Ancient Greece | Can’t Sleep? Learn About the Birthplace of Democracy

Benjamin Boster (0:02)

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Thanks to Fitnexa for sponsoring the episode.

SPEAKER_2 (1:01)

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Benjamin Boster (1:32)

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I help you drift off one fact at a time. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster, and tonight's episode is about Ancient Greece.

SPEAKER_2 (1:50)

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Benjamin Boster (2:51)

Ancient Greece was an ancient civilization existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th to 9th centuries BC to the end of Classical Antiquity circa 600 AD, comprising a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and regions, primarily centered in the northeastern area of the Mediterranean Sea.

Prior to the Roman period, most of this area was officially unified only once, from 338 to 323 BC, under the Kingdom of Macedon. In western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period.

Scholars mark Ancient Greece as beginning with Mycenaean Greece, which declined during the Bronze Age collapse circa 1100 BC. Three centuries later, Greek urban city-states, or polis, began to form in the 8th century BC, ushering in the Archaic period and the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean Basin. This was followed by the intellectual flourishing of the classical period of Ancient Greece, from the Greco-Persian Wars to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, which included the Golden Age of Athens, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the short-lived Spartan and Theban hegemonies, the creation of the Hellenic League led by Philip II of Macedon, and the subsequent conquest of Persia's Achaemenid Empire by his son Alexander the Great. Alexander's territorial conquests led to the spread of Greek culture into Northern Africa and West Asia. The Hellenistic period ending circa 30 BC, when the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, centred in Alexandria, was annexed by Rome.

Classical Greek culture, especially Greek philosophy, had a powerful influence on Ancient Rome, which propagated variants of it throughout the Mediterranean and much of Europe. For this reason, Classical Greece is generally considered the cradle of Western civilization. The seminal culture from which the modern West derives many of its founding archetypes and ideas in politics, philosophy, science, and art.

The territory of Greece is mountainous, and as a result, Ancient Greece consisted of many smaller regions, each with its own dialect, cultural peculiarities, and identity. Regionalism and regional conflicts were prominent features of Ancient Greece. Cities tended to be located in valleys between mountains or on coastal plains, and dominated a certain area around them.

In the south lay the Peloponnese, consisting of the regions of Laconia, southeast, Messenia, southwest, Elis, west, Achaea, north, Corinthia, northeast, Argalis, east, and Arcadia, center. These names survive to the present day as regional units of modern Greece, though with somewhat different boundaries. Mainland Greece to the north, nowadays known as Central Greece, consists of Aetolia, Acarnania in the west, Locrus, Dorus, and Phocis in the center, while in the east lay Boeotia, Attica, and Megaris. Northeast lay Thessaly, while Epirus lay to the northwest. Epirus stretched from the Ambracian Gulf in the south to the Seranian Mountains and the Aos River in the north, and consisted of Kaonia, north, Melosha, center, and Thesprosha, south.