Ancient Greece Timeline

On Crete, the Minoans built their first palaces c. 2000 BCE, among them the palace at Knossos. The palaces were centres of government, economic life and religion. Minoan art depicts bull-leaping, a sport that seems to have carried religious meaning. Mycenaean culture took shape on the Greek mainland under Minoan influence. The volcano on Thera, modern Santorini, erupted and buried the island's settlements, among them the town of Akrotiri, in pumice and ash. Fire destroyed many Cretan palaces and settlements c. 1450 BCE.

The Mycenaeans, Greeks from the mainland, then established themselves on Crete, chiefly at Knossos. They adapted the Minoans' Linear A into Linear B to write Greek, their own language. Later, a wave of destruction swept across mainland Greece: Mycenaean palaces were burned, and their sites declined. Scholars suggest several possible causes of the collapse: internal unrest, climate change and the Sea Peoples, perhaps in combination. After Mycenaean civilization ended came what is often called the Greek Dark Age.

The Greek Dark Ages stretched from c. 1200 BCE to c. 800 BCE. When the Mycenaean palaces fell, their script, Linear B, dropped out of use, and for centuries the Greeks, it seems, had no writing. Greece's population fell. People lived scattered among small farming villages, a peasant society with no cities, and local strongmen, or chiefs, took charge instead of the old Mycenaean aristocracy. Greek tradition remembered a “Dorian invasion”, though historians now see it as one of several migrations that resettled Greece.

Iron replaced bronze in tools and weapons. At Lefkandi, on Euboea, graves show ties with Cyprus and Egypt; the community there was neither poor nor isolated. Late in the period, the population started to grow again and trade revived. Tales of a heroic age spread by word of mouth, an oral tradition that lay behind Homer's epics. Trade put Greeks in touch with Phoenician merchants, whose alphabet they would later borrow. Greece then entered the Archaic period, the time when city-states arose.

Greece was a land of many small city-states, the poleis, kept apart by mountains and the sea. The Greeks adapted the alphabet of the Phoenicians to write their own language. The first recorded Olympic Games, held c. 776 BCE, were a festival for Zeus at Olympia. Commercial interests helped drive the poleis to found colonies overseas. Colonisation spread the Greek way of life, along with Greek settlements, as far afield as North Africa and Spain.

Lyric poetry reached new heights, with Sappho of Lesbos among its most admired poets. Thales of Miletus sought causes for natural events within nature itself, not in the gods' actions. In Athens, Draco wrote down the first code of laws c. 621 BCE. To relieve a debt crisis, Solon freed the Athenians enslaved for debt. His new law code replaced Draco's harsh laws, keeping only the laws on homicide. Peisistratus then ruled Athens as tyrant until his death, when his sons Hippias and Hipparchus succeeded him.

A Spartan army expelled Hippias from Athens, ending the rule of Peisistratus's family. Cleisthenes' reforms handed ordinary Athenians more political power, and he is regarded as Athenian democracy's founder. Ionian Greeks, with Athenian help, rose against Persian rule; Darius I made Athens's role his reason to invade Greece. In 490 BCE, Greek forces under Athenian leadership defeated the Persian invaders at Marathon. Themistocles persuaded Athens to put surplus silver-mine income into warships, readying a large fleet against a Persian invasion. Marathon did not end Persia's ambitions; Darius's successor, Xerxes, prepared a huge and full-scale invasion of Greece.

At Thermopylae, Greek forces under Leonidas held the pass for three days against the Persians before losing it. At Salamis, with Themistocles shaping strategy, the Greek fleet defeated the Persian navy after luring it into a narrow strait. At Plataea, the Greek army overcame the Persian land army, whose commander Mardonius was killed. Athens went on to lead the Delian League, an alliance of Greek city-states that formed against Persia. Athens grew to dominate its allies and spent league money rebuilding the Athenian temples the Persians had destroyed.

Under Pericles, Athens rebuilt on a grand scale, with the Parthenon among its works. The Peloponnesian War (431 BCE–404 BCE) placed Athens and its allies on one side, Sparta and its allies on the other. A plague swept Athens early in the fighting, and Pericles was among the dead. An Athenian expedition to Sicily met with disaster after Spartan troops helped Syracuse end the siege. A final defeat at Aegospotami forced Athens into peace with Sparta, and the Delian League was dissolved. Athens also tried the philosopher Socrates for impiety and condemned him to death.

At Leuctra in 371 BCE, Epaminondas of Thebes defeated Sparta and broke its military dominance of Greece. He won his final battle but died in it; soon after, Theban power faded. Philip II of Macedon then defeated Athens and its allies at Chaeronea, and the Greek city-states passed under Macedonian rule. Philip planned a Greek war on Persia; after his death, Alexander, his son, took his place and carried it forward. In his campaign in Asia, Alexander overthrew the Persian Empire and then carried the war into India. His conquests spread Greek thought and customs through Asia, all the way to India.

Alexander the Great died without a clear heir. That left his generals, the Diadochi, fighting one another for the empire. At Ipsus in 301 BCE, some generals allied against Antigonus, and he died in the battle. New kingdoms rose from the breakup of Alexander's empire, among them those ruled by the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties. These kingdoms spread Greek culture and mixed it with the traditions of the peoples they ruled. In Athens, Zeno of Citium taught at a stoa, the place that gave his philosophy school the name Stoic.

Euclid, a mathematician in Alexandria c. 300 BCE, wrote the Elements, a treatise on geometry. When Rome defeated King Perseus at Pydna, the Macedonian kingdom came to an end. In 146 BCE the Achaean League lost a war to Rome, and Corinth was sacked. Attalus III of Pergamon died without an heir, leaving his kingdom to Rome. Octavian's defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII at Actium ended Ptolemaic rule in Egypt, and with it the last Hellenistic kingdom fell to Rome.