Key figures of ancient Greece

When was ancient Greece, and what defined it

Ancient Greece was never one country. It was a network of more than a thousand city-states (in Greek, a polis, plural poleis) spread around the Aegean, the Black Sea, southern Italy and Sicily. Athens and Sparta are the famous ones, but Syracuse, Corinth, Thebes, Miletus and Croton matter just as much to the people in this guide. What tied them together was a shared language, shared gods, Homer's poems and festivals such as the Olympic Games, traditionally first held in 776 BCE.

Historians usually split the era into three periods:

• Archaic period, about 800 to 480 BCE: the Greek alphabet (adapted from the Phoenician script), the written Homeric epics, new colonies, the first lawgivers and the first thinkers who explained nature without myth.
• Classical period, 480 to 323 BCE: the defeat of the Persian invasion, Athenian democracy and empire, the Parthenon, tragedy and comedy, the Peloponnesian War, and the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
• Hellenistic period, 323 to 31 BCE: the kingdoms that Alexander's generals carved out of his empire, with Greek as the language of government and learning from Egypt to Afghanistan, and Alexandria as the centre of science. It ends when Rome defeats the last Ptolemaic ruler at Actium in 31 BCE.

One fact sits under all of it. Political life belonged to adult free men who were citizens. Women, enslaved people and resident foreigners (metics) lived in these cities and did much of the work, but they did not vote or hold office. Athens ran its silver mines at Laurion with enslaved labour, and Sparta's whole system rested on the helots, a conquered population forced to farm for Spartan citizens.

Early figures: Pythagoras and Leonidas

Pythagoras (about 570 to 495 BCE) was born on the island of Samos and moved to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a community of followers who shared a strict way of life. He taught that the soul passes into new bodies after death; the earliest evidence is a joke by the poet Xenophanes about Pythagoras stopping someone beating a puppy because he heard a dead friend's voice in its yelps. He wrote nothing. The theorem that carries his name was known to Babylonian scribes more than a thousand years earlier, and the stories linking it to him come from writers centuries after his death.

Leonidas I (about 540 to 480 BCE) was one of Sparta's two kings. In 480 BCE he held the narrow pass of Thermopylae against the army of the Persian king Xerxes. When a local Greek showed the Persians a mountain path round the pass, Leonidas sent most of the allied troops away and stayed with his three hundred Spartans, about seven hundred Thespians and some Thebans. Our main source is Herodotus, writing about fifty years later. The famous reply “Come and take them” first appears in Plutarch, more than five hundred years after the battle, so treat it as tradition.

Athens at its height: Pericles, Socrates and Hippocrates

Pericles (about 495 to 429 BCE) led Athens for roughly thirty years, not as a king but as an elected general who kept winning votes in the Assembly. He backed the building programme that produced the Parthenon (begun in 447 BCE) and paid for much of it with money from the Delian League, the alliance Athens had turned into an empire. In 451 BCE he proposed the law that limited citizenship to people with two Athenian parents. He led Athens into the Peloponnesian War against Sparta in 431 BCE and died in the plague two years later.

Socrates (about 470 to 399 BCE) was a stonemason's son who fought as a foot soldier at Potidaea and Delium and then spent his days questioning Athenians about justice, courage and how to live. He wrote nothing: we know him through his followers Plato and Xenophon, who do not always agree, and through Aristophanes, who mocked him in the comedy The Clouds in 423 BCE. In 399 BCE a jury of 501 citizens convicted him of impiety and corrupting the young. He refused his friend Crito's plan to help him escape and was executed by drinking hemlock.

Hippocrates (about 460 to 370 BCE) was a physician from the island of Kos, famous enough in his own lifetime that Plato mentions him by name. About sixty medical texts, the Hippocratic Corpus, were later collected under his name, though scholars think he wrote few or none of them. The best known, On the Sacred Disease, argues that epilepsy has a natural cause like any other illness and is called sacred only out of ignorance. The Hippocratic Oath belongs to the same collection, and its date and author are uncertain.

The philosophers who founded schools: Plato and Aristotle

Plato (about 428 to 348 BCE) came from a rich Athenian family and was in his late twenties when his teacher Socrates was executed. Around 387 BCE he founded the Academy in a grove outside Athens, often called the first institution of higher learning in the West. All of his known dialogues survive. In the Republic he argued that the ideal city should be ruled by philosophers and that women with the right nature should be educated as rulers too; in the Timaeus and Critias he told the story of Atlantis, which most historians read as his own invention.

Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE) came from Stagira in northern Greece, studied at Plato's Academy for twenty years and then tutored the teenage Alexander of Macedon. In 335 BCE he opened his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens. His surviving works are lecture notes on logic, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetry, physics and above all biology, where he described hundreds of animal species from his own observation. He also argued in the Politics that some people are slaves by nature and that men are naturally fitter to rule than women: those views are part of the record, and students should study them, not skip them.

Teacher and student disagreed on basic questions, which makes them a good pair to study together. See Plato vs Aristotle, or listen to the two argue in Yuga's Academy debate.

Alexander and the Hellenistic world: Alexander, Euclid and Archimedes

Alexander the Great (356 to 323 BCE) became king of Macedon at twenty in 336 BCE. In eleven years he defeated the Persian Empire at the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, founded Alexandria in Egypt in 331 BCE, and marched as far as the Punjab, where his exhausted army refused to go further in 326 BCE. He died in Babylon at thirty-two. The conquest was brutal (he razed Thebes in 335 BCE and burned the palace at Persepolis), and no account written in his lifetime survives: the fullest, by Arrian, dates from the second century CE.

Euclid (active about 300 BCE) worked in Alexandria under the first Ptolemy. His Elements, in thirteen books, builds geometry and number theory as a chain of proofs from a few definitions and five postulates; Book IX proves that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Almost nothing is known about his life, and the famous line that there is “no royal road” to geometry comes from Proclus, writing some seven hundred years later.

Archimedes (about 287 to 212 BCE) lived in Syracuse in Sicily and corresponded with mathematicians in Alexandria. He proved that pi lies between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7 by drawing polygons of up to 96 sides inside and outside a circle, worked out the law of the lever and the principle of buoyancy, and asked for a sphere inside a cylinder to be carved on his tomb. His machines helped Syracuse hold off a Roman siege for about two years, and he was killed when the city fell in 212 BCE. The bath and “Eureka” story comes from the Roman writer Vitruvius, two centuries later: see did Archimedes shout Eureka.

A late coda: Greek learning did not stop when Rome took over. Hypatia (about 355 to 415 CE) taught philosophy, mathematics and astronomy in Roman Alexandria and helped her father Theon edit a commentary on Ptolemy's astronomy, before she was murdered by a Christian mob in 415 CE during a feud between the city's prefect and its bishop. She belongs to the Roman period, but she worked in Greek and in the tradition of Plato and Euclid.

Timeline of ancient Greece

Big themes and debates historians still argue about

• How democratic was Athens? Ordinary male citizens voted directly in the Assembly and many offices were filled by lot, which was radical. But citizens were a minority of the people living in Attica, and the city ran an empire over its allies. Ask students to state both facts in the same sentence.
• Athens or Sparta? Sparta's discipline won the Peloponnesian War, but it left few writings of its own, so almost everything we know about Sparta was written by outsiders, many of them Athenians who admired or disliked it.
• Reason and religion. Hippocratic doctors gave natural explanations for disease, yet Leonidas and Socrates both took oracles seriously. The Greeks did not swap religion for science; they did both.
• Can we trust the sources? Socrates is known through Plato and Xenophon; Pericles' speeches are Thucydides' reconstructions; Pythagoras is mostly later legend; Alexander's histories were written four centuries after him. Good answers name the source and its date.
• Greeks and their neighbours. Greek mathematics and astronomy drew on Egypt and Babylon, the alphabet came from the Phoenicians, and after Alexander, Greek and Persian, Egyptian and Indian traditions mixed in the Hellenistic kingdoms.

Primary sources to read, with where to start

• Herodotus, Histories, Book 7, chapters 201 to 233: Thermopylae and Leonidas.
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.35 to 2.46 (the funeral oration) and 2.47 to 2.54 (the plague of Athens).
• Plato, Apology: Socrates' defence speech at his trial, as Plato presents it. Read it next to Xenophon's shorter Apology to see two versions of one event.
• Plato, Republic, Book VII: the allegory of the cave.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II (virtue as a mean) and Politics, Book I (household, slavery, the city).
• Hippocratic Corpus, On the Sacred Disease: a short, readable argument for natural causes.
• Euclid, Elements, Book I: the definitions, the five postulates and the first proposition (drawing an equilateral triangle).
• Archimedes, The Sand Reckoner: a letter to the king's son counting the grains of sand that would fill the universe.
• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, Book 7, and Plutarch's Lives of Pericles and Alexander: later, but our fullest narratives.

Most of these are free in English translation through the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and Project Gutenberg. For how to read them critically, see how to analyze a primary source.

How to study ancient Greece: projects that work

Build a source-gap chart. For each figure, write the earliest surviving source and how many years after the person it was written. The pattern explains why historians are careful with famous quotes.

• Stage the trial of Socrates. Split the class into prosecution and defence, use Plato's Apology and Xenophon's Apology as evidence, and have a jury vote.
• Repeat Archimedes' pi method. A hexagon inside a circle of diameter 1 has a perimeter of exactly 3. Double the sides to 12, 24, 48 and 96 with a calculator and watch the value close in on 3.14.
• Run a Socratic seminar on one question from the Apology or the Crito, where the rule is that every claim must be defined before it is argued.
• Interview a figure. Use our historical figure interview project and the questions to ask Socrates. You can rehearse by voice with Socrates on Yuga, who will answer a question with a question as Plato shows him doing.

A note on that last idea: an AI recreation is not the real Socrates. It is built from the dialogues and the historical record and can get things wrong. Cite Plato, Xenophon or Herodotus in your work, not the app.