Group items tagged

in its literature, art, philosophy and politics.

mainland with over 1,400 islands,

The global financial crisis of the late 2000s hit Greece particularly hard, as the legacy of high public spending and widespread tax evasion combined with the credit crunch and the resulting recession to leave the country with a crippling debt burden.

To say that we owe a lot to the ancient Greeks is nothing new. Everywhere we look, we see echoes of that world in our own: democracy, philosophy, art, architecture, science, sport, to name but a few.

Our very sense of the ‘Classical’ from the Renaissance onwards, has been based on the ‘fact’ that ancient Greek temples and buildings were made out of marble and stood shining off-white in the sunlight. But ever since the first modern travellers visited Greece in the 17th century, we have discovered evidence that this is, in fact, completely wrong. Greek temples were painted bright blue, red, green: our very definition of the opposite of Classical!

By the seventh century AD, for example, the term 'democracy' had a ‘mob-rule’ feel about it, which made ancient Athens a very unpopular model for any society, right through until the until the late 18th century. In the English Civil War, for instance, Cromwell was encouraged to follow the example of the ancient Spartans, not the Athenians.

Before the Greek dark ages, Athens was a small village, home to a tribe of Ionian people. After the Greek dark ages, Athens grew rapidly until Athens was one of the two most powerful city-states in the ancient Greek world. (The other was Sparta.) 

Take politics for example: apart from the word itself (from polis, meaning city-state or community) many of the other basic political terms in our everyday vocabulary are borrowed from the ancient Greeks: monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy and - of course - democracy.

demokratia

It meant literally 'people-power'

When Homer was born, the Greeks had just recently learned how to use the alphabet from the Phoenicians. Homer used the alphabet to write down two long epic poems called the Iliad and the Odyssey. Probably Homer didn't make up these stories, or even the words, himself. Poets or bards had been going around Greece telling these stories for hundreds of years already. But Homer wrote them down, and gave them their final form.