Origins
Ancient Greek civilisation emerged from the dark age that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces around 1200 BC. The Archaic period (c. 800–480 BC) saw the rise of the polis — the independent city-state — as the basic political unit. By 500 BC there were several hundred Greek poleis around the Aegean, in southern Italy, in Sicily, and along the Black Sea coast. The most powerful were Athens and Sparta.
The Classical period, 480–323 BC
The Classical period began with the Greek victory over Persia at the battles of Marathon (490 BC), Salamis (480 BC), and Plataea (479 BC). The fifth century BC produced what is now called the Athenian Golden Age: democracy under Pericles, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comic playwright Aristophanes, the sculptor Phidias, and the philosopher Socrates.
The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta ended with Spartan victory but exhausted both. The fourth century BC was dominated by the philosophical schools of Plato (Academy, founded c. 387 BC) and Aristotle (Lyceum, founded c. 335 BC), and politically by the rise of Macedon under Philip II and his son Alexander.
Alexander and the Hellenistic period
Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) inherited the Macedonian throne in 336 BC and within thirteen years conquered the Persian Empire, reaching the Indus River. He died in Babylon in 323 BC of unclear causes. His empire fragmented among his generals (the Diadochi), producing the Hellenistic kingdoms — Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Asia, Antigonid Macedon — that dominated the eastern Mediterranean for the following three centuries. The Hellenistic period was the high point of Greek scientific work: Eratosthenes measured the Earth’s circumference, Archimedes pioneered mechanical mathematics, and the Antikythera mechanism was built.
Roman conquest
Rome defeated the Macedonian kingdom in the Macedonian Wars (215–168 BC) and absorbed the rest of mainland Greece after the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC. The Hellenistic east continued under Greek-speaking administration for another century until the Roman annexation of Egypt in 30 BC. Greek culture and language remained dominant in the eastern Mediterranean throughout the Roman period and continued under the Byzantine Empire until 1453.
Legacy
Greek philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans), Greek mathematics (Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius), Greek tragedy and comedy, Greek political vocabulary (democracy, tyranny, oligarchy, monarchy), and Greek scientific method underpin Western intellectual history. The Greek language is still spoken by approximately 13 million people. The standard alphabet of much of Eurasia (Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian) is descended from the Greek alphabet. The modern Olympic Games (revived 1896) explicitly invoke the ancient games at Olympia.
What survives
The Acropolis of Athens, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the stadium at Olympia, the theatres at Epidaurus and Syracuse, and several thousand inscriptions on stone are all extant. Much of the philosophical and literary corpus has survived continuously since antiquity; some additional texts have been recovered from Egyptian papyri (Oxyrhynchus) and Byzantine palimpsests (the Archimedes Codex).