recalibration of the radiocarbon curve moved radiocarbon dates later, and a 2022 model gives about 1609 to 1560 BC, but the exact date remains unsettled. Ash from the eruption turns up across the eastern Mediterranean and serves as a marker layer for dating sites.

• Spyridon Marinatos proposed that the eruption inspired Plato's story of Atlantis. Plato names no volcano and the idea is popular but not supported by current scholarship.
• A sulfate spike in Greenland ice once linked to Thera has been reattributed to a different eruption, Mount Aniakchak.
• A buried olive branch was wiggle-matched in 2006 to 1627 to 1600 BC. A later study argued that its outermost rings could differ from the eruption date if the tree had stopped growing, so the branch no longer settles the question.

Sources: Plato, Timaeus 24e to 25d (the Atlantis story; a later literary tale, not evidence for Thera), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Thera; World History Encyclopedia: Akrotiri Frescoes; Wikipedia: Minoan eruption

The Trojan War: Tradition and the Archaeology of Troy (c. 1300 to 1180 BC)

The Greeks and Romans took the Trojan War as history, and Alexander the Great visited the site in 334 BC. The ruins at Hisarlik in modern Turkey hold nine main layers, Troy I to IX. Troy VI, which flourished from about 1750 to 1300 BC, was destroyed around 1300 BC, probably by an earthquake. Troy VIIa, from about 1300 to 1180 BC, ended with scorch marks and signs of attack, which points to war. Modern scholars remain divided on whether a historical kernel lies behind the Iliad, since no inscription confirms the epic.

• Hittite records mention a place called Wilusa, usually identified with Troy, but the texts do not describe any Greek attack on it, and Trevor Bryce cautions against reading them as proof of the war.
• The lower town found by Korfmann's team covered roughly 200,000 square metres together with the citadel, far larger than earlier scholars assumed.
• Thucydides argued that the ruins of a place can mislead about its past power. Sparta, he noted, was settled in villages, so a visitor would never guess its strength.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.10 (what ruins can show about the past), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Troy; Wikipedia: Troy

The Late Bronze Age Collapse (c. 1200 to 1100 BC)

Around 1200 BC the connected palace states of the eastern Mediterranean broke down. No Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palace clearly survived: Pylos burned about 1180 BC, Thebes was burned, and Mycenae and Tiryns were damaged. Hattusa, the Hittite capital, was burned or abandoned, and Ugarit was sacked. Egypt under Ramesses III repelled invasions by Libyans and the groups the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples, but the cost strained the treasury. Greece then entered some four centuries of reduced settlement and trade, often called the Dark Age.

• The researcher Jesse Millek found that 94 of 153 supposed destruction events were misdated, poorly supported or never happened, so the collapse may have been less sudden than once thought.
• Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit, wrote to the king of Alasiya that 'the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us' (letter RS 18.147).
• At Kition on Cyprus the excavator, Vassos Karageorghis, wrote that there was no evidence of violent destruction and that he saw cultural continuity, and Kition and Paphos prospered after 1200 BC.

Sources: Medinet Habu, Year 8 inscription of Ramesses III (Edgerton and Wilson translation), University of Hamburg eManual Alte Geschichte; World History Encyclopedia: Bronze Age Collapse; Wikipedia: Late Bronze Age collapse

The Greek Alphabet (c. 800 to 700 BC)

Greeks adopted the Phoenician script in the late 9th or early 8th century BC, conventionally around 800 BC. Phoenician wrote only consonants, so the Greeks repurposed five letters for vowels. Greek is the earliest known alphabet that systematically writes vowels as well as consonants. The earliest substantial inscriptions date to about 740 to 730 BC and include the Dipylon vase from Athens and Nestor's Cup from Pithekoussai. Herodotus said the letters came with Phoenicians who arrived with Cadmus, and the Greeks called them Phoenician letters.

• Aleph became alpha, he became epsilon, yod became iota and ayin became omicron: the Greeks recycled Phoenician consonants as vowels.
• The Mycenaean script Linear B is unrelated to the Greek alphabet, and writing disappeared from Greece for centuries between the two.
• Ancient Greek had only one form of each letter, with no lower case, almost no punctuation and no accent marks until the Hellenistic scholars added them.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 5.58 (Cadmus and the Phoenician letters), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Greek Alphabet; Wikipedia: Greek alphabet

Lycurgus and the Spartan System (traditionally 9th to 8th century BC; may be legendary)

Lycurgus, traditional lawgiver of Sparta (a figure of tradition), Lawgiver · Sparta (traditional)

Lycurgus is the traditional author of Sparta's laws and way of life: the council of elders, the common messes, the training system and iron money. This is tradition, not secure history. Plutarch admits there is least agreement among historians about when he lived, and some modern scholars think he never existed. The Great Rhetra, which Plutarch records as a Delphic charter, is thought by modern scholars to be later, perhaps 7th century BC. The Spartans honoured him as a god in the historical period.

How they rose: Herodotus, the earliest surviving source, presents Lycurgus as guardian of the young king Leobotes and gives two origins for the laws: Apollo through the Pythia, or Cretan models. In Plutarch's version he left Sparta, was recalled, and drew up the constitution.

How they died: Plutarch says Lycurgus made the Spartans swear to keep his laws until he returned from Delphi, then decided to end his life abroad and abstained from food until he died. Accounts of where he died differ.

• The ban on gold and silver in favour of iron money is doubtful. Coinage reached Greece only in the 550s BC, Herodotus does not mention a ban, and reports of kings being fined in drachmas and talents imply that Sparta used gold and silver.
• The land redistribution credited to him is attested only after the reforming kings Agis IV and Cleomenes III, who wanted to redistribute Sparta's land, which makes it suspect.
• The Disc of Iphitos, which supposedly links him to the founding of the Olympic Games, is likely a forgery from the fourth century BC.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus (Loeb translation), LacusCurtius; World History Encyclopedia: Lycurgus; Wikipedia: Lycurgus of Sparta

The First Olympic Games (776 BC, traditionally) (776 BC (traditional date))

Ancient tradition dated the first Olympic Games to 776 BC, when Coroebus of Elis won the stadion, a sprint of about 190 metres. The date cannot be verified. The Games probably began in the 8th century BC, though Alfred Mallwitz argued for about 704 BC, and ancient lists of the earliest victors are of uncertain reliability. At first the stadion was the only event. An Olympic truce announced by messengers from Elis protected travel to the festival, though it did not stop all wars. Pausanias is a key source for the early Games.

• Athletes competed nude for most of the Games' history. Pausanias says Orsippus, a stadion winner in 720 BC, was the first naked runner and lost his garment on purpose because running without it was easier.
• Winners received a crown of olive leaves, and the word stadium comes from the stadion race.
• The Spartan Cynisca was the first woman listed as an Olympic victor, as the owner of a winning horse team.

Sources: Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.8 (the origins of the Games), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Ancient Olympic Games; Wikipedia: Ancient Olympic Games

Greek Colonisation (Syracuse, Massalia, Byzantium) (c. 750 to 550 BC)

From the 8th century BC Greek cities founded settlements from Spain to the Black Sea. Euboeans founded Pithekoussai on Ischia early in the 8th century. Thucydides names Archias of Corinth as the founder of Syracuse, and later chronologies date it to 733 BC. Phocaeans founded Massalia (modern Marseille) on the coast of Gaul about 600 BC, and Megarans founded Byzantium in the second half of the 7th century. The causes included shortage of fertile land, civil conflict, drought, trade and strategic outposts, and many foundations were private ventures rather than state projects.

• Ancient sources credit the Greeks with 70 to 90 Black Sea colonies, even though they once called that sea inhospitable.
• By the middle of the 7th century BC the one Greek colony in Egypt, Naukratis, had been founded, through a trade concession from the pharaoh Psammetichus I.
• Herodotus's account of the founding of Cyrene tells of social unrest and a prolonged drought on Thera, the mother city.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.3 (the Greek colonies in Sicily), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Greek Colonization; Wikipedia: Greek colonisation

Delphi and the Oracle of Apollo (c. 750 BC to about AD 390)

Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, was the home of the oracle of Apollo. Ancient accounts say the Pythia, a priestess chosen from local women, sat on a tripod over an opening in the earth in the inner sanctum, and that priests put her words into verse, though scholars debate how much of this is accurate. Kings and cities consulted it on war, laws and colonies. Herodotus tells how Croesus of Lydia tested several oracles and chose Delphi. The first archaeologically attested temple dates to the 7th century BC and burned in 548 or 547 BC, and the Alcmaeonid family paid for a new one. The expanded Pythian Games were held every four years from about 586 to 582 BC.

• The Serpent Column dedicated at Delphi was taken to Constantinople by Constantine and still stands in Istanbul.
• Roughly a thousand slave manumissions, from about 200 BC onwards, are carved into the polygonal wall at Delphi.
• Plutarch, who wrote about the oracle, once served as a priest there.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 1.47 (Croesus tests the oracles), Perseus Digital Library; Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.5 (Delphi), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Delphi; Wikipedia: Delphi

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (late 8th to early 7th century BC)

The Iliad and Odyssey are thought to date from the late 8th or early 7th century BC. Early scholars of the Homeric Question debated whether Homer existed and how the poems formed. Milman Parry and Albert Lord, studying Balkan singers from the late 1920s and 1930s, argued that the poems were composed orally from traditional formulas. Herodotus said Hesiod and Homer lived not more than four hundred years before his own time. Martin West argued that the Iliad was composed around 660 to 650 BC at the earliest.

• Most ancient biographies describe Homer as blind, but they were written long after his time.
• In Iliad 10, Odysseus wears a helmet made of boar's tusks, a style worn by warriors between about 1600 and 1150 BC, long before the poems took shape.
• In 1664 the abbé d'Aubignac argued that Homer never existed and that the poems were hastily cobbled together from unrelated pieces.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 2.53 (Homer and Hesiod and the Greek gods), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Homer; Wikipedia: Homer

The Rise of the Polis and the Hoplite (c. 750 to 650 BC)

A polis was a self-governing community of citizens, usually small. About 1,500 are known. In a sample of 869 poleis from the Copenhagen Polis Centre's study, only about 10 percent had more than 500 square kilometres of territory. Hoplite warfare, in which citizens bought their own armour and fought shoulder to shoulder in a phalanx, took shape in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. The big round shield, the aspis, was 80 to 100 centimetres across and weighed 6.5 to 8 kilograms, and the spear was 2.5 to 4.5 metres long.

• Sparta was made up of villages, not a walled city, and historians still call it a polis.
• Thucydides noted that armies drift to the right in battle, because each man shelters behind his neighbour's shield.
• Dropping your shield to run away brought disgrace, and the Greeks had a word for it, ripsaspis.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 5.71 (armies drift to the right), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Polis: The City-State of Ancient Greece; World History Encyclopedia: Hoplite: The Key Infantry Soldier of Ancient Greece; Wikipedia: Hoplite

Solon (c. 639 to c. 559 BC (archon 594 BC))

Solon, Athenian lawgiver, poet and archon, Lawgiver · Athens

Solon was chosen archon at Athens in 594 or 593 BC to ease a crisis over debt. He annulled contracts secured by the debt markers on land, banned borrowing on the security of a person, and freed enslaved Athenians. He divided citizens into four classes by produce, and those without property could still attend the assembly and law courts. He replaced Draco's laws except those on homicide, and had his own written on revolving boards. Historians debate how exactly the seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens, worked.

How they rose: Solon was an Athenian of noble birth who also traded by sea, and a poet. He was picked to mediate between rich and poor.

How they died: After his reforms he left Athens for about ten years. He opposed Peisistratus's bodyguard and tyranny and died not long after Peisistratus took power. He is said to have died in Cyprus around 559 BC, though sources differ.

• When Peisistratus seized power, Solon stood in armour outside his door, urging Athenians to resist, according to Aristotle.
• Plato says Solon heard the Atlantis story from Egyptian priests.
• According to Stobaeus, a late source, Solon asked to learn a song of Sappho before he died.

Sources: Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 7 (Solon's classes; Rackham translation), Perseus Digital Library; Plutarch, Life of Solon (Loeb translation), LacusCurtius; World History Encyclopedia: Solon; Wikipedia: Solon

Sappho (c. 630 to c. 570 BC)

Sappho of Lesbos, lyric poet, Poet · Lesbos

Sappho was a lyric poet from Lesbos, from either Eresos or Mytilene. She probably wrote about 10,000 lines, of which about 650 survive, mostly in fragments recovered from papyri such as those found at Oxyrhynchus. The Ode to Aphrodite is the only poem certainly complete. Ancient admirers called her the tenth Muse, and the Sapphic stanza, which Catullus later used in Latin, was believed in antiquity to be her invention. The words sapphic and lesbian come from her name and her island.

How they rose: Little is firmly known of her life. The Parian Chronicle, the only ancient source for an exile to Sicily, dates it between 604 and 595 BC. Herodotus says her brother Charaxos ransomed the courtesan Rhodopis in Egypt, and adds that Sappho attacked him bitterly in one of her poems.

How they died: Her death is unknown. The story that she leapt from the Leucadian cliffs for love of Phaon is regarded by modern scholars as legend, not history.

• The claim that the church burned her works has no support. Her poems more likely vanished because demand was too small for them to be copied when codices replaced papyrus scrolls, and her Aeolic dialect may have seemed provincial.
• A papyrus discovered in 2014, now called the Brothers Poem, names two of her brothers, Charaxos and Larichos.
• Ancient comedies painted her as promiscuous, even as admirers called her the tenth Muse.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 2.135 (Sappho's brother Charaxos), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Sappho of Lesbos; Wikipedia: Sappho

Thales of Miletus (c. 624 to c. 546 BC)

Thales of Miletus, early Greek natural philosopher, Philosopher · Miletus

Thales was from Miletus in Ionia and is often called the first philosopher of the Greek tradition, though that label is largely a later one. Aristotle reports that he held water to be the originating substance. Herodotus says he predicted the solar eclipse that stopped a battle between Lydians and Medes, which modern scholars usually identify with the eclipse of 28 May 585 BC, though many historians doubt the prediction. He is listed first among the Seven Sages. Nothing he wrote survives, and most stories about him were written down long after his time.

How they rose: He gained a reputation for both practical wisdom and abstract thought. Aristotle tells how Thales predicted a large olive harvest, reserved the town's presses, and rented them out at high prices to show philosophers could get rich.

How they died: According to Diogenes Laertius, quoting Apollodorus, Thales died at about 78 while watching games, reportedly of heat and thirst.

• Plato tells how a Thracian servant girl laughed at Thales for falling into a well while watching the stars.
• Herodotus called him a Phoenician by remote descent, though most scholars think he was Greek.
• Aristotle says Thales thought the lodestone had a soul because it moves iron, and later writers report that he said the same of amber.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 1.74 (the eclipse and the battle on the Halys), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Thales of Miletus; Wikipedia: Thales of Miletus

Draco and Athens' First Written Laws (c. 621 BC)

Draco, Athenian lawgiver (c. 621 BC), Lawgiver · Athens

Draco is reported to have set up his code in 621 or 620 BC, under the archon Aristaechmus. It was the first written code at Athens and was displayed on rotating wooden tablets called axones. His laws separated deliberate murder from accidental killing, and the family of a victim had to bring a prosecution. Part of the homicide law survives on an inscription of 409 to 408 BC, when Athens republished it. Almost nothing else is known about Draco's life, and some scholars wonder if he was partly fictional.

How they rose: Draco wrote down existing customs, in Aristotle's view. The Constitution of the Athenians credits him with a full constitution, which historians doubt.

How they died: Solon repealed nearly all of Draco's laws in the early 6th century BC, keeping only the homicide law. The Suda says Draco died on Aegina, smothered by hats and cloaks thrown on him by admirers in a theatre, a story treated as folklore.

• Plutarch quotes Demades saying Draco's laws were written in blood, not ink.
• The English word draconian, meaning excessively severe, has been used of legislation since 1777.
• The Greek word drakon means serpent, and Karl Julius Beloch suggested the laws were issued by priests in the name of a sacred serpent.

Sources: Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 4 (Draco; Rackham translation), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Draco's Law Code; Wikipedia: Draco (lawgiver)

Pythagoras (c. 570 to c. 495 BC)

Pythagoras of Samos, philosopher and founder of a religious community, Philosopher · Samos and Croton

Pythagoras was born on Samos and settled around 530 BC in the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a community bound by vows. His best-attested doctrine is that souls are immortal and pass into new bodies. No writing of his survives, and the main biographies by Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus come from late antiquity and are full of legend. The theorem named after him was known earlier in Babylonian and Indian sources, and the scholar Walter Burkert argued Pythagoras had nothing to do with it.

How they rose: He left Samos at about 40, according to Aristoxenus, which is where the date of c. 570 BC comes from.

How they died: After Croton defeated Sybaris around 510 BC, the Pythagoreans opposed a democratic constitution. Cylon roused the people, and a Pythagorean meeting house was burned. Pythagoras either died in the attack or fled to Metapontum, where accounts say he died.

• Aristotle reportedly wrote that Pythagoras had a golden thigh.
• He is supposedly the first person to call himself a philosopher, meaning lover of wisdom.
• Iamblichus lists 235 Pythagoreans, 17 of them women.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 4.95 (Pythagoras, Zalmoxis and the Greeks of the Hellespont), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Pythagoras; Wikipedia: Pythagoras

Peisistratus (561 BC, 559 to 556 BC and 546 to 527 BC (with two exiles))

Peisistratus (Pisistratus), tyrant of Athens, Tyrants of Athens (Peisistratids)

Peisistratus made himself tyrant of Athens in about 561 BC and was twice driven out. He returned for good after landing at Marathon and defeating the Athenians at Pallene in 546 BC. His rule gave Athens loans for small farmers, a tithe on farm produce, building work and a more prominent Panathenaic festival. Aristotle reports that people called his rule the age of Cronus, the golden age of myth. Ancient tradition also credits him with having the Homeric poems collected, a claim historians debate.

How they came to power: After winning fame in a war against Megara, Peisistratus wounded himself and his mules, claimed his enemies had done it, and won a bodyguard of club-bearers from the assembly. With them he seized the Acropolis. Solon opposed the move in vain. After his first ouster he returned with the help of Megacles in a procession in which a tall woman dressed as Athena rode in his chariot.

How it ended: Peisistratus died in 527 BC and his sons took over. Hipparchus was killed in 514 BC, and Hippias was expelled in 510 BC.

• Around 565 BC he captured the Megarian port of Nisaea, the victory that made his name.
• In his second exile he grew wealthy from mines near Mount Pangaion.
• Aristotle says he took a tithe, or tenth, of farm produce, but Thucydides says the tyrants of his family took no more than a twentieth of Athenians' income.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 1.59 to 1.60 (Peisistratus), Perseus Digital Library; Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 14 (Peisistratus; Rackham translation), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Pisistratus, Tyrant of Ancient Athens; Wikipedia: Peisistratos

Cleisthenes and the Democratic Reforms (508/507 BC) (508 to 507 BC)

Cleisthenes of Athens and his reforms of 508/507 BC, Statesman · Athens (Alcmaeonid)

Cleisthenes belonged to the Alcmaeonid clan. After Sparta helped expel the tyrant Hippias in 510 BC, he came to lead Athens against the Spartan-backed Isagoras. His reforms replaced the four old kinship tribes with ten tribes based on residence, each drawing on city, coast and inland groups called trittyes made up of demes. The council grew from 400 to 500 members, fifty from each tribe. Citizens were identified by deme, not by father's name. His reforms are described as isonomia, equality before the law, rather than demokratia.

How they rose: Isagoras, backed by King Cleomenes I of Sparta, expelled Cleisthenes. Athenians besieged Isagoras on the Acropolis and recalled Cleisthenes, who took the lead and passed the reforms.

How they died: No ancient text mentions Cleisthenes after his reforms, so his later life and death are unknown. One ancient author claims he himself was the first man ostracised.

• In 507 BC Athenian envoys offered earth and water, the symbols of submission, to the Persian satrap Artaphernes while seeking an alliance. Athens later disowned them.
• Aristotle says the ten tribal heroes were chosen by the Pythia at Delphi from a list of one hundred names.
• Ostracism, a vote of at least 6,000 citizens to exile a person for ten years without confiscating property, may have been introduced by Cleisthenes. It was first used in 487 BC and was meant to remove potential tyrants.

Sources: Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 21 (Cleisthenes; Rackham translation), Perseus Digital Library; Herodotus, Histories 5.66 (Cleisthenes and the tribes), Perseus Digital Library; World History Encyclopedia: Cleisthenes; Wikipedia: Cleisthenes of Athens

Aeschylus (c. 525 to c. 456 BC)

Aeschylus of Eleusis, tragic playwright, Playwright · Athens

Aeschylus was born in Eleusis and became the first of the three great Athenian tragedians. He wrote an estimated 70 to 90 plays, of which seven survive complete, including the Oresteia trilogy. His Persians, staged in 472 BC, is the only surviving Greek tragedy based on recent events, and it describes the defeat at Salamis from the Persian side. He is credited with adding a second actor, and he won many prizes at the Dionysia.

How they rose: Born into a family of Eleusis, he fought at Marathon in 490 BC. His Persians won first prize in 472 BC, and the Oresteia won in 458 BC.

How they died: He died in Gela, Sicily, around 456 BC. A late story says an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a rock.

• His reported epitaph names his father and says nothing of his plays; it says only that the grove of Marathon could tell of his courage.
• Herodotus names Cynegirus, son of Euphorion, as a man who lost his hand holding a Persian ship at Marathon; Aeschylus' father was also Euphorion, and the Perseus note on the passage calls Cynegirus the poet's brother.
• The story that an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head appears only in writers of the first century AD, such as Valerius Maximus and Pliny the Elder, about five centuries later, and may be a legend.

Sources: Aeschylus, Persians, trans. Smyth (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 6.114 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Aeschylus (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Aeschylus

Themistocles (c. 524 to c. 459 BC)

Themistocles of Athens, statesman and admiral, Statesman · Athens

Themistocles was an Athenian politician who saw that the city's future lay at sea. He fortified the Piraeus, pushed through the building of a large fleet, and was the key figure behind the Greek decision to fight at Salamis. Despite saving Greece, he was ostracised and ended up in the service of Persia.

How they rose: He was archon in 493 BC, according to later writers. When a rich silver vein was found at the Laurium mines around 483 BC, he persuaded the Athenians not to share the money out but to build two hundred ships; Herodotus says these were built for the war with Aegina, and they served against Persia in 480 BC.

How they died: He was ostracised around 472 to 471 BC, accused by Sparta of links with the traitor Pausanias, and fled east. The Persian king Artaxerxes I gave him Magnesia, where he died about 459 BC. Thucydides reports illness and a rumour of poison; Plutarch adds the bull's-blood story.

• After Salamis, Herodotus says the Spartans gave him an olive crown, the best chariot in Sparta, and an escort of 300 picked men to the border.
• Thucydides says he asked the king for a year to study the Persian language and customs, and then rose so high at court that no Greek before or since had held such standing.
• Herodotus says he argued that the Delphic oracle's 'wooden wall' meant the ships, not the Acropolis fence, and the Athenians judged him a better adviser than the oracle-readers.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 8.124 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.138 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Themistocles (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Themistocles (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Themistocles; Herodotus, Histories 7.143-144 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

The Ionian Revolt (499 to 493 BC)

In 499 BC Aristagoras, the deputy ruler of Miletus, was in trouble with the Persians after a Persian-backed attack on the island of Naxos failed. He gave up his own tyranny and called on the other Greek cities of Ionia to throw out their Persian-backed rulers. Athens sent twenty ships and Eretria five. In 498 BC the rebels marched inland and burned the Lydian capital, Sardis. The Persians then retook the initiative, and the revolt was broken at sea off the island of Lade in 494 BC.

• Herodotus says Histiaeus, a Milesian held at the Persian court, shaved the head of his most trusted slave, branded a message on it, waited for the hair to grow back, and sent the man to Aristagoras to urge revolt.
• After Sardis burned, Herodotus says King Darius shot an arrow into the sky, praying to Zeus for vengeance on the Athenians, and told a servant to say 'Master, remember the Athenians' three times whenever dinner was set before him.
• When the playwright Phrynichus staged The Capture of Miletus in Athens, Herodotus says the audience burst into tears and the city fined him 1,000 drachmas and banned any further performance of the play.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 5.97 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 5.105 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 6.21 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); The Persian Wars (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Ionian Revolt; Herodotus, Histories 5.35 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

Sophocles (c. 496 to 406 BC)

Sophocles of Colonus, tragic playwright, Playwright · Athens

Sophocles was born in Colonus, just outside Athens, and wrote for the city's dramatic festivals for about sixty years. He wrote over 120 plays and seven survive complete, among them Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Aristotle credits him with adding the third actor. He also served the state: as one of the treasurers of the Delian League and, according to ancient reports, as a general.

How they rose: His first victory came in 468 BC, traditionally over Aeschylus. He was a treasurer of the Greek League (Hellenotamias) in 443 to 442 BC, and an ancient biography says he was elected general in 441 BC alongside Pericles.

How they died: He died in the winter of 406 to 405 BC at about 90, shortly after the death of Euripides.

• By one ancient count he took part in 30 competitions and won 24, never placing lower than second; Diodorus gives a lower figure of 18 victories.
• Cicero tells a story that his sons tried to have him declared senile and he answered by reading from his new play Oedipus at Colonus, which won the case; the story is not independently confirmed.
• Aristotle credits him with adding the third actor to the stage, though other ancient writers give that to Aeschylus.

Sources: Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Sophocles (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Sophocles

Pericles (c. 495 to 429 BC)

Pericles of Athens, statesman and general, Statesman · Athens

Pericles was the dominant politician of Athens from the 450s until his death. He backed reforms that widened the power of the assembly and courts, pushed the great building programme on the Acropolis, and led Athens into the Peloponnesian War with a plan to avoid land battles. Thucydides said that Athens was in name a democracy but in practice ruled by its first citizen.

How they rose: From a leading family, he supported Ephialtes' stripping of the Areopagus council around 462 to 461 BC. After Cimon was ostracised, Pericles was elected general almost every year; Plutarch says he held the post in unbroken succession for fifteen years.

How they died: In 430 BC, during the plague, the Athenians removed him and fined him, then re-elected him the next year. He died of the plague in 429 BC, after his two legitimate sons had died of it.

• In 451 BC he sponsored a law limiting citizenship to children of two Athenian parents, and years later asked the Athenians to make an exception for his own son by Aspasia, who came from Miletus.
• Herodotus says his mother, Agariste, dreamed shortly before his birth that she gave birth to a lion.
• The Funeral Oration, the famous speech honouring Athens' war dead, survives only in Thucydides' version, which he wrote in his own words.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.65 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.35 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Pericles (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Pericles (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Pericles; Herodotus, Histories 6.131 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

The Battle of Marathon (490 BC)

In 490 BC a Persian fleet under Datis and Artaphernes crossed the Aegean to punish Athens and Eretria for helping the Ionian rebels. The Persians landed at Marathon, about 40 km from Athens. The Athenians, helped by a small force from Plataea and led by ten generals including Miltiades, attacked and won. Herodotus says 6,400 Persians and 192 Athenians died. The runner of the legend needs care. Herodotus's runner, whom his text calls Philippides (usually written Pheidippides), goes from Athens to Sparta to ask for help, a distance of well over 200 km. The run from Marathon to Athens with news of victory appears centuries later in Plutarch and Lucian, and they give the runner different names.

• Herodotus says the Athenians ran the last stretch toward the Persian line, and that they were the first Greeks he knew of to charge an enemy at a run.
• Herodotus reports that the runner Philippides said the god Pan met him on Mount Parthenion above Tegea and asked why Athens ignored him; the Athenians later gave Pan a shrine below the Acropolis.
• The Spartans reached Athens only after the full moon, too late for the battle; Herodotus says 2,000 of them went on to Marathon, looked at the Persian dead, and praised the Athenians.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 6.105-106 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 6.112 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 6.120 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Battle of Marathon (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Battle of Marathon

Leonidas I (c. 489 to 480 BC)

Leonidas I, King of Sparta, Agiad dynasty · Sparta

Leonidas was one of Sparta's two kings, from the Agiad house. Spartan kings led the army in the field, and in 480 BC he took the force sent north to block Xerxes' advance at Thermopylae. We know him mostly from Herodotus. His fame rests on the last stand, when he kept back a rear guard of Spartans, Thespians and Thebans while the rest of the army left.

How they came to power: Leonidas came to the throne around 489 BC after the death of his half-brother Cleomenes I, who left no son. He married Cleomenes' daughter, Gorgo.

How it ended: He fell at Thermopylae in late summer 480 BC, fighting the Persians after the mountain path was betrayed. Herodotus says Xerxes had his head cut off and put on a stake.

• Herodotus says the Delphic oracle told Sparta that either Sparta would be destroyed by the Persians or a Spartan king would die.
• Herodotus says Leonidas picked his 300 men from fathers with living sons.
• Herodotus credits Gorgo, Leonidas' wife and Cleomenes' daughter, with working out that a seemingly blank writing tablet sent by the exiled Spartan Demaratus hid a warning under its wax.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 7.205 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 7.220 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 7.239 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Leonidas I of Sparta (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Leonidas I

Herodotus (c. 484 to c. 425 BC)

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, historian, Historian · Halicarnassus

Herodotus came from Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor, a Greek city under Persian rule. He travelled widely, including to Egypt, and wrote an account of the Greek and Persian wars with long digressions on the peoples he met. His word for the work, historie, meant inquiry. He reports what he was told and often says when he doubts it. Some of his stories, such as the gold-digging ants of India, are plainly hearsay: he says they were bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs. He is the main source for the Persian Wars, and for much of it the only continuous one.

How they rose: Born in Halicarnassus around 484 BC, he left the city, lived for a time in Athens, and joined the Athenian colony at Thurii in southern Italy around 443 BC.

How they died: He died around 425 BC. We do not know where; Thurii, Athens and Pella have all been suggested.

• He says the Egyptians shaved their eyebrows when a household cat died of natural causes, and that when a fire broke out they stood around thinking more of the cats than of putting it out.
• He tells how Darius asked Greeks what price would make them eat their dead fathers and Indians what price would make them burn them, to show that custom is king.
• He reports that Phoenicians sent by the Egyptian king Necho sailed round Africa, and that they said the sun was on their right hand as they went, which Herodotus did not believe; the Perseus editor notes that this detail is what makes the story likely to be true.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 1.1 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 2.66 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 3.38 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 3.102 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Herodotus; Herodotus, Histories 4.42 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

Thermopylae and Artemisium (Late summer 480 BC)

When Xerxes I invaded Greece in 480 BC, a Greek army under the Spartan king Leonidas blocked the coastal pass at Thermopylae while the allied fleet held Artemisium, off the north of Euboea. The land force was far more than 300 men: Herodotus's own list comes to about 5,000, and modern estimates run up to about 7,000. A local man, Ephialtes, showed the Persians a mountain path around the pass. Leonidas sent most of the army away and stayed with his Spartans, 700 Thespians and some Thebans. They were wiped out, and the fleet pulled back from Artemisium. Herodotus claims millions of Persians; modern estimates run from tens of thousands to about 300,000.

• Herodotus lists thousands of other Greeks at the pass, and says the 700 men of Thespiae chose to stay and die with the Spartans rather than leave.
• Herodotus says a Spartan named Dieneces, told that the Persian arrows would hide the sun, replied that this was good news, because they would fight in the shade.
• Before the fighting, Herodotus says a storm off Magnesia wrecked at least 400 Persian ships; later, at Artemisium, the Euboeans paid the Athenian Themistocles 30 talents to keep the fleet from leaving.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 7.202 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 7.228 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 8.4 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Battle of Thermopylae (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Battle of Thermopylae; Herodotus, Histories 7.190 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

The Battle of Salamis (September 480 BC)

After Thermopylae, the Persians took Athens and burned the Acropolis. The city had been evacuated, and the Athenian fleet joined the other Greeks, about 370 ships in all, in the strait between the island of Salamis and the mainland. Themistocles pushed for a fight in the narrows, where the larger Persian fleet could not use its numbers. He sent a message to Xerxes that the Greeks were about to flee, and the Persians sailed in at night. At dawn the Greeks attacked the crowded Persian ships. Xerxes then withdrew most of his army to Asia and left Mardonius with a picked force in Greece.

• Herodotus says Themistocles sent his household slave Sicinnus, his sons' attendant, with the false message to Xerxes, and later enrolled him as a citizen of Thespiae and made him rich; Plutarch calls him a Persian-born war captive and the tutor of Themistocles' children.
• Herodotus says Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus who fought for Xerxes, rammed a ship of her own side (a Calyndian ship) while being chased; Xerxes, watching, took it for an enemy kill and said his men had become women and his women men.
• Herodotus says Xerxes sat below Mount Aigaleos to watch, and that his scribes wrote down the name, father and home city of captains who did well.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 8.85 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 8.88 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Themistocles (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Battle of Salamis (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Battle of Salamis; Herodotus, Histories 8.75 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 8.90 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

Phidias (c. 480 to c. 430 BC)

Phidias of Athens, sculptor, Sculptor · Athens

Phidias was the most famous sculptor of the classical age. He made the huge gold-and-ivory statue of Athena for the Parthenon and the gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus at Olympia, which the Greeks counted among the Seven Wonders. Pausanias saw the Athena statue in the second century AD and describes it. Neither statue survives.

How they rose: A friend of Pericles, he was put in charge of overseeing the works on the Acropolis. The Athena Parthenos was dedicated in 438 BC, and the Zeus at Olympia followed around 432 BC.

How they died: He was accused of stealing gold meant for the statue. Plutarch says Phidias had made the gold removable so it could be weighed, and embezzlement was not proven. Plutarch says he was then charged with impiety for putting portraits of himself and Pericles on the shield, and that he was led to prison and died there of sickness, though some said poison. A different tradition, from the historian Philochorus, says the Eleans put him to death after the Zeus was finished.

• Excavations at Olympia in the 1950s uncovered a workshop with tools and moulds, and a cup scratched 'I belong to Phidias'; whether the cup is genuine is debated.
• Plutarch says that when Phidias carved the battle of the Amazons on the shield of the goddess, he put in a likeness of himself as a bald old man lifting a stone, and one of Pericles fighting an Amazon; this became part of the charges against him.
• Pausanias, who saw the Athena Parthenos in the second century AD, describes it as made of ivory and gold.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Pericles, chs. 13 and 31 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.24 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Phidias (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Phidias

Euripides (c. 480 to 406 BC)

Euripides of Athens, tragic playwright, Playwright · Athens

Euripides wrote about 90 plays, of which 19 survive, more than any other Greek tragedian. His characters are often ordinary, flawed or driven by passion, as in Medea, The Trojan Women and The Bacchae. He won first prize only four times in his life. After his death his reputation grew, and his lines were quoted across the Greek world.

How they rose: Ancient tradition says he was born on Salamis around the time of the battle in 480 BC. He began competing at the Dionysia in 455 BC.

How they died: He died in 406 BC, probably in Macedonia, where the tradition says he was a guest of King Archelaus. Late stories say he was torn apart by dogs. His Bacchae was staged after his death.

• Plutarch says that after the Sicilian disaster some Athenian prisoners were freed, or given food, because they could recite passages of his plays, which the Sicilian Greeks loved.
• In Asia, when Alexander could find no other books, he had Harpalus send him tragedies by Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, according to Plutarch.
• He won first prize four times in his lifetime and a fifth time after his death, according to the usual ancient count.

Sources: Euripides, Bacchae (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Nicias, ch. 29 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Euripides (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Euripides; Plutarch, Life of Alexander, sections 1-24 (LacusCurtius)

The Battle of Plataea (August 479 BC)

In 479 BC the Persian general Mardonius still held Boeotia with the army Xerxes had left behind. A Greek force led by the Spartan regent Pausanias, with Athenians and many other contingents, camped near Plataea. After days of skirmishing and supply trouble, a Greek change of position looked like a retreat. The Persians attacked, and the Spartans and Tegeans pushed through their line. Mardonius was killed, and the Greeks stormed the Persian camp. Herodotus's totals for both armies are very large and probably inflated.

• Herodotus says Mardonius was killed by a Spartan of note named Arimnestus (spelled Aeimnestus in the Perseus translation).
• Herodotus says that after the battle Pausanias had a Persian banquet laid out beside an ordinary Spartan meal and told the Greeks to look at the folly of a people with such luxury who came to take their poor food.
• Part of the spoils paid for a tripod at Delphi that stood on a bronze column of three intertwined snakes; the column still survives in Istanbul, where it was moved in late antiquity.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 9.70 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 9.82 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Herodotus, Histories 9.81 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Battle of Plataea (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Battle of Plataea; Herodotus, Histories 9.64 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

The Delian League and the Athenian Empire (478 to 404 BC)

After the Persian invasion, Athens and many Aegean cities formed an alliance at Delos in 478 BC to continue the war against Persia. Members supplied ships or paid money, and Thucydides says the first assessment came to 460 talents. Athens led the League and soon used force against members that tried to leave, such as Naxos and Thasos. In 454 BC the treasury was moved from Delos to Athens. Historians still debate how far allied money paid for Athens's own projects. The League ended when Athens surrendered to Sparta in 404 BC.

• Plutarch says Aristides swore the oath for Athens and, to mark the curses, cast iron ingots into the sea.
• Naxos, around 470 BC, was the first member to try to leave; Thucydides says it was besieged and forced to return, the first time the alliance was broken by the subjugation of a member.
• Thasos revolted in 465 BC over disputes about its markets and mine on the mainland coast of Thrace, was beaten at sea, and surrendered after a long siege.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.96 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.98 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Delian League (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Delian League; Plutarch, Life of Aristides (LacusCurtius)

Thucydides (c. 460 to c. 400 BC)

Thucydides son of Olorus, Athenian historian and general, Historian · Athens

Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War as an eyewitness and as a participant. He wrote that he began as soon as the war broke out because he thought it would be a great one, and he hoped his work would be 'a possession for all time'. His narrative breaks off in the year 411 BC.

How they rose: A wealthy Athenian with gold-mining rights in Thrace, he caught the plague and survived. In 424 BC he was elected general and sent to protect Amphipolis, but the Spartan Brasidas took it first, and Athens exiled him for twenty years.

How they died: He died around 400 BC; the cause and place are unknown. A later tradition that he was murdered on his way home to Athens is doubted.

• He writes that the speeches in his history are as close as he could manage to the general sense of what was said, not word-for-word records.
• He says his exile let him see events from both sides of the war.
• He describes his own illness with the plague, so that others could recognise the disease if it returned.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 5.26 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.48 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Thucydides

Hippocrates (c. 460 to c. 370 BC)

Hippocrates of Kos, physician, Physician · Kos

Hippocrates was a famous physician from the island of Kos, mentioned by Plato and Aristotle. A collection of about seventy early medical works carries his name, though most were written by others. They stress careful observation and natural causes. One, On the Sacred Disease, argues that epilepsy is no more divine than other illnesses. The Hippocratic Oath is in the collection, but it may have been written after his death.

How they rose: Born on Kos around 460 BC in the family of Asclepiads, he taught and practised, and Plato names him as a teacher of medicine in the Protagoras and the Phaedrus.

How they died: He died around 370 BC, probably at Larissa in Thessaly, at an age ancient sources give as 83, 85, 90 or over a hundred.

• Plato's Phaedrus says Hippocrates held that the nature of the body can only be understood by looking at the nature of the whole.
• Plato's Protagoras has Socrates name 'Hippocrates of Cos, the Asclepiad' as a doctor one could go to and pay a fee.
• On the Sacred Disease says epilepsy has a natural cause and is hereditary like other diseases, with phlegm running down from the brain, rather than a punishment sent by a god.

Sources: Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease, trans. Francis Adams (MIT Internet Classics Archive); Plato, Phaedrus 270c (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Hippocrates (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Hippocrates; Plato, Protagoras 311b (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

Alcibiades (c. 450 to 404 BC)

Alcibiades of Athens, general and politician, General · Athens

Alcibiades was a wealthy, charming and reckless Athenian, the ward of Pericles and a companion of Socrates. He pushed Athens into the Sicilian Expedition. Accused of religious offences, he fled to Sparta, where he advised the Spartans to fortify Decelea near Athens. Later he went to the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, and then back to the Athenian fleet. Thucydides says the Athenians feared the lawlessness of his way of life and handed the war to others.

How they rose: Born into a leading family and raised in the household of Pericles after his father died at Coronea. He was elected general in 420 BC and became a leading voice for the Sicilian campaign.

How they died: Athens recalled him, then dropped him after the defeat at Notium in 406 BC. He took refuge in Phrygia, and in 404 BC, Plutarch says, assassins set his house on fire and killed him with arrows and javelins as he rushed out. Who sent them is uncertain: Sparta and the Persian satrap are both blamed.

• Plutarch says he cut off the tail of his expensive dog so that Athenians would gossip about that instead of something worse.
• Plutarch and Plato's Symposium say Socrates saved his life in battle at Potidaea in 432 BC.
• Plutarch says that at Sparta he had an affair with the wife of King Agis, and she bore a son.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.15 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Alcibiades (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Alcibiades

The Parthenon (447 to 432 BC)

Construction began in 447 BC under the political leadership of Pericles. Plutarch names Ictinus and Callicrates as the architects and says Phidias had general oversight of the works. The temple was finished in 438 BC and the sculptures were done by 432. It housed a huge gold-and-ivory statue of Athena. Later it was a Christian church and then a mosque. In 1687 it was badly damaged when a Venetian shell hit an Ottoman gunpowder store inside. Greece has asked for the return of the sculptures taken to London in the early 1800s by Lord Elgin, and the British Museum holds them.

• Thucydides has Pericles say the statue carried 40 talents of pure gold and that it could be removed, which made it an emergency reserve of money.
• The explosion happened on 26 September 1687; accounts differ on whether the Venetians aimed at the powder store on purpose.
• Plutarch says the works rose quickly yet were built to last, and that each part looked both ancient and freshly made the day it was finished.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Pericles, ch. 13 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.13 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.24 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Parthenon (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Parthenon

Aristophanes (c. 446 to c. 386 BC)

Aristophanes of Athens, comic playwright, Playwright · Athens

Aristophanes wrote Old Comedy, with its political satire, obscenity, fantasy and direct address to the audience. He wrote about 40 plays, and 11 survive in full, including The Acharnians, The Clouds, Lysistrata and The Frogs. His targets included the politician Cleon, the general Lamachus, the tragedian Euripides and Socrates. The Clouds (423 BC) shows Socrates running a school where students learn to argue any case, and Plato points to such a comic portrait in the Apology.

How they rose: He began his career in the 420s BC. Cleon was angry at one of his early plays, The Babylonians, and The Acharnians refers to being hauled into court over it, but details of any case are unrecorded.

How they died: He died around 386 BC at about sixty. We do not know how.

• The Frogs (405 BC) won such acclaim that it was given a rare repeat performance at a later festival.
• In The Frogs the god Dionysus goes down to the underworld to bring back a dead tragic poet, and Aeschylus and Euripides compete by weighing their verses on a scale.
• In the Apology Socrates recalls that Aristophanes' comedy showed a Socrates swinging about and claiming to walk on air.

Sources: Aristophanes, Frogs (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plato, Apology (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Aristophanes (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Aristophanes

The Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BC)

The war pitted Athens and its empire against Sparta and its allies. Thucydides called the real cause the growth of Athenian power and the fear it caused in Sparta. Sparta invaded Attica each year, while Athens used its navy, until the Peace of Nicias in 421 BC. Athens then lost a huge fleet in Sicily in 413 BC. With Persian money, Sparta built its own navy, and Lysander destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405 BC. Athens surrendered in April 404 BC.

• Thucydides insists the war lasted 27 years, counting the shaky peace after 421 BC as part of it.
• Xenophon says Corinth and Thebes in particular urged that Athens be destroyed, and the Spartans refused to enslave a Greek city that had served Greece so well in the Persian danger.
• Xenophon says the Peloponnesians began tearing down the walls of Athens to the music of flute-girls, believing that day to be the beginning of freedom for Greece.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 5.26 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Xenophon, Hellenica 2.2 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Livius.org: Peloponnesian War; Peloponnesian War (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Peloponnesian War

The Plague of Athens (430 to 426 BC)

In the second summer of the Peloponnesian War, country people had crowded inside Athens' walls, and a disease broke out in the port of Piraeus. Thucydides, who caught it and recovered, describes fever, red eyes, a bloody throat and violent illness. He says the first visit lasted two years, and the plague struck again in the winter of 427 to 426. Thucydides says 4,400 hoplites and 300 cavalry died of it, along with a number of others he could not count; modern estimates for all deaths are much higher. Pericles died of it in 429. The cause is still unsettled: typhoid, typhus, smallpox, plague and other illnesses have all been argued.

• Thucydides says doctors died faster than anyone else, because they had the most contact with the sick.
• He also says birds and dogs that ate the unburied dead either died or kept away from the bodies.
• A mass grave found at the Kerameikos in 1994 to 1995 led to a 2006 DNA study that pointed to typhoid fever; other scientists questioned the method and the result.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.50 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 3.87 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); The Plague at Athens, 430 to 427 BCE (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Plague of Athens

The Sicilian Expedition (415 to 413 BC)

In 415 BC Athens voted to send a large fleet to Sicily, under Nicias, Alcibiades and Lamachus. After leaving Corcyra it numbered 134 warships in all, Thucydides says, besides two Rhodian fifty-oared ships. Just before it sailed, the statues of Hermes in Athens were damaged, and Alcibiades was recalled over religious charges. He fled to Sparta instead. Syracuse held out, and Sparta sent the general Gylippus to help. A second Athenian fleet under Demosthenes did not turn the war. The Athenians were beaten in Syracuse's Great Harbour and cut down on a retreat by land. Nicias and Demosthenes were put to death.

• A lunar eclipse at the full moon in late August 413 BC led the soothsayers to advise Nicias to wait 'thrice nine days', and the army never got away.
• Thucydides says the prisoners taken numbered not less than 7,000; they lived together in the stone quarries of Syracuse for about seventy days, after which most were sold, and the Athenians and their Sicilian and Italian allies were kept on there.
• Thucydides calls it the greatest Greek achievement of the war, most glorious to the victors and most calamitous to the conquered: the Athenians were beaten at all points and, of the many who set out, few came home.

Sources: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.43 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 7.87 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Nicias, ch. 29 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); The Delian League, Part 5: Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Sicilian Expedition; Thucydides, History 7.50 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts)

Socrates (c. 470 to 399 BC)

Socrates of Athens, philosopher, Philosopher · Athens

Socrates spent his days in the streets and workshops of Athens, questioning people about justice, courage and virtue. He wrote nothing; our evidence is mainly Plato and Xenophon, with Aristophanes' caricature. Plato's Apology shows him saying that his questioning began with the Delphic oracle's reply to his friend Chaerephon that no one was wiser than he. Socrates concluded that his wisdom lay in knowing how little he knew.

How they rose: The son of a stoneworker, Sophroniscus, and a midwife, he served as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis, according to Plato. He gathered a circle of young Athenians, including Plato and Alcibiades.

How they died: Tried for impiety and corrupting the young in 399 BC, he was sentenced to death and drank hemlock in prison, aged about 70.

• He refused the Thirty's order to bring in Leon of Salamis, though disobeying could have cost his life.
• Aristophanes' The Clouds (423 BC) puts him on stage swinging in a basket; the Apology refers to this portrait.
• Plato's Phaedo gives his last words, a request to pay a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing.

Sources: Plato, Apology (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plato, Phaedo 118a, the death of Socrates (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Socrates; Socrates (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Socrates

Plato (c. 428 to c. 348 BC)

Plato of Athens, philosopher and founder of the Academy, Philosopher · Athens

Plato wrote dialogues, mostly with Socrates as the main speaker, on knowledge, justice, love, the soul and the best form of government. The Republic and the Symposium are among the best known. His theory of Forms holds that the things we see are copies of unchanging realities. He founded the Academy in Athens, a school that outlived him by centuries.

How they rose: Born into a prominent Athenian family, he followed Socrates and was deeply affected by his execution. He travelled, visited Syracuse in Sicily, and founded the Academy in the 380s BC.

How they died: He died in Athens in 348 or 347 BC, aged about eighty. The ancient anecdotes about how he died are late.

• The Phaedo says Plato was not at Socrates' death, 'I think he was ill', although in the Apology he is named as present at the trial.
• Diogenes Laertius says his real name was Aristocles and that 'Plato', meaning broad, was a nickname; the story is late and doubted.
• According to the Seventh Letter, whose authorship is debated, he went to Sicily three times, and on the last trip Dionysius II of Syracuse kept him against his will until Archytas of Tarentum intervened.

Sources: Plato, Apology (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plato, Phaedo (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Plato; Plato (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Plato

Epaminondas (c. 418 to 362 BC)

Epaminondas of Thebes, general and statesman, General · Thebes

Epaminondas commanded Thebes at its height. He beat Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BC, led armies into the Peloponnese, and helped create the new Arcadian city of Megalopolis. In Messenia he freed the helots and helped rebuild the city of Messene on Mount Ithome. Ancient writers praise him for both ability and character.

How they rose: Born into a Theban family of little wealth, he rose through the Boeotian League. In 371 BC, as one of its commanders, he led the Theban army at Leuctra.

How they died: At Mantinea in 362 BC the Thebans and their allies fought with success, but Epaminondas was struck by a spear. Later writers, including Diodorus, say that when a friend remarked that he died without a son, he replied that he left two daughters, his victories at Leuctra and Mantinea. He died soon after.

• Xenophon ends his Hellenica with Mantinea and says the result left Greece in even more confusion than before.
• Plutarch says that at Mantinea in 385 BC, when Pelopidas fell with seven wounds, Epaminondas thought him lifeless but stood over him and defended him.
• Plutarch says Epaminondas was the one friend of the richer Pelopidas who would not share his money, preferring the poverty he had inherited.

Sources: Xenophon, Hellenica 6.4 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Xenophon, Hellenica 7.5 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Epaminondas (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Epaminondas

Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412 to c. 323 BC)

Diogenes of Sinope, Cynic philosopher, Philosopher · Athens and Corinth

Diogenes taught by example. He lived with almost nothing, in a large clay jar in Athens, and mocked wealth, status and convention in public. Most of what is told about him comes from much later writers, and many stories are probably legend. His own writings are lost.

How they rose: He left Sinope on the Black Sea after a scandal over debased coinage; ancient writers disagree about whether he or his father was to blame. In Athens he took up the Cynic way of life, which treated nature as the guide to living well.

How they died: He died around 323 BC, probably in Corinth. Ancient stories give many causes, including a dog bite, bad food and holding his breath. The tale that he died on the same day as Alexander is likely legend.

• The 'barrel' of popular memory was a large clay storage jar, a pithos; the Greek word does not mean barrel, and later retellings changed it.
• Plutarch, who tells the story of Alexander meeting him in Corinth, wrote more than 400 years after the time; he has Alexander say that if he were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes.
• He carried a lamp in daylight, saying he was looking for a person; later retellings turn this into a hunt for an honest man.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Alexander, ch. 14 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch on Alexander and Diogenes (Livius.org); Diogenes of Sinope (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Diogenes

The Thirty Tyrants (404 to 403 BC)

When Athens surrendered in 404 BC, Sparta backed an oligarchic board of thirty men to write a new constitution. Critias, an associate of Socrates, led the harsher faction. The Thirty executed enemies without trial, seized property and limited full citizenship to 3,000 men. Theramenes, a moderate, objected and was put to death. Exiled democrats under Thrasybulus seized the fort of Phyle and then the Piraeus, and Critias was killed in the fighting. The Thirty fled to Eleusis, and the Spartan king Pausanias helped arrange a settlement and an amnesty in 403 BC.

• Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians says the Thirty put to death not less than 1,500 people in a short time.
• Xenophon says Theramenes drank the hemlock, threw out the last drops like a man playing kottabos, and called out 'Here's to the health of my beloved Critias.'
• Socrates says in Plato's Apology that the Thirty ordered him and four others to bring in Leon of Salamis for execution; he refused and went home.

Sources: Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 35: the regime of the Thirty (Livius.org); Plato, Apology (32c-d) (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); The Thirty Tyrants (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Thirty Tyrants

The Trial and Death of Socrates (399 BC)

In 399 BC Meletus, backed by Anytus and Lycon, charged Socrates with not honouring the city's gods, introducing new divinities, and corrupting the young. A jury of several hundred citizens convicted him. In Plato's account, he mocked the process by proposing free meals at the Prytaneum as his penalty, and a larger majority then voted for death. His execution was delayed while a sacred ship was away at Delos. He drank hemlock in prison. Scholars still debate whether the trial was mainly about religion, politics after the Thirty, or his public questioning of citizens.

• In Plato's Apology Socrates says that if thirty votes had gone the other way he would have been acquitted; Diogenes Laertius gives the count as 281 for conviction against 220.
• By Athenian custom no execution could be carried out while the sacred ship sailed to Delos, so Socrates waited in prison for about a month.
• According to Plato's Phaedo his last words asked Crito to pay a debt of a cock to Asclepius.

Sources: Plato, Apology (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plato, Phaedo 118a, the death of Socrates (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Socrates; Socrates (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Trial of Socrates

Demosthenes (384 to 322 BC)

Demosthenes of Athens, orator and statesman, Orator · Athens

Demosthenes became Athens' leading voice against Macedon. His speeches against Philip, the Philippics and the Olynthiacs, tried to rouse Athens to resist. After Chaeronea in 338 BC he was chosen to deliver the funeral speech for the dead. His speech On the Crown, delivered in 330 BC against his rival Aeschines, is often counted among the finest in Greek.

How they rose: Orphaned at seven, he found his guardians had wasted his inheritance, which Plutarch puts at close to fifteen talents. Once of age he sued them and won, though Plutarch says he recovered only a small part of it, and he turned to legal speechwriting before entering politics.

How they died: In 324 BC he was convicted in the Harpalus affair and went into exile. After Alexander's death he urged revolt against Macedon, which failed. Pursued by Antipater's men in 322 BC, he took poison at a sanctuary of Poseidon on Kalaureia.

• Plutarch says he built an underground study and would stay in it for two or three months at a time, shaving one side of his head so that shame would keep him from going out.
• Plutarch, citing Demetrius of Phalerum, says he corrected his indistinct speech by taking pebbles in his mouth and reciting speeches; the anecdotes may be exaggerated.
• Plutarch says that when Archias' men came for him at Calauria, Demosthenes asked for time to write a message to his family, put his pen to his mouth and bit it, and died of the poison it held.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Demosthenes, Olynthiac 1 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Demosthenes (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Demosthenes

Aristotle (384 to 322 BC)

Aristotle of Stagira, philosopher and founder of the Lyceum, Philosopher · Athens

Aristotle wrote on logic, physics, biology, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry. He built the first systematic theory of logical deduction and sorted human knowledge into fields. He taught at the Lyceum in Athens, and his followers were called Peripatetics. About 31 of roughly 200 treatises survive, many in the form of lecture notes.

How they rose: Born in Stagira in 384 BC, he went to Athens at about seventeen and studied at Plato's Academy. In 343 or 342 BC Philip II invited him to tutor Alexander, then thirteen. He returned to Athens later and set up the Lyceum.

How they died: After Alexander died in 323 BC, Athens turned hostile to Macedonians and Aristotle left for Chalcis on Euboea. He died there in 322 BC of natural causes.

• Plutarch says Alexander took with him Aristotle's edited copy of the Iliad, called the Iliad of the Casket, and kept it with his dagger under his pillow.
• Plutarch says visitors were still shown the stone seats and shady walks of Aristotle at the precinct of the nymphs near Mieza, where he taught Alexander.
• Plutarch quotes a letter in which Alexander complains that Aristotle had published his teachings and asks 'in what shall I surpass other men?'; the letter's authenticity is debated.

Sources: Aristotle, Politics 1252a, trans. Rackham (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Alexander, sections 1-24 (LacusCurtius); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Aristotle; Aristotle (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Aristotle

Leuctra and the Theban Hegemony (371 BC (hegemony to 362 BC))

In July 371 BC a Spartan army led by King Cleombrotus met a smaller Theban army under Epaminondas at Leuctra in Boeotia. Epaminondas stacked his left wing deeply and attacked the Spartan right, where the king and the best troops stood. Cleombrotus was mortally wounded and the Spartans broke. In the following years, Thebes invaded the Peloponnese, ended Spartan control of Messenia and helped found new cities in Arcadia. The Theban hegemony faded after Epaminondas died at Mantinea in 362 BC.

• Xenophon says the Thebans were massed at least fifty shields deep, while the Spartan phalanx was not more than twelve men deep.
• Xenophon says about 1,000 of the Spartan side died, including about 400 of the 700 full Spartan citizens present; other ancient writers give higher figures.
• Xenophon says Cleombrotus was carried off the field still alive, which he takes as proof that the king's side had at first been winning.

Sources: Xenophon, Hellenica 6.4 (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts); Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Battle of Leuctra (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Battle of Leuctra

Philip II of Macedon (359 to 336 BC)

Philip II, King of Macedon, Argead dynasty · Macedon

Philip II rebuilt Macedon's army, adopting the long pike called the sarissa and training professional infantry. He expanded the kingdom, seized the gold and silver mines near Amphipolis, and won control of Thessaly. After beating Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 BC, he led the Greek states into the League of Corinth. He was preparing a war against Persia when he died.

How they came to power: Born around 382 BC, he spent some years as a hostage in Thebes, where he saw the Theban army at close hand. His brother King Perdiccas III died in battle in 359 BC. Philip first acted as regent for his infant nephew, then took the throne himself.

How it ended: He was assassinated in October 336 BC at Aegae while entering the theatre for his daughter's wedding festival. The killer, Pausanias, a member of his bodyguard, had a private grievance; some ancient writers suspected others, including Olympias, but nothing was proved.

• Plutarch says Philip had just taken Potidaea when three messages arrived together: that Parmenio had beaten the Illyrians, that his racehorse had won at the Olympic Games, and that Alexander had been born.
• He lost his right eye to an arrow at the siege of Methone in 354 BC.
• Diodorus says that on the day he died he had statues of the twelve gods carried in procession, with a thirteenth of himself.

Sources: Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 16.66-95 (LacusCurtius); Plutarch, Life of Alexander, sections 1-24 (LacusCurtius); Philip II of Macedon (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Philip II of Macedon

The Battle of Chaeronea (August 338 BC)

In August 338 BC Philip II of Macedon met a combined Athenian and Theban army at Chaeronea in Boeotia. According to Diodorus, Philip's young son Alexander commanded one wing. The Macedonians won, and the Theban Sacred Band, an elite unit of 300, was wiped out, according to Plutarch. The following year Philip organised the League of Corinth, and every Greek state but Sparta joined, with Philip as its leader for a planned war on Persia.

• Diodorus says that after the battle Philip drank unmixed wine at a feast and led a drunken revel through the captives, jeering at them, until the Athenian orator Demades told him Fortune had cast him as Agamemnon and he was playing Thersites.
• Plutarch says Philip looked at the dead of the Sacred Band lying in their ranks and wept, saying anyone who thought such men had done wrong deserved to die.
• A stone lion monument stands at Chaeronea; excavations in 1879 found 254 skeletons beneath, traditionally the Sacred Band, though not all 300 were found.

Sources: Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 16.66-95 (LacusCurtius); Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Battle of Chaeronea (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC)

Alexander the Great (336 to 323 BC)

Alexander III, King of Macedon, Argead dynasty · Macedon

Alexander III of Macedon led his father's army to victory over the Persian Empire, reaching Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran and the edge of India. He founded many cities called Alexandria, and hired Persians into his court and army, which some of his Macedonians resented. His conquests spread Greek language and culture across Asia. He never lost a major battle.

How they came to power: Born in Pella in 356 BC, he was tutored by Aristotle. He commanded a wing at Chaeronea at eighteen. When Philip II was killed in 336 BC, he became king at twenty, put down rivals and crushed a revolt at Thebes in 335 BC.

How it ended: He died in Babylon on 10 or 11 June 323 BC after a fever, aged 32. Arrian records a rumour of poisoning but doubts it, and historians still argue about the cause. His generals split the empire.

• Arrian says that when he destroyed Thebes in 335 BC he ordered the house of the poet Pindar spared.
• Arrian says that at Gordium Alexander dealt with the knot either by cutting it with his sword or, in Aristobulus's version, by pulling out the pin of the wagon-pole; Arrian says he cannot be sure which.
• Plutarch says the young Alexander tamed the horse Bucephalas that no one else could ride, and that Philip told him to find a kingdom large enough for him.

Sources: Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, trans. Chinnock, 1884 (Project Gutenberg); Plutarch, Life of Alexander, sections 1-24 (LacusCurtius); Alexander the Great (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Alexander the Great

Alexander's Campaigns (334 to 323 BC)

In 334 BC Alexander crossed into Asia and beat a Persian force at the Granicus. In 333 BC he defeated Darius III at Issus, then took Tyre and Egypt, where he founded Alexandria in 331 BC. At Gaugamela in 331 BC he beat Darius again. He took Babylon, Susa and Persepolis, where the palace burned in 330 BC. Campaigns in Bactria and Sogdiana followed, then India, where he defeated Porus at the Hydaspes in 326 BC. His army refused to go farther, he turned back, and he died in Babylon in June 323 BC.

• At the Hyphasis river his troops refused to go on, and Arrian says he built twelve altars before turning back.
• Arrian says Alexander founded a city called Bucephala on the Hydaspes in memory of his horse Bucephalas, which died there of toil and old age rather than a wound.
• Plutarch says that on the march through the country of the Oreites Alexander lost a multitude of men, so that not even a fourth of his fighting force was brought back from India; modern historians treat the figure with caution.

Sources: Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, trans. Chinnock, 1884 (Project Gutenberg); Plutarch, Life of Alexander, sections 66-77 (LacusCurtius); Alexander the Great (World History Encyclopedia); Wikipedia: Wars of Alexander the Great

Epicurus (341 to 270 BC)

Epicurus of Athens, founder of the Epicurean school, Philosopher · Athens

Epicurus was an Athenian raised on the island of Samos. He held that everything is made of atoms and void, and that death is the end of sensation. His aim was a calm life, free from bodily pain and mental disturbance, and he treated simple pleasures and friendship as the surest way there. His school was known simply as the Garden.

How they rose: He returned to Athens in 307/306 BC. There he bought a garden (Apollodorus, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, says for eighty minae) and gathered followers around him.

How they died: He died in Athens in 270 BC, aged seventy-two according to Diogenes Laertius (modern counts give seventy or seventy-one), and Hermarchus took over the school. Hermippus reports that he sat in a bronze bath of warm water, drank unmixed wine and told his friends to remember his teachings.

• In his last letter, to Idomeneus, he calls the day both blissful and his last. He says the pain of his urinary and intestinal illness could hardly be worse, but that he sets against it gladness of mind at remembering their conversations (Diogenes Laertius 10.22).
• His will freed four slaves, named as Mys, Nicias, Lycon and Phaedrium, and left the Garden and its grounds for the use of Hermarchus and the school (Diogenes Laertius 10.16 to 10.21).
• His best-known line on mortality is a piece of logic: when we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist, so it is nothing to us (Letter to Menoeceus).

Sources: Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus (Hicks translation, Internet Classics Archive, MIT); Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book 10: Epicurus (Wikisource, Hicks translation); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epicurus; World History Encyclopedia: Epicurus

Zeno of Citium (c. 334 to c. 262 BC (dates are disputed))

Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, Philosopher · Athens

Zeno was born at Citium on Cyprus, a city with both Greek and Phoenician inhabitants, and scholars still argue about his ancestry. He taught in Athens at the Stoa Poikile, the painted porch on the edge of the Agora, which gave Stoicism its name. He held that virtue is the only true good and that a good life means living in line with nature and reason. His best-known book, the Republic, is lost, so we know his ideas mainly through later writers.

How they rose: Diogenes Laertius says Zeno was shipwrecked on a voyage from Phoenicia to Piraeus, carrying a cargo of purple dye, and went up to Athens aged about thirty. There he read in a bookseller's shop and became a pupil of the Cynic Crates. Modern scholars treat much of this as anecdote.

How they died: In the traditional story, Zeno tripped as he left his school and broke a toe. He struck the ground and quoted a line of tragedy, 'I come, I come, why do you call me?', and then died, reportedly by holding his breath. Diogenes gives his age as ninety-eight, but he also reports Persaeus's figure of seventy-two.

• Diogenes Laertius says Crates tested Zeno's modesty by making him carry a pot of lentil soup through the Ceramicus, then smashing the pot with his staff and calling after the fleeing Zeno, 'Why run away, my little Phoenician?'
• Diogenes quotes Zeno as saying, 'I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck', since the wreck drove him to philosophy.
• Athens gave him the keys to the city walls and, by Diogenes Laertius, voted him a golden crown and a tomb in the Ceramicus at public expense. Plutarch reports that he declined Athenian citizenship, so as not to seem unfaithful to Citium.

Sources: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book 7: Zeno (Wikisource, Hicks translation); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Stoicism; World History Encyclopedia: Zeno of Citium; Wikipedia: Zeno of Citium

Ptolemy I Soter (323 to 283/282 BC (king from 305/304 BC))

Ptolemy I Soter, satrap and then king of Egypt, Ptolemaic dynasty

Ptolemy was a Macedonian, the son of Lagus, and one of the seven men who served as Alexander's personal bodyguards. He held Egypt for about forty years. He took the title of king around 305 BC, when the other successors did the same, and ruled as both Greek king and pharaoh. He also wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns, now lost, which later writers such as Arrian used.

How they came to power: At the settlement made in Babylon after Alexander died in 323 BC, Ptolemy was given the satrapy of Egypt. He moved quickly to secure it, taking Cyrene, and he defeated Demetrius at Gaza in 312 BC (Plutarch, Demetrius 5).

How it ended: Around 285 BC he made his son Ptolemy II co-ruler; Bevan, writing in 1927, argues this was shared rule and not a true abdication. Modern accounts date Ptolemy's death to 283 or 282 BC, and Bevan gives his age as eighty-four. Bevan notes he was the only one of Alexander's great chiefs to die peacefully in bed.

• He intercepted Alexander's funeral procession, which was bound for Macedonia, and brought the body to Egypt. Bevan reports that it rested at Memphis; Pausanias says Ptolemy's son moved it to Alexandria, while Diodorus and Strabo credit Ptolemy I.
• At Salamis on Cyprus in 306 BC, Demetrius destroyed Ptolemy's fleet, and Ptolemy escaped with only eight ships (Plutarch, Demetrius 16).
• Pausanias says his title Soter, 'Saviour', came from the Rhodians, whom he helped during Demetrius's siege of 305 to 304 BC. Bevan notes the evidence for exactly when the title began is mixed, and that the Cyclades may have honoured him first.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Demetrius, chapters 5, 16 and 18 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); E. R. Bevan, The House of Ptolemy (1927), chapter 2: Ptolemy I (LacusCurtius); World History Encyclopedia: Ptolemy I; Wikipedia: Ptolemy I Soter

The Wars of the Successors (323 to 281 BC)

Alexander died in Babylon on 10 June 323 BC with no adult heir and no agreed successor. His generals, the Diadochi or 'successors', shared out the satrapies at Babylon, giving Ptolemy Egypt, Lysimachus Thrace and Antigonus Phrygia, and then spent four decades fighting for more. The regent Perdiccas was killed by his own officers, the Greek states were beaten at Crannon in 322 BC, and Antigonus One-Eye rose to dominate Asia until Lysimachus and Seleucus defeated and killed him at Ipsus in 301 BC. At Corupedium in 281 BC Seleucus beat and killed Lysimachus. By then the old empire had split into three large kingdoms.

• The veteran soldiers known as the Argyraspides, or Silver Shields, handed their own commander Eumenes over to Antigonus, who had him executed.
• Cassander had Alexander's young son Alexander IV and his mother Roxane killed, around 311 to 310 BC. The generals began taking the royal title one by one after the naval battle of Salamis in 306 BC (Plutarch, Demetrius 18).
• Celtic bands who crossed into Anatolia in the 270s BC settled in the region that became Galatia.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Demetrius, chapters 29 and 30: the battle of Ipsus (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Livius.org: Alexander's successors, the Diadochi; World History Encyclopedia: Wars of the Diadochi; Wikipedia: Wars of the Diadochi

The Hellenistic Kingdoms (306 to 30 BC)

After the Successor wars, Alexander's old lands settled into three lasting monarchies: the Ptolemies ruled Egypt, the Seleucids ruled a vast territory from Syria and Mesopotamia eastward, and the Antigonids held Macedonia and a loose hold on Greece. In 306 BC, after his naval victory at Salamis on Cyprus, Antigonus took the royal title and gave one to his son Demetrius, and Plutarch says the other rivals followed (Demetrius 18). Each family ruled as Greek or Macedonian kings over much older populations and founded cities, courts and cults that carried Greek language and culture across the region. Rome ended the Antigonids with the defeat of Perseus at Pydna in 168 BC, and Pompey ended the Seleucid state in 64 to 63 BC. Egypt, the last survivor, was annexed by Octavian in 30 BC after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra.

• After the earthquake at Rhodes in 227 or 226 BC, Polybius lists the royal gifts: Ptolemy III promised 300 talents of silver and a million artabae of grain among much else, and Seleucus II exempted Rhodian traders from customs duties (Polybius 5.89).
• Parthia and Bactria broke away from the Seleucids in the 240s BC, in the revolts of Arsaces and Diodotus.
• Ptolemy II married his full sister Arsinoe II, the first brother-sister royal marriage in the Ptolemaic line.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Demetrius, chapter 18: the kings take the royal title (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Polybius, Histories 5.88 to 5.90: royal gifts to Rhodes (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Seleucid Empire; World History Encyclopedia: Ptolemaic Dynasty; Livius.org: Alexander's successors, the Diadochi

Pyrrhus of Epirus (c. 319 to 272 BC (reigned from 306/307 BC))

Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, who fought Rome and Carthage, Aeacid dynasty · Epirus

Pyrrhus was a Molossian king from Epirus in north-west Greece, of the Molossian Aeacid house. He fought among the successors, spent time in Alexandria, and held and lost the kingship of Macedon more than once. From 280 to 275 BC he led an army with elephants to southern Italy to help the Greek city of Tarentum against Rome. He then crossed to Sicily to fight Carthage and left the island after his harsh rule alienated the Greek cities.

How they came to power: He was a child when his father's enemies drove the family out. Plutarch says the Illyrian king Glaucias took him in and, when Pyrrhus was twelve, led a force back into Epirus and set him on the throne. Livius gives his first accession as 306 BC, and he was dethroned a few years later.

How it ended: In 272 BC, in street fighting at Argos, an Argive woman threw a tile from a roof that struck him on the head below his helmet. A soldier named Zopyrus then killed and beheaded him. Plutarch says Antigonus Gonatas wept when the head was brought to him and had the head and body adorned and burned. Pyrrhus was about forty-six or forty-seven.

• After the costly battle at Asculum, Plutarch reports that Pyrrhus answered a congratulation by saying that one more victory over the Romans would utterly ruin him.
• In Plutarch's Pyrrhus, Hannibal names Pyrrhus the foremost of all generals, with Scipio second and himself third. Appian instead has Hannibal rank Alexander first and Pyrrhus second.
• Plutarch says that after his cremation the great toe of Pyrrhus's right foot was found unburnt, and that he had been believed to cure ailments of the spleen by pressing that foot on the sufferer.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, chapters 2 to 3, 8, 21 and 34 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Livius.org: Pyrrhus of Epirus; Wikipedia: Pyrrhus of Epirus

Euclid (active c. 300 BC (life dates uncertain))

Euclid of Alexandria, author of the Elements, Mathematician · Alexandria

Euclid taught in Alexandria in the early Ptolemaic period, and the later writer Proclus puts him in the time of the first Ptolemy. His Elements has thirteen books covering plane geometry, number theory and solid geometry, and it builds each result from definitions, postulates and common notions. It includes a proof that there are infinitely many primes (Book 9). Four other works survive, the Data, On Divisions, Optics and Phaenomena, and others are lost.

How they rose: Almost nothing reliable is known. MacTutor notes that stories of his father's name and his birthplace are considered fictitious, and that the Euclid of Megara sometimes named in older books was a different, earlier philosopher.

How they died: The date, place and manner of his death are unknown. Some scholars have even suggested that 'Euclid' was a team of Alexandrian mathematicians, or a name used by a team, though MacTutor assumes a single author.

• The Elements begins with the definition 'A point is that which has no part' and the first postulate, 'To draw a straight line from any point to any point.'
• Proclus tells of King Ptolemy asking whether there was a shorter way to learn geometry, and Euclid replying that there was no royal road to geometry.
• In a story preserved by Stobaeus, a student who asked what he would gain from learning geometry was given threepence by Euclid, through a slave, because he must profit from what he learns.

Sources: Euclid, Elements Book I (David Joyce, Clark University); MacTutor History of Mathematics: Euclid of Alexandria; World History Encyclopedia: Euclid

The Library and Museum of Alexandria (founded about 300 to 280 BC; declined over centuries)

The Mouseion, or Museum, was part of the royal palace in Alexandria. Strabo, who saw it, describes a covered walk, a seated hall and a large building where the resident scholars ate together; they held their property in common and a priest ran the whole. World History Encyclopedia says Ptolemy I probably proposed the library and Ptolemy II built it and acquired its first books, while the Letter of Aristeas, which credits Demetrius of Phalerum, is a late and challenged source. Callimachus compiled its Pinakes, a catalogue in 120 books, and the holdings are often given as 500,000 scrolls, though that may be an exaggeration. Historians now see a long decline that began when Ptolemy VIII expelled foreign scholars in 145 BC; Plutarch says Caesar's fire of 48 BC spread from the dockyards and 'destroyed the great library', but his editor notes the loss can only have been partial, and the story of an Arab burning in the AD 640s is widely rejected.

• According to Galen, a decree of Ptolemy II had the books found on ships entering the harbour taken to the library and copied; the copies went back to the owners and the originals stayed.
• Seneca, quoting Livy, gives 40,000 scrolls as the number lost in Caesar's fire. Other ancient writers describe only warehouses or ships burning.
• Callimachus, who wrote the Pinakes, never held the post of head librarian; MacTutor says Eratosthenes, who measured the size of the Earth, became head of the library under Ptolemy III.

Sources: Strabo, Geography 17.1.8: the Museum at Alexandria (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Plutarch, Life of Caesar 49.6: the fire at Alexandria (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Library of Alexandria; Wikipedia: Library of Alexandria

The Colossus of Rhodes (c. 292 BC to 226 BC)

The Rhodians raised the statue of their sun god Helios after surviving Demetrius's long siege of 305 to 304 BC, and paid for it in part by selling the siege equipment he left behind. The sculptor was Chares of Lindos, and Strabo, quoting a poem, gives its height as seventy cubits, roughly 33 metres. Construction is usually dated from about 292 to 280 BC. The popular picture of it straddling the harbour mouth is a medieval invention that scholars reject. An earthquake in 226 BC (some give 228) broke it at the knees, and, as Strabo says, the Rhodians did not raise it again because of an oracle.

• Polybius, writing roughly seventy years later, says the earthquake threw down the Colossus and most of the city's walls and arsenals, yet the Rhodians handled the disaster so well that it brought them more gain than damage: kings and cities sent gifts (5.88).
• Polybius (5.89) lists a promise from Ptolemy of 3,000 talents (he queries the figure) toward restoring the Colossus, with 100 master builders. The statue was never restored.
• A story from the chronicler Theophanes says Arab raiders sold the bronze about AD 653 to a merchant who carried it away on 900 camels. L. I. Conrad doubts it, since Theophanes is the only source.

Sources: Strabo, Geography 14.2.5: Rhodes and the Colossus (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Polybius, Histories 5.88 and 5.89: the earthquake at Rhodes and the gifts (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Colossus of Rhodes; Wikipedia: Colossus of Rhodes

Archimedes (c. 287 to 212 BC)

Archimedes of Syracuse, Mathematician and engineer · Syracuse

Archimedes lived in Syracuse in Sicily and wrote on geometry, floating bodies and levers. He worked out the volume of the sphere in relation to the cylinder around it. In The Sand Reckoner he built a number system that could express numbers up to about 8 followed by 63 zeros. Little is known for certain about his life, and many of the best-known stories were written down long after his death.

How they rose: Plutarch says Archimedes thought of his machines as a side activity to geometry until King Hiero urged him to use his theory in practice. To prove it, he used compound pulleys to draw a loaded ship across the land. Hiero then had him build war machines, which wrecked the first Roman assault when Marcellus besieged Syracuse (Plutarch, Marcellus 14 to 17).

How they died: Syracuse fell to Marcellus in 212 BC after a long siege. Plutarch gives three versions of Archimedes' death: a soldier killed him over a problem he would not leave, or for refusing to come until he finished, or because the soldiers thought his instruments held gold. Marcellus grieved, shunned the killer and honoured his family.

• Plutarch says Marcellus mocked his own engineers as being beaten by 'this geometrical Briareus', after the hundred-handed giant of myth, and says the Romans fled at the sight of any rope or beam over the wall.
• He wanted his tomb to show a sphere inside a cylinder, with the ratio between them. In 75 BC Cicero found one matching it, overgrown with brambles.
• His treatise The Method was lost for centuries. J. L. Heiberg found a tenth-century manuscript of it in 1906. The Eureka story of the gold crown and the burning mirrors are not found in his surviving works and are treated cautiously.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, chapters 14 to 19 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); MacTutor History of Mathematics: Archimedes of Syracuse; World History Encyclopedia: Archimedes

Eratosthenes (c. 276 to c. 194 BC)

Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Scholar · Alexandria

Eratosthenes was born in Cyrene, studied in Athens and spent his career in Alexandria. He made a map of the known world and is traditionally credited with coining the word 'geography'. Later writers say he compared the Sun's angle at Alexandria with a report that at noon on the summer solstice the Sun's light reached the bottom of a well at Syene. From that and the distance between the cities, his figure for the Earth's circumference was about 250,000 stadia, or 252,000 in Strabo's version. Modern estimates of how close that is depend on which length of stadion he used.

How they rose: Ptolemy III brought him to Alexandria as tutor to his son, and MacTutor says he became head of the library there, perhaps around 240 BC.

How they died: He died in Alexandria around 194 BC. He is reported to have gone blind in old age and to have starved himself, but that report cannot be confirmed.

• His nickname was 'Beta', second place, because contemporaries saw him as excellent in many fields but just short of the top in each.
• The Sieve of Eratosthenes, a method for finding prime numbers, still carries his name.
• His main work on measuring the Earth is lost and survives only through other writers: Strabo says that Hipparchus took Eratosthenes' 252,000 stadia as his working figure (Geography 2.5.7).

Sources: Strabo, Geography 2.5.7: Eratosthenes' figure for the Earth (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); MacTutor History of Mathematics: Eratosthenes of Cyrene; World History Encyclopedia: Eratosthenes

The Macedonian Wars and the Sack of Corinth (214 to 146 BC)

Rome fought four wars against Macedon between 214 and 148 BC. It beat Philip V at Cynoscephalae in 197 BC and proclaimed the Greeks free in 196, then beat Perseus at Pydna in 168 and split Macedon into four client republics. Tension between Rome and the Achaean League peaked in 148 to 146 BC, partly over the League's wish to absorb Sparta. After the League rejected Roman terms, Lucius Mummius, with roughly 23,000 infantry and 3,500 cavalry, broke the Achaean army near Corinth in 146 BC. Pausanias says the Romans hesitated, fearing an ambush, and stormed and burned Corinth on the third day after the battle; its art was carried off to Italy, the League was dissolved, and Julius Caesar refounded Corinth in 44 BC.

• Polybius, who was present, says he saw soldiers playing draughts on paintings thrown on the ground, among them a Dionysus by Aristeides (Polybius 39.2, as quoted by Strabo).
• Plutarch reports that when a Roman wanted to destroy the statues and honours given to Philopoemen, Polybius argued against it and neither Mummius nor the commissioners would let them be destroyed.
• Livy praises Mummius for keeping none of the spoils himself, while Polybius says he could not resist the pressure of those around him.

Sources: Polybius, Histories book 39, fragments on the sack of Corinth (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Pausanias, Description of Greece 7.16.7: the sack of Corinth (Perseus Digital Library, Jones translation); World History Encyclopedia: Achaean League; EBSCO Research Starters: Sack of Corinth; Wikipedia: Battle of Corinth (146 BC)

Polybius (c. 200 to c. 118 BC)

Polybius of Megalopolis, historian of Rome's rise, Historian · Megalopolis

Polybius was an Achaean from Megalopolis in the Peloponnese. He wrote the Histories, which aim to explain how Rome came to rule almost the whole known world in less than fifty-three years. Only the first five books survive complete; the rest are fragments. He stresses first-hand evidence and criticises other historians for bias. His analysis of mixed government in Book 6 influenced later political thinkers.

How they rose: He rose in Achaean politics and was elected to the cavalry command in 170 or 169 BC. After Rome's victory over Macedon, he was one of about 1,000 prominent Achaeans taken to Italy in 167 BC and detained for seventeen years. In Rome he became close to the family of Aemilius Paulus and to Scipio Aemilianus.

How they died: He lived to see Rome destroy Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC and then helped organise the new government of Greek cities. He died around 118 BC. A late source, Pseudo-Lucian, says he fell from his horse at the age of eighty-two, which is uncertain.

• He was an eyewitness at the sack of Corinth and noted soldiers playing draughts on thrown-down paintings (39.2).
• He tells how Rhodes turned its earthquake of about 227 or 226 BC into a fund-raising success, listing the royal gifts it received (5.88 to 5.90).
• He compares histories of single wars to looking at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful: they show you something, but not the living whole (1.4).

Sources: Polybius, Histories book 1, chapters 1 to 4 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Polybius, Histories book 39, on Corinth (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Polybius; Wikipedia: Polybius

The Antikythera Mechanism (made in the 2nd or early 1st century BC (estimates run from about 205 to 87 BC); ship lost c. 70 to 60 BC; found 1900 to 1901)

Sponge divers found the wreck off the island of Antikythera in early 1900, and the mechanism was recovered the following year from about 45 metres of water. It is a hand-cranked analogue device whose roughly thirty surviving gears are spread over 82 fragments. The front shows the zodiac and a calendar ring; the back has dials for the Metonic, Saros, Callippic and Exeligmos cycles, and a dial that tracks the Panhellenic games. Nobody knows who made it or exactly when: proposed origins include Rhodes, a Corinthian colony and Pergamon. The ship that carried it sank around 70 to 60 BC, and reconstructions, such as those by Michael Wright, by Freeth and Jones and by a UCL team in 2021, are proposals.

• The Games dial is the only pointer that moves anticlockwise. It lists the Panhellenic games and also the minor Naa games of Dodona, and the month names suggest a link to Epirus.
• X-ray tomography in 2005 by a Cardiff-led team revealed a manual-like text on the casing. Other inscriptions record the 223-month Saros eclipse cycle.
• Freeth and Jones found that their simulated Mars pointer could be off by up to 38 degrees, and argue the design was more sophisticated than the precision with which it could be made.

Sources: National Archaeological Museum, Athens: The Mysteries of the Mechanism of Antikythera (museum site); World History Encyclopedia: Antikythera Mechanism; Wikipedia: Antikythera mechanism

Sulla Sacks Athens (87 to 1 March 86 BC)

Athens had come under a tyrant, Aristion, who took the side of Mithridates VI of Pontus against Rome. Sulla, given the command against Mithridates, landed in Greece and besieged both Athens and its harbour, Piraeus. Short of timber for siege engines, he cut down sacred groves, including those of the Academy and Lyceum, and took treasure from Epidaurus, Olympia and Delphi. Soldiers overheard old men complaining that a stretch of wall near the Heptachalcum was unguarded, and Sulla entered at about midnight on 1 March 86 BC; Plutarch says blood in the Kerameikos flowed out through the Dipylon gate. Piraeus was destroyed, and Sulla pardoned the survivors, saying he forgave a few for the sake of many, the living for the sake of the dead.

• Plutarch says that when Athenian envoys spoke at length of Theseus and the Persian wars, Sulla replied that the Romans had not sent him to Athens to learn its history but to subdue rebels (Sulla 13).
• The Acropolis held out a while longer after the lower city fell.
• Athens was sacked but not wholly destroyed, partly because of its cultural importance in the Hellenistic world, according to the modern account in Wikipedia.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Sulla, chapters 12 to 14 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Sulla; Wikipedia: Sulla

Plutarch (c. AD 46/50 to c. AD 120)

Plutarch of Chaeronea, biographer and priest of Delphi, Biographer and priest · Chaeronea

Plutarch came from a well-off family in the small Boeotian town of Chaeronea. His Parallel Lives pairs a Greek statesman with a Roman and compares them, and twenty-three pairs survive. His Moralia collects essays on philosophy, religion and daily life. He wrote under Roman rule, in the Greek world, for readers of both languages. He is the main source for many of the people in this timeline.

How they rose: He studied philosophy in Athens under Ammonius around AD 66 to 67, held local offices in Chaeronea, and was made a Roman citizen through his friend Lucius Mestrius Florus. In middle age he served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi. World History Encyclopedia says Hadrian made him imperial procurator of Achaea, but Wikipedia notes that this comes only from a late writer, Syncellus.

How they died: The date is unknown. Estimates run from about AD 120 to 125, and one gives 'after 119'.

• In the Life of Demosthenes he says he lives in a small city and prefers to stay there so that it may not become smaller. He admits he began studying Latin literature late in life because public duties and students left him no time in Rome.
• Thomas North's English translation of the Lives, made from Amyot's French, was one of Shakespeare's sources.
• The ancient Catalogue of Lamprias lists 227 works under his name, and many of them are lost.

Sources: Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes, chapter 2 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Plutarch; Wikipedia: Plutarch

Paul Preaches at Athens (c. AD 50 to 52 (Acts gives no date))

According to the Book of Acts, Paul was in Athens waiting for his companions and was distressed by the number of idols. He argued in the synagogue and in the marketplace, where Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him; some called him a babbler and others thought he preached foreign gods. They took him to the Areopagus, where he spoke about an altar 'to an unknown god' and about the resurrection. Luke remarks that all Athenians and foreigners there spent their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new (Acts 17:21). The audience was divided, and a few, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, joined him before Paul left for Corinth.

• Paul quotes poets in his speech. The line 'we too are his offspring' is usually traced to Aratus or Cleanthes, and another line is linked to Epimenides.
• Scholars disagree whether 'the Areopagus' means the hill or the council that met there. Bruce Winter argues for the council, which he says had authority over proposals to admit new gods.
• Winter reads the scene as a formal preliminary hearing before the council, not a public lecture and not a trial.

Sources: Acts of the Apostles 17:16 to 18:1 (NRSVUE, BibleGateway); Bruce W. Winter, 'Introducing the Athenians to God: Paul's failed apologetic in Acts 17?' Themelios 31.1; World History Encyclopedia: Agora; Wikipedia: Areopagus sermon

Hadrian (AD 117 to 138)

Hadrian, Roman emperor and benefactor of Athens, Nerva-Antonine dynasty

Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire from AD 117 to 138. The Historia Augusta says that because of his fondness for Greek studies some called him 'Greekling'. He became archon of Athens in 112, before he was emperor, and travelled in Greece several times as emperor, being initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. He is also remembered for the wall in northern Britain begun around 122.

How they came to power: Trajan died on 8 August 117, and Hadrian's reign is dated from 11 August. His adoption by Trajan was disputed in antiquity: Cassius Dio thought it was a sham, while the Historia Augusta treated it as genuine.

How it ended: He died on 10 July 138 at Baiae, aged 62, after a period of failing health. He had adopted Antoninus Pius as his successor on condition that Pius adopt the young Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.

• After his young companion Antinous drowned in the Nile in AD 130, Hadrian founded the city of Antinoopolis, and the Greeks worshipped Antinous as a god at his request.
• The Historia Augusta says that during his stay in Greece he ordered that no one should come armed to a sacrifice, as many had been doing.
• Athenians built an arch in 131/132 honouring him as the city's founder, next to the old founder Theseus.

Sources: Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian, chapters 1, 13 and 14 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Hadrian; Wikipedia: Hadrian

Hadrian's Athens (AD 124 to 132)

Hadrian visited Athens in autumn 124, in 128 to 129 and in the winter of 131 to 132. He was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and presided over the city's Dionysia in March 125. His greatest work there was the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which he dedicated in 131 to 132, and the Athenians built the Arch of Hadrian, with inscriptions naming him a new founder of the city beside Theseus. Around 130 to 131 he also set about organising the Panhellenion, a league of Greek cities centred on the Olympieion. The Historia Augusta says he bestowed many favours on the Athenians and dedicated works there, including a temple of Olympian Jove and an altar to himself.

• Pausanias says that every city dedicated a statue of Hadrian in the precinct, and the Athenians added a colossus behind the temple.
• Pausanias says the gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus inside the temple exceeds in size all other statues except the colossi at Rhodes and Rome.
• Pausanias also mentions a gymnasium named after Hadrian with a hundred columns from the Libyan quarries.

Sources: Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.18.6 to 1.19.4 (Perseus Digital Library, Jones translation); Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian, chapter 13 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Hadrian; Wikipedia: Hadrian

The Heruli Sack Athens (AD 267)

In 267 the Heruli, a Germanic people who had invaded the Balkans, attacked Athens, which had recently been fortified with a new wall. They took the city and destroyed much of it, and the Athenians, led by the historian Dexippus, drove them out. Afterwards Athens shrank to the area around the Roman Agora, enclosed by a new fortification called the Post-Herulian Wall. The Historia Augusta, a late and often unreliable source, says that the Goths ravaged Cyzicus, Asia and Achaea and were beaten by the Athenians under Dexippus (Gallieni 13.8), and its editor identifies the invaders as the Eruli. How much the city declined is debated: a 2021 Cambridge chapter by Lamprini Chioti examines the sack and the recovery using the archaeology.

• Dexippus, the Athenian who led the resistance, was a historian. The Historia Augusta calls him 'an historian of these times'.
• The Historia Augusta says the emperor Gallienus himself was holding the office of archon at Athens at the time (Gallieni 11.3).
• World History Encyclopedia says the Heruli burned the Stoa of Attalos in the Agora in this attack.

Sources: Historia Augusta, The Two Gallieni, chapters 11 and 13 (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); Lamprini Chioti, 'The Herulian Invasion in Athens (A.D. 267)', in The Destruction of Cities in the Ancient Greek World (Cambridge University Press, 2021); World History Encyclopedia: Agora; Wikipedia: Sack of Athens (267 AD)

Constantine I (AD 306 to 337)

Constantine I, Roman emperor and founder of Constantinople, Constantinian dynasty

Constantine was born at Naissus, in modern Serbia, on 27 February 272. As emperor he reunited the empire under one ruler, introduced the gold solidus and called the first Council of Nicaea in 325. He backed Christianity but kept the sun-god Sol Invictus on his coins in his early years. Historians still debate his own beliefs, and the ancient sources about him are one-sided.

How they came to power: His troops acclaimed him emperor at York after his father died in July 306. He defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312, and beat Licinius to become sole ruler in 324.

How it ended: He fell ill in 337, was baptised before he died, and died on 22 May near Nicomedia. He was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople.

• The two ancient accounts of his vision before the Milvian Bridge differ: Lactantius describes a dream in which he marks his soldiers' shields, while Eusebius describes a sign in the sky at midday.
• The Edict of Milan of 313 was a joint policy of Constantine and Licinius that allowed all people to follow the religion they chose and ordered the return of confiscated church property.
• The column he set up in his new city in 330 carried a statue of Constantine as the sun god Helios, with a seven-rayed crown.

Sources: Galerius and Constantine: Edicts of Toleration, 311 and 313 (Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook); Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.16 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Wikisource); World History Encyclopedia: Constantine I; Wikipedia: Constantine the Great

Constantinople Is Founded (AD 324 to 11 May 330)

After uniting the empire in 324, Constantine began building on the site of the old Greek city of Byzantium, and the new city was dedicated on 11 May 330. Socrates Scholasticus says he enlarged Byzantium, ringed it with strong walls, adorned it with buildings and decreed by law that it be called New Rome, with the law cut on a stone pillar in the Strategium near his equestrian statue. Like Rome, the city was divided into 14 regions, and its Hippodrome seated over 80,000 spectators. Socrates adds that he built two churches, Irene and the Apostles. The city became the capital of the eastern Roman, or Byzantine, empire, which Theodosius II fortified with great land walls in 413, and it lasted until 1453.

• Columns, marbles, doors and tiles were taken from temples across the empire, and many Greek and Roman statues were displayed in its streets.
• The new city at first lacked some of Rome's offices: its first urban prefect, Honoratus, took office only on 11 December 359.
• Socrates Scholasticus says Constantine moved pagan images into public view in the city and set up the Delphic tripods in the Hippodrome.

Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.16 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Wikisource); World History Encyclopedia: Constantinople; Wikipedia: Constantinople

Justinian I (AD 527 to 565)

Justinian I, Byzantine emperor, builder of Hagia Sophia, Justinian dynasty

Justinian was born around 482, and Procopius places his birth at Tauresium in the Balkans. His legal commission under Tribonian produced the Corpus Juris Civilis. He sent Belisarius against the Vandals in 533 to 534, and the war to retake Italy ran from 535 to 554. In 532 he nearly lost the throne in the Nika riots, then rebuilt Hagia Sophia on a grand scale. His wife Theodora was a powerful figure at court.

How they came to power: His uncle Justin, who became emperor in 518, adopted him. Justinian became co-emperor on 1 April 527, and sole ruler when Justin died on 1 August.

How it ended: He died on 14 November 565 without children, and was succeeded by his nephew Justin II. Wikipedia notes his reconquests were only partly lasting, with Africa the only lasting gain.

• Procopius says the dome of Hagia Sophia seems not to rest on solid masonry but to be suspended from heaven. The architects were Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus.
• Procopius claims 30,000 people died in the Nika riots; modern historians treat the figure with caution.
• In the early 550s two monks reportedly smuggled silkworm eggs from Central Asia to Constantinople, starting silk production in the empire.

Sources: Procopius, Buildings, book 1: Hagia Sophia (LacusCurtius, Loeb translation); World History Encyclopedia: Justinian I; Wikipedia: Justinian I

Justinian Closes the Athenian Schools (AD 529)

The traditional story says Justinian closed the Academy in Athens in 529 and ended ancient philosophy. The chronicler John Malalas says the emperor sent a decree to Athens ordering that no one teach philosophy, and places it among a wider persecution of 'Hellenes', pagans, that year. Malalas is the only source to say the decree went to Athens. The school in Athens was a Neoplatonist community that saw itself as heir to Plato's school, but it had no institutional continuity with the Academy of the 4th century BC. Agathias, writing about fifty years later, says seven philosophers, including Damascius and Simplicius, went to the Persian king Chosroes and came back after the Roman-Persian peace of 532, which secured their freedom to live by their beliefs.

• Agathias is the only source for the Persian journey and wrote about half a century later, so the details are doubted.
• Damascius's only known later writing is an epitaph for a slave girl, Zosime, set up at Emesa in 538.
• Alan Cameron argued in 1969 that the decree only cut public funding and the school may have carried on. James Hannam disagrees, but agrees the final fate of the Academy is unrecorded and that the schools of Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople stayed open.

Sources: John Malalas, Chronography book 18, chapter 47 (ToposText section 18.451, translation by Brady Kiesling); James Hannam: Emperor Justinian's Closure of the School of Athens; Edward Watts, 'Justinian, Malalas, and the End of Athenian Philosophical Teaching in A.D. 529', Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004); Edward Watts, 'Where to Live the Philosophical Life in the Sixth Century?' (GRBS 2005), on Medievalists.net

Basil II (AD 976 to 1025)

Basil II, Byzantine emperor, 'the Bulgar-slayer', Macedonian dynasty

Basil II reigned for 49 years and 11 months as senior emperor, one of the longest reigns of any Roman emperor. Psellos, writing in the eleventh century, says the rebel years turned a pleasure-loving young man into a hard and suspicious ruler. His wars against the First Bulgarian Empire ended with its submission in 1018. He also issued a law in 996 limiting powerful landowners, and in 1002 introduced the allelengyon tax.

How they came to power: He was born in 958 and crowned co-emperor as a child in 960. Generals Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes ruled first. He became senior emperor in 976, but the court official Basil Lekapenos held real power until 985. Basil put down the revolts of Bardas Skleros and Bardas Phokas in Anatolia, helped by troops from Vladimir of Kiev, who married his sister Anna in 989.

How it ended: He died in Constantinople on 15 December 1025, with no children. His brother Constantine VIII succeeded him. Psellos says he was in his seventy-second year, while Cedrenus says about seventy.

• At Kleidion in 1014, Basil reportedly captured about 15,000 Bulgarian prisoners and had most of them blinded. Wikipedia notes the figures may be exaggerated.
• Psellos describes him as shorter than average, with a loud laugh, who fiddled with his beard when angry or deep in thought, and who gave up bright clothes for plain dark purple.
• After his Bulgarian victory he is said to have celebrated a triumph in Athens before returning to Constantinople.

Sources: Michael Psellus, Chronographia, book 1: Basil II (Sewter translation, Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook); World History Encyclopedia: Basil II; Wikipedia: Basil II

The Fourth Crusade Sacks Constantinople (1202 to 12 April 1204)

Pope Innocent III called the crusade in 1198, and the Venetians asked 85,000 silver marks to carry the army, and when the crusaders could not pay, they agreed to take Zara for Venice in November 1202. They then backed the young Alexios IV for the Byzantine throne after his envoys, Villehardouin says, offered 200,000 marks of silver, supplies, and obedience of the Greek empire to Rome. The crusaders reached the city in June 1203, and in early 1204 Alexios V seized the throne. They broke into the city on 12 April 1204 and looted for three days; Niketas Choniates describes desecrated churches, a broken altar in Hagia Sophia and assaults on women. Baldwin of Flanders was crowned emperor in Hagia Sophia on 16 May, and Nicaea's forces recovered the city in 1261.

• The bronze Horses of Saint Mark were sent to Venice from the Hippodrome.
• Innocent III had forbidden attacks on Byzantine Christians, and wrote angry letters when he heard about the sack.
• Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for the sack in 2001 and again in 2004; Patriarch Bartholomew I accepted the apology in April 2004.

Sources: Villehardouin, Memoirs or Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade (Marzials translation, Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook); Niketas Choniates, The Sack of Constantinople (Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook); World History Encyclopedia: Fourth Crusade; Wikipedia: Sack of Constantinople (1204)

Gemistos Plethon (c. 1355 to c. 1452 (some say 1454; older works give 1450))

George Gemistos Plethon, philosopher of Mistra, Philosopher · Mistra

Plethon was born in Constantinople about 1355 and later settled at Mistra in the Peloponnese, where he taught philosophy, astronomy, history and geography. His students included Bessarion and George Scholarios. He wrote pamphlets in 1415 and 1418 urging Manuel II and Theodore to remake the Peloponnese as a centralised Hellenic state. They did not take his advice. He wrote 'We are Hellenes by race and culture', and scholars debate whether he anticipated modern Greek nationalism.

How they rose: In 1438 to 1439 he accompanied Emperor John VIII to the Council of Ferrara-Florence. Marsilio Ficino later called him 'the second Plato'. The traditional story that he inspired Cosimo de' Medici to found a Platonic Academy is disputed: James Hankins finds no independent evidence of a meeting.

How they died: He died at Mistra in 1452 or 1454, the later date meaning he lived to see 1453. His late Book of Laws, which proposed a religion based on Zeus and the Greek gods, was received after his death by Scholarios, by then patriarch, who burned it in 1460. Plethon's remains were moved to the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini in 1466.

• He adopted the name 'Plethon', a near-synonym of Gemistos, to echo Plato.
• His work De Differentiis argued Plato's idea of God was superior to Aristotle's, which started a quarrel with Scholarios.
• A surviving summary of his doctrine places Zeus at the top of a pantheon and has all things proceed by an unalterable destiny.

Sources: Darien DeBolt, 'George Gemistos Plethon on God' (20th World Congress of Philosophy), with the first English translation of Plethon's Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato; Philip Sherrard, 'The Symbolical Career of Georgios Gemistos Plethon', Studies in Comparative Religion 8.2 (1974), on Medievalists.net; Wikipedia: Gemistos Plethon

Constantine XI Palaiologos (AD 1449 to 1453)

Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Byzantine emperor, Palaiologos dynasty

Constantine was the fourth son of Manuel II Palaiologos, born in Constantinople on 8 February 1404, according to Wikipedia. He governed the Morea from Mystras as despot from 1428. He supported the church union proclaimed at the Council of Florence, in the hope of western help. In 1453 he led the defence against Sultan Mehmed II.

How they came to power: He was proclaimed emperor at Mystras on 6 January 1449. Wikipedia notes he was never crowned in a formal ceremony.

How it ended: He was killed in the Ottoman capture of the city on 29 May 1453. Nicol concludes it is impossible to be certain of the place and manner of his death. Greek sources place it at or near the Gate of St Romanos, and the earliest Turkish accounts record that his head was cut off. Nicol thinks it likely, though not certain, that the head was shown to Mehmed.

• Sphrantzes says the emperor had a census of defenders taken: 4,773 Greeks and a little under 200 foreigners, and that the true figure was a secret known only to the emperor and himself.
• His grave was never found, and later claims of tombs in Istanbul were probably legend, Nicol says.
• Greek folk legend made him 'the Marble Emperor', turned to stone and hidden beneath the Golden Gate, waiting to return.

Sources: George Sphrantzes, The Siege of Constantinople in 1453 (Chronicon Minus, Philippides translation, De Re Militari); Donald M. Nicol, 'The Death of Constantine', from The Immortal Emperor (Cambridge University Press); Wikipedia: Constantine XI Palaiologos

The Fall of Constantinople (6 April to 29 May 1453)

The Ottoman siege began on 6 April 1453, lasted 53 days, and ended with the city's fall on 29 May. The Theodosian walls were among the strongest of their time and a chain across the Golden Horn blocked enemy ships, but Mehmed's large cannons battered the walls and, Nicol says, about seventy smaller ships were dragged overland into the Golden Horn in late April. Modern estimates put the Ottoman army at 50,000 to 80,000 men and the defenders at 7,000 to 8,000, about 2,000 of them foreigners; Sphrantzes gives 4,773 Greeks and a little under 200 foreigners, and an Ottoman force of 200,000, a figure far above modern estimates. In the final assault before dawn on 29 May, the Genoese commander Giustiniani was badly wounded after holding the key point for over six hours and was carried away, and about fifty Turks entered through the Kerkoporta. Looting lasted about three days, and Mehmed made the city his capital.

• Sphrantzes was captured and enslaved, and was ransomed on 1 September 1453; the sultan later bought his children.
• Orban's giant cannon is said to have collapsed under its own recoil after about six weeks, though this account is disputed.
• Kritoboulos reports that the emperor said the city was taken and he had no reason to live. Doukas instead has him cry out for a Christian to cut off his head (as summarised by Nicol).

Sources: George Sphrantzes, The Siege of Constantinople in 1453 (Chronicon Minus, De Re Militari); Donald M. Nicol, 'The Fall of Constantinople', from The Immortal Emperor (Cambridge University Press); Wikipedia: Fall of Constantinople

Ottoman rule and the millet system (1453 to 1832)

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the Ottomans came to rule most Greek-speaking lands, with the Ionian Islands the main exception. The sultans dealt with Christians and Jews largely through their own religious leaders, an arrangement later called the millet system. Orthodox Christians of many languages were grouped in one community, the Rum millet, under the Ecumenical Patriarch, and Mehmed II installed Gennadios Scholarios in that post soon after the conquest (accounts date it from 1453 to 1454). Historians disagree about how fixed the system was in the early centuries, and recent scholarship argues that the tidy picture of an ancient structure is a later construction. What is clear is that the church became the main link between Greek-speaking Christians and the state, and that this shaped both their privileges and their risks.

• The Rum millet took its name from 'Rome', the Ottoman word for the Byzantine heritage. It counted Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Albanians and others as one community under the patriarch, although a firman of 1680 still listed them separately.
• In 1766 and 1767 the Serbian Patriarchate of Pec and the Archbishopric of Ohrid, which had run their own affairs, were taken over by Greek Phanariots under the Ecumenical Patriarch.
• Responsibility ran both ways. In 1821 Patriarch Grigorios V excommunicated Alexander Ypsilantis, yet he was removed from office and hanged on 10 April, Easter Sunday by the Orthodox calendar, after Ottoman officials held the church answerable for the Greek revolt.

Sources: Declaration of the First National Assembly at Epidaurus, January 1822: the revolutionaries' account of four centuries of Ottoman rule (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Constantinople, the Patriarchate and the Phanariotes in 1821; Wikipedia: Millet (Ottoman Empire)

The Venetian bombardment of the Parthenon (September 26, 1687)

In September 1687, during the Morean War, a Venetian army under Otto Wilhelm Konigsmarck and a fleet under Francesco Morosini besieged the Ottoman garrison on the Acropolis of Athens. The Ottomans were using the Parthenon to store gunpowder. On the evening of 26 September a mortar shell struck it, and the blast destroyed the roof and much of the walls. Wikipedia's account of the war gives about 300 dead. The Ottomans surrendered on 29 September, and the Venetians left Attica in 1688.

• Morosini himself called the hit a 'miraculous shot', according to Wikipedia's article on the Morean War.
• Drawings made earlier survive. The French artist Jacques Carrey (spelled 'Carey' by World History Encyclopedia) drew much of the Parthenon's sculpture in 1674, and his drawings are sometimes the only evidence for figures later lost.
• Morosini then tried to carry off the central figures of the west pediment as spoils. According to World History Encyclopedia, his lifting tackle collapsed and the horses were smashed.

Sources: Plan of the Venetian siege of the Acropolis, late 1680s (Wikimedia Commons); World History Encyclopedia: Parthenon: Temple of Athena Parthenos; Wikipedia: Morean War

Rigas Feraios (1757 to June 24, 1798)

Rigas Feraios (Rigas Velestinlis), writer and revolutionary, Revolutionary thinker · Velestino and Vienna

Rigas was born in 1757 in Velestino in Thessaly and worked for Phanariot and Wallachian officials before settling in Vienna, where many Greek merchants and scholars lived. There he published works inspired by the French Revolution, including a Declaration of the Rights of Man and a New Political Constitution for the inhabitants of the Ottoman Balkans, Asia Minor and the Aegean. He also wrote the war hymn known as the Thourios. Historians still argue whether his family was Aromanian or Greek, and statues of him stand in both Athens and Belgrade.

How they rose: He worked as a secretary for Phanariot and Wallachian officials, including Prince Nicholas Mavrogenes in Bucharest. In the 1790s he moved to Vienna and began to publish.

How they died: Betrayed by a Greek merchant, Demetrios Oikonomos Kozanites, he was arrested by the Austrians at Trieste on his way to Greece and handed over to the Ottomans in Belgrade. He was put to death there in June 1798 with his companions, and their bodies were thrown into the Danube. Most accounts say he was strangled and give 24 June, but some encyclopedias say he was shot or hanged.

• Lord Byron's 'Sons of the Greeks, arise!' translates 'Deute paides ton Hellenon', the war song credited to Rigas. Byron's version was first published in 1812, with Childe Harold, and the editors' note says it is 'as literal as the author could make it in verse'.
• His best-known line in the Thourios is usually translated as 'It is finer to live one hour as a free man than forty years as a slave and prisoner'.
• His portrait appeared on the Greek 200-drachma banknote, according to Wikipedia.

Sources: Lord Byron, Translation of the famous Greek War Song, 'Deute paides ton Hellenon' (Wikisource); Den Store Danske (lex.dk): Rigas Feraios; Wikipedia: Rigas Feraios

Theodoros Kolokotronis (April 3, 1770 to February 15, 1843)

Theodoros Kolokotronis, general of the Greek War of Independence, General · Peloponnese

Kolokotronis was born in Messenia in 1770 into a family of klephts, mountain outlaws who raided Ottoman officials. He fled to Zakynthos around 1806 (his memoir says 1805) and served as an officer in the Greek Light Infantry under British command, reaching the rank of major in 1810. When the rising began in 1821 he rallied villagers in the Morea, took Tripolitsa in the autumn and trapped the army of Dramali Pasha at Dervenakia in August 1822. He was also a party leader in the Greek civil wars of 1823 to 1825, and was imprisoned by fellow Greeks in 1825.

How they rose: The son of a klepht leader, he was himself a klepht and armatolos, then an officer in the Ionian Islands, where he adopted his red helmet. In 1821 he organised a band of klephts in the Peloponnese.

How they died: After the war he backed Kapodistrias, then turned against the Bavarian regency for Otto, was sentenced to death for treason in 1834 and was pardoned in 1835. He died in Athens on 15 February 1843 (3 February by the old calendar), a few days after attending a ball at the palace, according to the introduction to the English edition of his memoirs.

• He did not write his memoirs himself. He dictated them to Georgios Tertsetis, and the story runs from his birth in 1770 to 1836.
• His aide Photakos recalled that in the first weeks of the revolt many recruits had no arms or only knives or bradawls, and the flags of most were their wives' kerchiefs.
• According to the editor of the English edition, when he was dismissed from the generalship the senate was forced to restore him after a crowd cried 'Give us back Kolokotrones!'

Sources: Kolokotrones, the Klepht and the Warrior: an autobiography, trans. Mrs Edmonds (1892), Internet Archive; Photakos, memoirs of the revolution of 1821, excerpts (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The outbreak of the revolution in the Peloponnese; Wikipedia: Theodoros Kolokotronis

Laskarina Bouboulina (1771 to May 22, 1825)

Laskarina Bouboulina, shipowner and naval commander, Naval leader · Spetses

Bouboulina was born in Constantinople in 1771 to a family from Hydra and lived on Spetses. Widowed twice, she ran her second husband's shipping business. In 1816 the Ottomans tried to seize his estate, and she travelled to Constantinople and, with help from the Russian ambassador and the sultan's mother, kept it. She is said to have joined the Filiki Eteria, though her name is missing from the surviving member lists. In April 1821 she sailed to Nafplio on her ship Agamemnon and helped blockade the town, and in September she was at the siege of Tripolitsa.

How they rose: After her second husband, Dimitrios Bouboulis, died at sea, she took over his fortune and trading business and added to his fleet.

How they died: After her faction lost the civil war of 1824 she left Nafplio for Spetses, where political opponents imprisoned her for a time. On 22 May 1825, in a family feud over her son's elopement with a Koutsis daughter, armed men of the Koutsis family came to her house and she was shot on her balcony.

• Her ship Agamemnon, armed with 18 cannons, is described as the first warship in modern Greece. It was larger than Ottoman rules allowed, and she is said to have bribed the Ottoman admiral Hussein to report it as a trading vessel.
• The story that Tsar Alexander I made her an honorary admiral of the Russian Navy has no documentary support, and Russian reference works deny that Russia had a female admiral. The Hellenic Navy gave her the rank of rear admiral in 2018.
• Kolokotronis's memoir calls her the mother-in-law of his son Panos, and says he asked for her ships to come near Mylos to support Panos with their cannon.

Sources: Kolokotrones, the Klepht and the Warrior: an autobiography (1892), Internet Archive; George Waddington, A Visit to Greece in 1823 and 1824, Internet Archive; Foundation of the Hellenic World: The revolution at sea; Wikipedia: Laskarina Bouboulina

The Elgin Marbles removed (1801 to 1812)

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was British ambassador to the Ottoman court. From 1801 his agents removed sculptures from the Parthenon and other Acropolis buildings, and by 1812 about half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures had been sent to Britain. Elgin said he acted under Ottoman permits, called firmans, of July 1801 and March 1810. A House of Commons committee in 1816 recommended paying 35,000 pounds for the collection, and Parliament approved the purchase by 82 votes to 30, after which it passed to the British Museum. The British Museum and the British government say the sculptures were obtained legally, that returning them would set a precedent for other museums, and that in London they can be seen alongside other ancient cultures. The Greek government says they were taken illegally or unethically and should be shown with the other Parthenon sculptures in the Acropolis Museum. It made a formal request for the return of all the removed sculptures in 1983.

• One shipload sank in a storm off Kythera in the brig Mentor, and it took two years to bring the cargo to the surface.
• Elgin put his personal cost at 74,240 pounds, but the 1816 committee recommended paying only 35,000 pounds.
• No official record of the July 1801 firman has been found in the Turkish archives, which is one reason his version of events remains disputed.

Sources: Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II, stanzas 11 to 15 (Project Gutenberg); Lord Byron, The Curse of Minerva (Wikisource); World History Encyclopedia: Parthenon: Temple of Athena Parthenos; Wikipedia: Elgin Marbles

The Filiki Eteria (1814 to 1821)

In September 1814 three Greek merchants in Odessa, Nikolaos Skouphas, Athanasios Tsakaloff and Emmanouil Xanthos, founded the Filiki Eteria, or Society of Friends. They borrowed the secrecy, oaths and ranks of earlier secret societies and Masonic lodges. For its first years it was tiny, with no more than about thirty initiated members, but after the founders moved to Constantinople in 1818 it recruited bishops, local notables, klephts and armatoles. Ioannis Kapodistrias declined to lead it, and Alexander Ypsilantis accepted in April 1820. The planned rising was upset in early 1821 when suspicion and arrests forced an early start in the Danubian Principalities.

• Under the 'system of the twelve apostles', twelve trusted members were sent to twelve regions where Greeks lived, to win over local leaders.
• The flag blessed at Iasi in 1821 showed a phoenix with the words 'Reborn from my Ashes' on one side, and on the other Constantine and Helen with the words 'In this our Victory'.
• At Dragatsani on 7 June 1821 the Sacred Band, young volunteers from across Europe, was cut down by Ottoman forces. Ypsilantis fled into Austrian territory, was held by the Austrians until 1827, and died in Vienna in January 1828.

Sources: Alexander Ypsilantis, proclamation 'Fight for Faith and Country', Iasi, 24 February 1821 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The Philiki Etaireia; Foundation of the Hellenic World: The Danubian Principalities, 1821; Wikipedia: Filiki Eteria

The War of Independence begins (February to autumn 1821)

The revolution began on the Ottoman fringe rather than in Greece. On 22 February 1821 Alexander Ypsilantis crossed the River Pruth into Moldavia, and on 24 February he issued his proclamation at Iasi. His rising collapsed by June, but in the last ten days of March war was declared in Gortynia, Kalavryta, Patras, Mani, Kalamata and other places across the Peloponnese, while the Ottoman army was busy with the revolt of Ali Pasha in Epirus. Petrobey Mavromichalis issued a proclamation at Kalamata on 23 March. By late September Kolokotronis's forces had taken Tripolitsa, the Ottoman centre in the Morea, and thousands of Ottoman civilians were killed after its fall. Violence against civilians began in the first weeks and came from both sides.

• Greece marks 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation, as its Independence Day. That was the date originally planned for the rising, though the first actions came on different days.
• Violence spread in both directions. News of the maltreatment and death of Muslims in the principalities brought reprisals against Christians in Constantinople, and Patriarch Grigorios V was hanged on 10 April.
• Kolokotronis's aide Photakos recalled that Kolokotronis's son Panos was authorised to kill, burn houses and seize possessions, to be given out to the soldiers.

Sources: Alexander Ypsilantis, proclamation 'Fight for Faith and Country', Iasi, 24 February 1821 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Photakos, memoirs of the revolution of 1821, excerpts (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Ypsilantis in the Principalities; Foundation of the Hellenic World: The outbreak of the revolution in the Peloponnese; Wikipedia: Greek War of Independence

The siege of Missolonghi and Byron (1824 to April 1826)

Lord Byron reached Missolonghi on 5 January 1824 to support the Greek cause with money and leadership. He fell ill in February, and bloodletting weakened him further. He died there on 19 April 1824, aged 36, after a cold in early April turned into a fever. The Ottoman siege of the town began at the end of April 1825 and lasted a year. On the night of 10 to 11 April 1826 the exhausted and hungry defenders attempted a sortie. Two of the three groups broke through, but the third, made up mostly of non-combatants, was largely destroyed, and the town fell. Byron's death, and then the fall of the town, made Missolonghi a symbol across Europe.

• Byron spent about 4,000 pounds of his own money to refit the Greek fleet and gave the Souliot fighters about 6,000 pounds, yet he never led the attack on Nafpaktos he had planned.
• A besieged resident, Nikolaos Kasomoulis, recorded that from mid-February 1826 families began to run out of bread, and that people ate a donkey, dogs and cats. Around 15 March they began eating seaweed.
• Byron's death drew a second wave of foreign volunteers. More than one thousand philhellenes reached the rebel regions, and roughly a third did not return.

Sources: Nikolaos Kasomoulis, military memoirs of the Greek Revolution, siege of Missolonghi, excerpt (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Lord Byron, 'On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year', January 1824 (Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The siege of Missolonghi; Foundation of the Hellenic World: Philhellenic volunteers; Wikipedia: Lord Byron

The Battle of Navarino (October 20, 1827)

In the Treaty of London of 6 July 1827, Britain, France and Russia called for an autonomous Greece that would remain under Ottoman suzerainty, and a secret clause said that if the Porte did not accept an armistice within a month the allies could take measures to enforce it. Ibrahim Pasha's Ottoman and Egyptian fleet stayed in Navarino Bay, and the allied fleet under Sir Edward Codrington sailed in on 20 October (8 October in the Julian calendar then used in Greece). According to Wikipedia the battle came more by accident than design: fighting began when Ottoman forces fired on a boat sent from a British ship. Within a few hours the allies had destroyed most of the fleet. It revived the Greek cause and, with the Russo-Ottoman war of 1828 and 1829, led to independence.

• Greek historians count about 30 allied ships against about 90 Ottoman and Egyptian ones. Wikipedia's count is 22 allied ships against 78 Ottoman and Egyptian vessels, so the figures are uncertain.
• The King's Speech of 29 January 1828 called it 'this untoward event', and Codrington was recalled by a despatch dated 4 June 1828.
• Immediately afterwards the Greeks tried to retake territory, and a Chios expedition from October 1827 to February 1828 under the philhellene Fabvier did not succeed.

Sources: Treaty of London, 6 July 1827, and related documents (Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 'Greece Liberated'); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The Treaty of London and Navarino; Foundation of the Hellenic World: Campaigns after Navarino; Wikipedia: Battle of Navarino

Ioannis Kapodistrias (1827 to 1831)

Ioannis Kapodistrias, first Governor of Greece, Governor of Greece

Kapodistrias was born on Corfu in 1776, trained in medicine at Padua and entered politics in the Ionian Islands before serving Russia, where he was foreign minister from 1816 to 1822. He reached Nafplio in January 1828 to find a country in ruins. His government issued the first Greek coin, the phoenix, in 1829, founded a National Exchange Bank, introduced crops such as the potato, and set up a model farm at Tiryns. The constitution adopted in 1827 was not put into practice and power was concentrated in his hands, which brought organised opposition from powerful families.

How they came to power: He declined to lead the Filiki Eteria. In 1827 the Third National Assembly at Troezen elected him governor, and he reached Greece in January 1828.

How it ended: On 27 September 1831 by the Julian calendar then used in Greece (9 October in the modern calendar), Konstantis and Georgios Mavromichalis killed him at the church of Saint Spyridon in Nafplio. They were the brother and son of Petrobey Mavromichalis, whom Kapodistrias had ordered imprisoned.

• He began as a doctor and in 1799 held a senior post at a military hospital on Corfu during the Russo-Ottoman siege of the island (sources differ on which side's hospital it was).
• He asked France for a loan of 60,000,000 francs to rebuild the state, but it was never granted, and the government ran on small monthly sums from Russia and France between 1828 and 1830.
• The phoenix coin he introduced took its name from a symbol of the Filiki Eteria, the secret society he had refused to lead.

Sources: Documents sent to Governor Kapodistrias: the London Protocol of 1829 and the Treaty of Adrianople (Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 'Greece Liberated'); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Economic policy of the Kapodistrian period; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911): Capo d'Istria (Wikisource); Wikipedia: Ioannis Kapodistrias

Independence recognised (February 3, 1830 to August 30, 1832)

The London Protocol of 3 February 1830 (22 January in the old calendar) was the first formal international act to recognise Greece as an independent sovereign state, not a tributary of the Ottoman Empire. It set a border from the Acheloos to the Spercheios rivers, added Euboea and the Sporades, and named Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg as sovereign. The Ottoman government accepted it in a note of April 1830. Leopold resigned in May 1830, and in 1832 the powers chose Otto, a younger son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The Treaty of Constantinople, signed on 21 July 1832, set the northern frontier along the Arta to Volos line, and a London protocol of 30 August 1832 gave Lamia to Greece.

• The Ottoman Empire received an indemnity of forty million piastres in the August 1832 settlement, while the claims of Crete and Samos to join Greece were rejected.
• Venizelos told a Thessaloniki crowd in 1930 that Greece in 1830 was 'a desert of debris' with a population approaching 700,000, in which Athens was a big village of 10 to 12 thousand.
• Venizelos said in the same speech that the Prince of Coburg refused the throne because the powers would not enlarge the new state's borders and he doubted it could survive.

Sources: Treaties and Protocols of Independence, 1827 to 1832 (Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 'Greece Liberated'); Eleftherios Venizelos, speech in Thessaloniki, 12 May 1930 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The protocols of 1828 to 1830; Foundation of the Hellenic World: Otto, the frontiers and the final settlement of 1832; Wikipedia: Treaty of Constantinople (1832); Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Ottoman Empire diplomatic documents, including the Porte's note of April 1830 accepting the London Protocol

Otto (1832 to 1862)

Otto, first King of modern Greece, House of Wittelsbach

Otto was born in 1815, the second son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, and was named king of Greece by the powers under the Convention of London of May 1832. A Bavarian regency council ran the government until he came of age in 1835, then he dismissed the leading regent and ruled as an absolute monarch. He arrived at Nafplio in early 1833 and in 1834 moved the capital to Athens. A popular revolt in Athens on 3 September 1843 forced him to grant a constitution, which was followed by the Constitution of 1844 and the first elections. His standing fell after British blockades of the Piraeus in 1850 and 1854.

How they came to power: The three Great Powers chose him as king after Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg resigned in 1830. The choice was set out in the Treaty of London of May 1832 and ratified by the Greek side in July 1832. Otto reached Nafplio in early 1833.

How it ended: In October 1862 he was deposed by a revolt while he was away from Athens in the countryside, and he went into exile in Bavaria. He died in Bamberg on 26 July 1867.

• He was 17 when he became king.
• He married Amalia of Oldenburg in Oldenburg on 22 November 1836.
• Venizelos said in 1930 that when the Sultan died the king ordered the Greek navy's only warship to be readied to sail to Constantinople.

Sources: Eleftherios Venizelos, speech in Thessaloniki, 12 May 1930 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Ottoman note recognising the election of Othon, December 1832, and related diplomatic documents (Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Domestic policy, 1833 to 1897; Wikipedia: Otto of Greece

Athens becomes the capital (1834)

Nafplio was the first capital of the modern Greek state, from 1829 or earlier (sources differ) until 1834. In 1834 King Otto decided to move the court and government to Athens. The choice was made largely for historical and sentimental reasons, since Athens was then a small town below the Acropolis. Otto commissioned the architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to design a modern city plan, whose first layout formed a triangle bounded by the Acropolis, the Kerameikos cemetery and the new royal palace, now the Parliament.

• Estimates of Athens's population then differ. Wikipedia says about 4,000 people, while Venizelos later spoke of 10 to 12 thousand.
• Piraeus, in Venizelos's 1930 account, was uninhabited apart from three huts.
• The National Gardens were commissioned by Queen Amalia in 1838 and finished by 1840.

Sources: Eleftherios Venizelos, speech in Thessaloniki, 12 May 1930 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Domestic policy, 1833 to 1897; Wikipedia: Athens

The first modern Olympics (April 6 to 15, 1896)

Athens was chosen as host at the Sorbonne Congress in Paris in June 1894. Crown Prince Konstantinos headed the organising committee, and a gift of 920,000 drachmas from Georgios Averoff paid for restoring the Panathenaic Stadium. The Games ran from 6 to 15 April 1896 (25 March in the Julian calendar then used in Greece), with 13 countries according to Olympedia, though the IOC counts 14. American athletes won most of the track and field events, but the home crowd was won over by the marathon.

• Olympedia describes marathon winner Spyros Louis as a shepherd who took the lead midway through the race. Wikipedia and some other accounts call him a water carrier.
• Olympedia says that, offered rewards, he asked only for a cart to help carry his water. Wikipedia says what he asked the king for was a carriage, so accounts differ.
• Most American competitors signed a letter to Crown Prince Konstantinos supporting the idea of holding all future Games in Athens, but Coubertin wanted the Games to rotate between cities.

Sources: Official Report of the 1896 Olympic Games (LA84 Foundation digital library); Olympedia: 1896 Summer Olympics; Wikipedia: 1896 Summer Olympics

Eleftherios Venizelos (Eight terms, 1910 to 1933)

Eleftherios Venizelos, Prime Minister of Greece, Liberal Party

Venizelos was born in 1864 near Chania, in Ottoman Crete, and made his name in the Cretan revolt of 1897 and the union of Crete with Greece. Invited to Athens in 1909 after the Goudi coup, he became prime minister in 1910 and led Greece through the Balkan Wars. His clash with King Constantine I over the First World War produced the National Schism of 1915 to 1917. At the Paris Peace Conference he won large gains by the Treaty of Sevres, but the Asia Minor campaign collapsed in 1922. He returned as prime minister in 1928 and improved relations with Turkey.

How they came to power: After Greek officers rebelled at Goudi in 1909, the Military League summoned him from Crete as adviser, and he became prime minister in 1910.

How it ended: His last term as prime minister ran from January to March 1933. After a failed coup attempt by Venizelist officers in 1935 he left Greece for Paris, where he died on 18 March 1936, aged 71.

• In 1934 he nominated Mustafa Kemal Ataturk for the Nobel Peace Prize, a sign of the Greek-Turkish rapprochement. The Nobel nomination archive lists him as the nominator.
• On 12 August 1920 two royalist soldiers attacked him at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, and he survived.
• In a speech at Thessaloniki in 1930 he called the creation of the Greece of 1830 'a political nightmare' and said he had called the country's devotion to the Great Idea 'romantic'.

Sources: Eleftherios Venizelos, speech in Thessaloniki, 12 May 1930 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Treaty of Bucharest, 10 August 1913, signed for Greece by Venizelos (Wikisource); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Domestic policy, 1897 to 1922; Foundation of the Hellenic World: Eleftherios Venizelos in the inter-war period; Wikipedia: Eleftherios Venizelos; Nobel Prize nomination archive: Peace 1934, nominee Mustafa Kemal, nominator E. K. Venizelos

The Balkan Wars (October 1912 to August 1913)

The First Balkan War began on 8 October 1912, when the Balkan League states attacked the Ottoman Empire. Greek forces entered Thessaloniki when the Ottoman commander agreed to surrender on 8 November 1912 (26 October by the old calendar), only a day or so ahead of a Bulgarian division. The war ended with the Treaty of London of 30 May 1913. Bulgaria then attacked its former allies in the Second Balkan War, which ended with the Treaty of Bucharest of 10 August 1913. Greece gained Macedonia, Epirus and Crete and dominion over islands of the northeastern Aegean.

• The Greek-Bulgarian line in the Treaty of Bucharest ended at the mouth of the Mesta (Nestos) on the Aegean Sea.
• The Greek delegation at Bucharest was led by Venizelos, and included Nicolas Politis, professor of international law at the University of Paris.
• According to the Foundation of the Hellenic World, in the period 1912 to 1922 Greece doubled her territory and population.

Sources: Treaty of Bucharest, 10 August 1913 (Wikisource); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Foreign policy, 1897 to 1922; Jacob Gould Schurman, The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913 (1914), Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: Balkan Wars

The Asia Minor catastrophe and the population exchange (1922 to 1923)

Greek forces had landed at Smyrna in 1919 and won a zone around it in the Treaty of Sevres, but the Allied powers changed their policy and the army collapsed in the summer of 1922. Crowds of refugees and soldiers flooded into Greece. The Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, made the exchange compulsory from 1 May 1923, based on religion rather than language. Roughly 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians and 355,000 to 400,000 Muslims were moved. The Greeks of Constantinople and the Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted.

• Turkish-speaking Karamanlides, who were Orthodox Christians, were included in the exchange, while Greek-speaking Muslims such as the Vallahades were moved to Turkey.
• Article 1 of the convention says the exchanged persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece without the authorisation of the government concerned.
• The Lausanne talks were led for Greece by Venizelos, and Greece avoided paying war reparations to Turkey, which the Foundation of the Hellenic World credits to his actions and to Allied pressure.

Sources: Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, Lausanne, 30 January 1923 (Wikisource); Foundation of the Hellenic World: Domestic policy, 1897 to 1922; Foundation of the Hellenic World: The Conference of Lausanne; Wikipedia: Population exchange between Greece and Turkey

Ioannis Metaxas (1936 to 1941)

Ioannis Metaxas, Prime Minister and head of the Regime of the Fourth of August, Regime of the Fourth of August

Metaxas was born in 1871 on Ithaca, trained at the Berlin War Academy and rose in the army. He was a monarchist in the National Schism. As prime minister from April 1936 he declared the Regime of the Fourth of August on 4 August 1936, with the consent of King George II. Parliament was shut, parties were banned and opponents were exiled. The Foundation of the Hellenic World describes the regime as authoritarian, with a personality cult around its leader. He also prepared the country for war and kept close ties with Britain.

How they came to power: He became prime minister in April 1936. On 4 August he proclaimed the new regime, with the throne's consent, citing party conflict in a deadlocked parliament and a Communist threat.

How it ended: He rejected the Italian ultimatum on 28 October 1940 and died at Kifissia on 29 January 1941 of toxemia, before the German invasion of April 1941.

• In his own proclamation he wrote that he was 'determined to exterminate in the harshest way any opposition to this nationwide task'.
• The text of the proclamation comes from his personal diary, published in 1970 and edited by L. Metaxa, and the Foundation of the Hellenic World reproduces it from that edition.
• His reply to the Italian ambassador is remembered as 'No' (Ochi), but later accounts say the reported words were in French: 'Alors, c'est la guerre' ('Then it is war').

Sources: Ioannis Metaxas, proclamation of the Fourth of August 1936 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, 1936 to 1940; Foundation of the Hellenic World: The events that led to the Greek-Italian war; Wikipedia: Ioannis Metaxas

Ochi Day and the Greco-Italian War (October 28, 1940 to April 1941)

Early on 28 October 1940 the Italian ambassador, Emanuele Grazzi, presented Metaxas with an ultimatum demanding passage for Italian forces to strategic points. Metaxas rejected it, and Italy attacked from Albania. The Greek army held the line and then counter-attacked, entering Albanian territory. The campaign lasted until Germany invaded in April 1941. Greeks mark 28 October each year as Ochi (No) Day.

• Metaxas's reply to the Italian ambassador is reported to have been in French, 'Alors, c'est la guerre', and the single word 'ochi' became the symbol afterwards.
• The Greek advance pushed about 60 kilometres into Albanian territory, immobilising 27 Italian divisions with 16 Greek ones, according to the Foundation of the Hellenic World.
• The Foundation of the Hellenic World counts the campaign as 216 days in three phases, from 28 October 1940 to 5 April 1941.

Sources: Kathimerini front-page headlines, 29 October 1940 to April 1941, quoted in the Foundation of the Hellenic World archive; Foundation of the Hellenic World: The Greek-Italian war; Foundation of the Hellenic World: Declaration of war, 1940; Wikipedia: Ochi Day

The Axis occupation and the famine (April 1941 to October 1944)

German troops entered Athens on 27 April 1941, and the country was divided among Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. Requisitions, the collapse of production, a naval blockade and a flourishing black market produced hyperinflation and famine. The winter of 1941 to 1942 was the worst. The Foundation of the Hellenic World says about 100,000 died that winter, and about 300,000 during the whole occupation from famine, vitamin deficiency and epidemics. Estimates differ, because civil registration did not work during the occupation. A relief commission founded under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the autumn of 1941 helped feed the population, and Greece was liberated in October 1944.

• German army records put deaths in Athens at about 300 a day in December 1941, while Red Cross estimates were about 400.
• According to Wikipedia, the price of bread rose nearly 90-fold between April 1941 and June 1942.
• On the black market food could be bought with British gold sovereigns or by barter.

Sources: Diary and memoir excerpts on the famine, Athens, winter 1941 (Foundation of the Hellenic World); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The Occupation and the famine; ICRC Archives: The ICRC during World War II; Wikipedia: Great Famine (Greece)

The Civil War (1946 to 1949)

The roots lay in the occupation, when the resistance movement EAM/ELAS and the exiled royalist government pursued incompatible aims. After the Varkiza agreement of February 1945, violence continued, and the plebiscite of February 1946, boycotted by the Left, restored the monarchy. Government forces fought the Democratic Army of Greece, mostly in the north. In March 1947 President Truman asked the US Congress for $400 million for Greece and Turkey after Britain announced it could no longer give aid. The Democratic Army was defeated on Mounts Vitsi and Grammos in the summer of 1949.

• Estimates of the dead range from about 80,000 to 158,000, and about a million people were temporarily displaced.
• The insurgents were weakened by the split between Stalin and Tito: the Soviet Union broke off relations with Yugoslavia in June 1948, and Tito closed the Yugoslav border to the Democratic Army in July 1949.
• The Communist Party, banned since 1947, was made legal again after the transition to democracy in 1974, and a law of 1989 formally recognised the conflict as a civil war.

Sources: President Truman's address to Congress, March 12, 1947 (Avalon Project, Yale Law School); Office of the Historian: The Truman Doctrine, 1947; Foundation of the Hellenic World: 1945 to 1950; Wikipedia: Greek Civil War

Konstantinos Karamanlis (Prime minister 1955 to 1963 and 1974 to 1980; president 1980 to 1985 and 1990 to 1995)

Konstantinos Karamanlis, Prime Minister and President of the Republic, National Radical Union · New Democracy

Karamanlis was born in 1907 in Proti near Serres, in Ottoman Macedonia, and became a Greek citizen in 1913. First elected to parliament in 1936, he was named prime minister by King Paul in October 1955. His governments pursued public works, the vote for women, the Zurich agreement that led to Cypriot independence and the first association treaty with the EEC in 1961. He resigned in 1963 after a disagreement with the king and lived in Paris for about eleven years. In 1974 he was recalled to lead a government of national unity as the junta fell.

How they came to power: King Paul appointed him prime minister in October 1955 after Marshal Papagos died, passing over two senior party figures. In July 1974 military leaders called him back from Paris to head a national unity government.

How it ended: He resigned as prime minister in 1980 and became president, served until 1985 and again from 1990 to 1995, and died in 1998 at the age of 91.

• His party New Democracy won about 54 percent in the elections of November 1974, and a December referendum voted against the monarchy.
• His government signed the treaty of accession to the European Communities in Athens on 28 May 1979.
• The Constitution of 1975, in its revised form, begins 'In the name of the Holy and Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity' and says the form of government of Greece is a parliamentary republic.

Sources: Constitution of Greece, 1975 (revised 2019) (Constitute Project); Treaty concerning the accession of the Hellenic Republic to the European Communities, Athens, 28 May 1979 (EUR-Lex); Foundation of the Hellenic World: 1970 to 1980, the restoration of democracy; Wikipedia: Konstantinos Karamanlis

The junta and the Polytechnic uprising (April 21, 1967 to July 24, 1974)

On 21 April 1967, weeks before scheduled elections, a group of officers led by Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos seized power and abolished the parliamentary constitution. The regime used imprisonment, banishment to remote islands and torture against opponents, and international protests ended in Greece's expulsion from the Council of Europe in 1969, as the Foundation of the Hellenic World puts it. In November 1973 students occupied the Athens Polytechnic. In the early hours of 17 November a tank crashed through the gate, and at least 24 people were killed outside the campus, according to a later study. A counter-coup under Dimitrios Ioannidis followed. After the junta backed a coup against Cyprus's President Makarios in July 1974 and Turkey invaded, the officers handed power to civilians, and Karamanlis returned.

• The students called themselves the 'Free Besieged' and ran a pirate radio station from laboratory equipment.
• A US ambassador's report of March 1970 described the regime's constitution as approved by referendum but not yet in force pending implementing laws.
• Early estimates of the dead ranged from 60 to 500. A later study by Kallivretakis fully identified 24 people killed as a result of the suppression, and an investigation after the junta found that no students inside the Polytechnic were killed. The exact toll is still debated.

Sources: Report by the US Ambassador to Greece, Henry Tasca, March 31, 1970 (Office of the Historian, FRUS); Foundation of the Hellenic World: The junta, 1967 to 1974; Foundation of the Hellenic World: The fall of the dictatorship; Wikipedia: Athens Polytechnic uprising

Andreas Papandreou (1981 to 1989 and 1993 to 1996)

Andreas Papandreou, Prime Minister and founder of PASOK, PASOK

Papandreou was born on Chios in 1919, the son of prime minister Georgios Papandreou. He left Greece before the Second World War and spent years in the United States as an economist and professor. He returned to Greece in 1959 and entered politics in the 1960s, then founded the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) on 3 September 1974. PASOK won 48 percent in October 1981. His governments introduced civil marriage, a national health system and changes to family law, and recognised the wartime resistance. His foreign policy often differed from the positions of Greece's NATO and EEC partners, and he made use of the veto.

How they came to power: After the fall of the junta he founded PASOK in 1974. It became the main opposition party and won the elections of October 1981.

How it ended: He led governments until 1989, was prime minister again from 1993, resigned in January 1996 because of ill health, and died in Athens on 23 June 1996.

• He gave up his American citizenship in early 1964, on the eve of first standing for elected office in Greece, according to a 1974 US embassy telegram. At a White House news conference in 1994, President Clinton called him a former professor in the United States.
• Papandreou's PASOK was the first left-socialist party to govern Greece, according to the Foundation of the Hellenic World.
• His son George Papandreou became prime minister in 2009.

Sources: President Clinton's news conference with Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, April 22, 1994 (American Presidency Project); Foundation of the Hellenic World: 1980 to 1990, the rise of PASOK; Foundation of the Hellenic World: Greece in the international environment; Wikipedia: Andreas Papandreou; Telegram from the US Embassy in Greece to the Department of State, 20 November 1974 (Office of the Historian, FRUS)

Entry into the European Community (May 28, 1979 to January 1, 1981)

Greece had an association agreement with the European Economic Community from 1961, and Karamanlis, who made membership the centre of his foreign policy after 1974, took the country towards full membership. The Treaty concerning the accession of the Hellenic Republic was signed at Athens on 28 May 1979 and entered into force on 1 January 1981. Greece became the tenth member, according to the EU's own history pages, and the EU's country page records 1 January 1981 as the date it joined.

• The treaty said it would enter into force on 1 January 1981 only if all the instruments of ratification had been deposited before that date.
• After 1981 the PASOK government used a veto in the EEC and sought 'systematic differentiation' from its partners, as the Foundation of the Hellenic World describes it.
• The 1961 association agreement was signed during the first Karamanlis governments.

Sources: Treaty concerning the accession of the Hellenic Republic to the European Communities, Athens, 28 May 1979 (EUR-Lex); European Union: Greece; Foundation of the Hellenic World: 1970 to 1980, the restoration of democracy; Wikipedia: Konstantinos Karamanlis; European Union: History of the EU, 1980 to 1989 (Greece the 10th member)

The euro and the Athens 2004 Olympics (January 1, 2001 to August 29, 2004)

On 1 January 2001 Greece became the twelfth EU state to adopt the euro. The conversion rate was fixed at 340.750 drachmas to the euro, and euro banknotes and coins circulated from 1 January 2002. The Athens Games of 13 to 29 August 2004 brought the modern Olympics back to their first host city. About 10,600 athletes from 201 countries took part, in 301 medal events, and Greece finished 15th in the medals with 16 medals.

• The Bank of Greece exchanged drachma coins until 1 March 2004 and drachma banknotes until 1 March 2012.
• The 2004 marathon followed the route of the 1896 Games, from Marathon to the Panathenaic Stadium, and the shot put events were held at Ancient Olympia.
• The medal obverse showed the Panathenaic Stadium, replacing the Giuseppe Cassioli design used since 1928, which had shown the Roman Colosseum.

Sources: European Central Bank press release: 'Greece now a member of European Economic and Monetary Union', 2 January 2001; European Commission: Greece and the euro; Olympedia: 2004 Summer Olympics; Wikipedia: 2004 Summer Olympics

The debt crisis (2009 to August 20, 2018)

In late 2009 the Greek government revised the 2009 deficit forecast from 6 to 8 percent of GDP to 12.7 percent, and later revisions put the figure above 15 percent. In April 2010 Greece submitted an official request for financing. A joint euro area and IMF package of 110 billion euros was agreed at staff level on 2 May 2010 and signed on 3 May. Further programmes followed in 2012 and 2015. Unemployment reached nearly 25 percent, and the debt rose from 127 percent of GDP in 2009 to 179 percent in 2017. Greece exited the programmes on 20 August 2018.

• The first adjustment programme was signed on 3 May 2010, and Greece needed to borrow nine billion euros for a debt repayment due on 19 May 2010.
• In 2012 private bondholders accepted a 53.5 percent reduction in the face value of their bonds, and a second programme of 130 billion euros followed.
• On 30 June 2015 Greece failed to make an IMF repayment on time and paid it 20 days late. On 5 July 2015 a referendum on the bailout terms produced a 61 percent vote to reject them, and banks stayed closed for several weeks.

Sources: European Commission: The Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece, May 2010, with the Memorandum of Understanding; European Court of Auditors: The Commission's intervention in the Greek financial crisis (2017); Wikipedia: Greek government-debt crisis