Talk:The Iron Age

Greece

Sparta

About 600 B.C., the Spartans reorganized their state into a type of authoritarian regime. Youths at the age of seven were taken for military training. They lived in the barracks, ate in common messes, and were trained in the spirit of war. The population was divided into citizens and non-citizens; the legal position of women was very low. The government consisted of a bicameral legislature said to have been based on the ideas of Lycurgus, the great Spartan lawgiver. The gerusia was the upper house. Its membership comprised twenty-eight elders and two kings. While the gerusia initiated legislation, the final decision rested with the lower house, the apella, which represented the citizens. Both houses were so selected and the citizens so defined, that the landed aristocracy kept a secure hold on the state. There were five magistrates, or ephors.

Athens

The other great Greek state, Athens, gradually developed from a monarchy, abolished in 683 B.C., and a tyranny, to a republican form of government. A struggle between the elements representing the nobility, led by Isagoras, and those representing the common people, led by Cleisthenes, culminated about 500 B.C. in a victory for the latter. The new period brought a series of social and constitutional reforms. The citizenry was enlarged to include the middle class and a popular organ of government, the Assembly, was definitely established whereby the citizenry, now dominated by the middle class, controlled the government. The government and the army were reorganized and a number of marked improvements were made over Solon’s earlier reforms of 594 B.C. The constitution, however, was not changed. The efforts by Sparta to assist the Athenian aristocracy to overthrow the new Athenian regime resulted in failure.

The Persian Wars

The period from 499-338 B.C. marked the third epoch in Greek history and was characterized by the Persian Wars and the struggles for power between the individual Greek states. From 499-490 B.C. the Greeks were preoccupied with the Persians. The disunity among them played into the hands of the Persians commanded by Darius, but at the Battle of Marathon, in 490 B.C., the Athenians won a decisive victory and forced the Persians to withdraw their forces into Asia. With the Persians temporarily out of the way, the Athenians were free to continue their development of democratic government through the middle class. On this occasion, the method of ostracism was introduced against politically undesirable individuals. The wars of Persia were resumed in 480 B.C. and ended in the defeat of the Greek forces at Thermopylae. The Persian forces of Xerxes occupied Attica and virtually destroyed Athens, forcing many inhabitants to flee. On the sea, however, the Greek navy organized by Themistocles turned the tide by defeating the Persians in the naval Battle of Salamis. A year later at Plataea (479 B.C.), the Greek forces won a decisive victory over the Persian troops led by Mardonius. Several island Greek cities revolted agains the Persians who were now in trouble everywhere and withdrawing. The combined fleets of Sparta, Athens, and the Greeks of Asia Minor captured Byzantium.

Classical Greece

The 5th century B.C. marks the apogee of ancient Greek greatness and the transference of leadership from Sparta to Athens. In 478-477 B.C. the Ionians, who now rejected Spartan leadership, came to an agreement with Athens to expel the Persians from Greek territories. This laid the basis for the Delian League (479-461 B.C.), named for Delos where the general assembly of the League was established. The smaller members of the League contributed money in place of naval and other assistance. The League ultimately fell under the complete control of Athens. Themistocles and Cimon became rivals for leadership in the new Athenian commonwealth. Cimon, in charge of the fleet of the League, won a victory over the Persians at the Eurymedon River, and occupied parts of the Thracian coast in 469 B.C. In Athens the two political groups, the aristocratic group headed by Cimon, and the democratic group headed by Pericles, continued the struggle. In 461 B.C., the democratic group won and Cimon was obliged to leave Athens. Meanwhile the treasury of the League was transferred from Delos to Athens. The contributions of the League now acquired the character of a tribute to Athens, and the Spartans and Boeotians launched a war against Athens (457-445 B.C.). In 452-451 B.C. an armistice was concluded between Sparta and Athens, making possible their joint naval expedition against the Persians. In 447 B.C. the Athenians were defeated at Corona while assisting the democratic elements against the aristocrats in the Boeotian cities. Two years late a thirty years’ peace was concluded between Sparta and Athens, and the Athenian and Peloponnesian Leagues were recognized as the two independent confederacies. Efforts on the part of Thucydides, who represented the aristocrats of Athens, to undermine the Pericles ended in failure. Thucydides lost and was banished from Athens. From 444-429 B.C., Athens was ruled by Pericles. The entire period of the Periclean political activity is known as the Age of Pericles, during which political, economic, and artistic Athens reached its apex. It was the Classical age in which Greek culture sponsored by Athens achieved lasting fame.

From 431-404 B.C., there was a series of invasions of Attica by the Peloponnesians, known as the Great Peloponnesian War. It was interrupted by the Peace of Nicias (421 B.C.), concluded for five years, each party giving up its conquests and prisoners of war. The renewed war ended in the defeat of Athens, in 404 B.C., whose democracy was replaced by an oligarchical form of government. The period from 404-371 B.C. inaugurated the era of Spartan hegemony, followed, after a war with Thebes (379-362 B.C.), by a period of Theban ascendency.

The Hellenistic Epoch

The period from 359-336 B.C. marked the rise of the Macedonian power. In 338 B.C. Philip of Macedon defeated the allied Greek armies and occupied Thebes, but not Athens. At Corinth, he convoked a congress and organized the Hellenic League. Sparta alone of the Greek states refused to join the League. Philip of Macedon was assassinated in 336 B.C., and was succeeded by his son, known as Alexander the Great, who inaugurated the Greco-Macedonian or Hellenistic epoch in Greek history (338-146 B.C.). The Greek hegemony passed to Alexander the Great and he assumed the leadership against the Persians after first reducing the rebellious Greek factions to his control. In 334 B.C., he defeated the Persians at the Granicus River, and the following year decisively defeated Darius at Issus, and thence advanced into Mesopotamia. During 332-331 B.C. he sent an expedition to Egypt, and there founded the city of Alexandria. In 327 B.C. he dispatched his armies to India and crossed into the Punjab. After the death of its founder, the Alexandrine Empire was divided among his successors. There emerged in its place five monarchies, each retaining a Hellenistic character: Egypt under the rule of the Ptolemies; Syria under the rule of the Seleucidae; Pergamon; Bithynia; and Macedonia. The ascendency of Macedonia was tempered by the formation in 290 B.C. of the Aetolian League, and later by the Achaean League, founded in 280 B.C. Eventually the Achaean League fell under Macedonian control and the Aetolian League, supported by Sparta, ultimately accepted an alliance with Rome.

From 215-205 B.C., Philip V of Macedon attempted to help the Carthaginians against Rome. The Romans prevented his crossing into Italy and procured the assistance of the Aetolian League, and of Pergamon as well as som of the other Greek states, including Sparta, in 210 B.C. The Greeks were forced to accept Roman terms in the Peace of Phoenice (205 B.C.). From 192-189 B.C., the situation changed and the Aetolians declared war on Rome while Philip supported Rome. The Aetolians were defeated and subjected to Rome. In the third and fourth Macedonians wars, 171-167 B.C. and 149-148 B.C. respectively, Rome defeated Macedon, made it a Roman province, and then gradually conquered a large portion of Alexander’s former Near Eastern empire. With no prospect of restoring their independence, the Greeks clung to the glorious traditions of their past. Their Roman conquerors respected their high cultural achievement and even helped to foster it. The Athenian university remained the chief university of the Roman Empire until it was closed by Justinian in the 6th century A.D. Greek scholars flooded Italy, and in turn the Romans, who appreciated Greek culture, visited Greece in growing numbers. In A.D. 330, Emperor Constantine transferred the Roman imperial seat to Constantinople, or Byzantium, and established Christianity as the religion of the state. The pagan religion of the Greeks, however, existed in some areas until 600. Since Christianity was best organized in the Near East, it was logical for Constantinople to be the seat of the Christian Church. The Latin language was the official language of the empire, but Greek was extensively used. The University of Constantinople, founded in 425, offered instruction in both Latin and Greek. With the fall of Rome in 476, the Eastern Roman Empire—whose Greek citizens were called Romaioi, citizens of Rome—gradually developed a new, Greek-dominated state, the Byzantine Empire, which lasted until its dissolution in 1204.

Byzantine Empire

The new state was far from a revival of the ancient city-states. It was a strongly centralized and theocratic state in which the ancient Athenian popular forum was replaced by a complex bureaucratic system. The history of the Byzantine Empire is one of continuous wars in the Balkans, southern Italy, and Asia Minor for the preservation of the empire. The position of the Empire was made worse by the incessant barbarian invasions that began with the 4th century—Visigothic, Gothic, Bulgarian, and Slavic, among others. The Slavs who infiltrated the empire in large numbers in the course of the 6th century were finally checked in the 9th century, and Christianized. In the beginning of the 6th century the Byzantine Empire produced a great leader in Emperor Justinian, whose main efforts were directed toward regaining the territories once belonging to the Roman Empire. His able military leaders fought the enemies on all sides of the empire, Persians in the east, Goths in Italy and Spain, Vandals in Africa. A temporary stability of the empire encouraged artistic revival of Byzantine art. In 537 the construction of the famous church of Hagia Sophia was completed. In the 7th century the Byzantine emperors were embroiled with the Lombards and Franks in the west and the Persians and Arabs in the east. During this period the army and state became Greek in every respect. But the religious dissension, the iconoclastic struggle, weakened the mepire from within and alienated it from the Church of Rome. The final separation of east and west, Constantinople and Rome, dates from 800, when Charlemagne was crowned Roman emperor. The final religious separation took place in 1054, when both the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other.

In the latter part of the 9th century emperors Nicephorus Phocas II (913-969) and John Zimisces (925-976) added a degree of stability and strength to the empire; in 1018 the Bulgarians were subjugated by Basil, “the Bulgar Slayer.” Following the latter’s death, the empire rapidly declined and, after a series of defeats by the Seljuk Turks, it never succeeded in regaining its past greatness. From the latter part of the 12th century and especially after 1204, when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, the empire declined beyond any possibility of recovery. In Constantinople a Latin dynasty was set up, lasting from 1204-1261. The Greek Church and its patriarch became subordinated to the archbishop of the Church of Rome. Greece was partitioned among the Frankish adventurers. In 1261, the exiled Byzantine rulers in Nicaea mustered enough strength to recapture Constantinople and restore their empire. Faced with a new enemy, the Ottoman Turks, and the medieval Serbian empire of Tsar Dushan, the Byzantine Empire lingered on precariously until 1453 when Constantinople was taken and occupied by Ottoman Turks. The latter gradually reconquered the Greek lands from the Frankish adventurers and distributed them among the Turkish warriors in the form of fiefs. Greece was subdivided militarily into six districts called sanjaks, each governed by a pasha, or governor. The Genoese and Venetians retained some Greek lands for one or two centuries after the fall of Constantinople. The Ionian Islands have remained until Venetian control, never having been occupied by the Turks.

Turkish Domination

During the Turkish domination, which lasted from the middle of the 15th century until the present, the Greeks, as Christians, were officially treated as an inferior race and were robbed of any opportunity for cultural development. Only a small Greek minority living in Istanbul, the Turkish name for Constantinople, made progress in commerce; some Greeks, the Phanariots, succeeded in holding high positions in the government. Although the Turks did not indulge in excessive or lasting anti-Christian activities, they exercised strict control over the Church hierarchy through the patriarch in Constantinople, who was appointed by the Porte, the Turkish government. However, the Greeks benefited from the fact that the patriarch was always their conational and that smaller church communities enjoyed a degree of local autonomy. The Church, more than any other institution, is credited with contributing to the preservation of Greek national and ethnical identities. During the Turkish domination, the towns of the ancient Greek homeland were reduced to occupied military posts. Almost the entire nation was made up of peasants working on the lands of Turkish feudal masters. In addition to delivering fixed amounts of crop yield to their overlords, the Greek peasants were compelled to pay to the government a special poll tax, the haratch, and a blood tribute of male youngsters for the Turkish standing army, the Janissaries.