In general, there are three stages that most legal systems progress through: Early Laws After the Dark Ages – About 1200-900 BC – and beginning at about 900 BC, the Ancient Greeks had no official laws or punishments. Murders were settled by members of the victim’s family, who would then go and kill the murderer. This often began endless blood feuds. It was not until the middle...
Origins – There are several theories about the origins of the Greek language. One theory suggests that it originated with a migration of proto-Greek speakers into the Greek peninsula, which is dated to any period between 2500 BC and 1700 BC. Another theory maintains that the migration into Greece occurred at a pre-proto-Greek (late PIE) stage, and the characteristic Greek sound...
Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (ca. 600 AD). Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the period of Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC...
Hipparchus (ca. 190 BC – ca. 120 BC) was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He was born in Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey) and probably died on the island of Rhodes. He is known to have been active at least from 147 BC to 127 BC. Hipparchus is considered the greatest astronomical observer, and by some the greatest astronomer of antiquity. He was the first Greek to develop...
The Gordian Knot is a legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (disentangling an “impossible” knot) solved easily by cheating or “thinking outside the box” (“cutting the Gordian knot”). The myth it refers to is associated in legend with Alexander the Great. According to a Phrygian...
In Greek mythology, Elysium was a section of the Underworld (the spelling Elysium is a Latinization of the Greek word Elysion). “Elysium is an obscure and mysterious name that evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios. The Elysian fields were the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. Two passages in Homer established...
The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece. They consisted of the Lesser Mysteries and the Greater Mysteries. These were ceremonies for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece. Of all the mysteries celebrated in ancient times these were held to be the ones of greatest importance. The Lesser Mysteries were held...
Greece consists of a large mainland at the southern end of the Balkans; the Peloponnesus peninsula (separated from the mainland by the canal of the Isthmus of Corinth); and numerous islands (around 3,000), including Crete, Rhodes, Kos, Euboea and the Dodecanese and Cycladic groups of the Aegean Sea as well as the Ionian sea islands. Greece has more than 15,000 kilometres of coastline and a land...
The Derveni papyrus is an ancient Greek papyrus scroll which was found in 1962. It is a philosophical treatise that is an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem, a theogony concerning the birth of the gods, produced in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras, in the second half of the fifth century B.C., making it “the most important new piece of evidence about Greek philosophy and...
Demosthenes (384 BC 322 BC) is generally considered the greatest of the Attic orators, and thus the greatest of all Ancient Greek orators. His writings provide an insight into the life and culture of Athens at this period of time. Born the son of a wealthy sword-maker, Demosthenes was orphaned at the age of seven. His father left him well-provided-for, but his legal guardians defrauded him and...