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The inhabitants of ancient Greece called themselves Hellenes,
and their land, Greece, called Hellas.
The territory of ancient Greece is approximately the actual one,
but to complete the Hellenic world,
it is necessary to add the Aegean coast of Asia Minor,
as well as southern Italy and Sicily.
The Greek history and culture are closely related to the landscape.
Mainland Greece is virtually a mountain chain sinking into the Aegean Sea,
whose many islands are the tops of this submerged mountain.
This phenomenon has led to a very trimmed and rugged coastlines,
with many peninsulas and nearby small islands,
plus some interior valleys with inaccessible access.
The plains, however, are few and of small size.
The link between these different areas is the sea,
the link of the different territories and the factor of expansion of the Greek world.
The scarcity of fertile land will force the ancient Greeks to seek new land
to feed the surplus population.
Hence the commercial vocation of the Hellenic people
or colonization of new territories that characterize the ancient Greece.
But the Greek landscape, being important,
doesn’t help to explain the great Hellenic cultural heritage.
Rationalism as an attitude towards life,
consideration of man as the measure of all things,
love of beauty and high aesthetic sense and democracy as political system,
are spiritual values in our world.
In the fourth century, Xenophon said:
"I think it's fair to encourage the people in general,
at the expense of the nobles and the wealthy,
because it is the people who, by giving men to the navy and commerce,
constitute the strength of Athens.
Accordingly, it is just those participants of those positions on which the choice depends”.
These values, undoubtedly, owe a recognizable debt to the Greek world,
do not arise suddenly, but are the result of an evolution of nearly 3,000 years.
During the three millennia,
different peoples inhabited the land of Hellas.
Since 3000 BC, when Neolithic ended, until 1100 before our era,
the Bronze Age was developed.
At this stage, three major cultures emerge.
First, the Cycladic, has as a main feature the development of a flourishing trade.
Much more important is the Minoan culture, whose core is the island of Crete.
Around 1900 BC grandiose palaces appeared in Knossos and Phaistos,
stunning royal palaces with hundreds of rooms,
some of them beautifully decorated with bright and colorful frescoes.
Cretan palaces signal the emergence of absolute power,
supported financially by an intense commercial activity,
based on the exchange of sumptuous handicrafts.
Minoan civilization has a religion that has as a central place
a powerful goddess of fertility,
which was associated with the animal-symbol of Crete, the bull.
Cretan artistic creations express fully the imagination
and inventiveness of a peaceful people,
certainly hedonistic,
as evidenced by the frescoes and decorative objects
that can be seen at the Museum of Heraklion.
Around 1450 BC, the explosion of a volcano on the island of Thera caused a major upheaval
that affected the entire region and weakened particularly Crete,
which thereafter could not resist the Mycenaean expansion.
The Mycenaean, the third great culture of the Bronze Age in Greece,
is named after Mycenae, the main city of the Achaeans.
Here, a village of shepherds and warriors always in search of pasture for their herds,
occupy the mainland Greece and the Peloponnese,
between 2000 and 1600 BC.
The Achaeans bring the taming of the horse,
the chariot and bronze long swords.
The city-state appropriate at this time of peak,
between 1600 and 1100 BC,
as Mycenae or Tiryns,
are surrounded by ancient walls, as befits a warrior culture,
and they impose a rigid social pyramid supported by a remarkable production of luxury goods,
which are traded throughout the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean.
With the invasion of the Dorians,
the Mycenaean civilization and the Age of Bronze were over,
giving way to the Iron Age, around the eleventh century BC .
Between 900 and 725 BC,
a slow population and economic growth strengthens the emerging poleis
or city-state Greece.
Athens, Argos, Corinth and the cities of Euboea, among others,
burst onto the scene of Mediterranean trade,
with its refined ceramic and metal production and its exports of oil and wine.
The commercial expansion of these cities led to that which, by the ninth century BC,
would start the foundation of colonies around the Mediterranean
from the Black Sea to Iberia and from North Africa to the French coast,
seeking the benefit of commercial racking.
The sixth century BC is the consolidation phase of the Greek character,
especially from the big test that represents its confrontation with the Persians in the Wars.
Then, Greece fully entered to the maturity stage,
what is known as the Classic period of antiquity.
The V Century, after victories over the Persians at the battles of Marathon and Salamis,
marked the apogee stage of the Greek world.
The cities were mostly governed by democratic systems,
while crafts and trade reached its highest levels.
Also in this century continues the consolidation of the Panhellenic sanctuaries
of Delphi and Olympia as religious centers,
as well as venues for sporting events, theatrical and literary,
which attract competitors from all over the known world.
In Delphi and Olympia,
the poleis find a common diplomatic mission,
a space in which to settle their differences and conflicts.
This is especially significant in the case of Olympia,
where athletic games and cultural rights,
were held for seven days every four years,
causing a military truce mandatory for all cities.
The winners, considered heroes, demigods, competed in various sports,
knowing that their success will bring prestige not only to them but also their home poleis.
In Athens, the great city of the Classic period,
the leader Pericles ruled between 461 and 429 BC,
giving his name to the century because of the prestige he won for their city.
A result of his personal intervention is the wonderful architecture of the Acropolis,
the masterpiece of classical art,
with its majestic Propylaea,
the dazzling Erechteion and the fabulous Parthenon,
a temple dedicated to Athena Parthenos,
the protective goddess of the city.
Greece is, during the Classic period,
at its best economically, culturally, and artistically.
Architects and sculptors pursued the ideal of beauty
and find it in the proportion, balance, measure and harmony.
The sculptors work and study in detail the way to represent the perfect measures,
the ideal bodies under the Greek canon.
As a result, athletes, gods and heroes out of the pen of the artists
are showing a naturally more apparent than real,
because everything has been wisely calculated.
Architects, meanwhile, raised temples of fine proportions
and mature its constructions to forms and structures of exquisite harmony,
which enhances the decorative grandeur and refinement,
as reflected in the increasingly rich and intense gables.
Not only art, also philosophy, astronomy, physical or geography
get benefit from this cultural effervescence.
The reason, the logic, becomes the engine of knowledge
and places the human in front of his own existence,
as Greek intellectuals believe that the magical or religious explanation,
by itself, is insufficient to understand the world,
nature and the human essence.
"Many things are wonderful, but none is more wonderful than man”,
tells the playwright Sophocles.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle ...
argue and create schools,
seek the wisdom they love: they are philosophers.
Theatre is another of the great achievements of Greece.
Metaphor of the world, daily life, myths and acts of the gods,
representations gathered thousands of people, as they had a meaning --
not only fun, but ritual and philosophical.
Aeschylus,
Euripides,
Aristophanes
and the aforementioned Sophocles wrote works that still today produce admiration.
The perfect acoustics of the theaters, such as Epidaurus,
allows actors to be heard farthest from the 15,000 spectators,
making the public part of the work.
The hegemony of Athens in the 5th century BC,
its imperial expansion,
caused rebellions and conflicts against the Attic policy in Greek world.
The rivalry with Sparta, Corinth and other cities triggered the Peloponnesian War,
which will last for thirty years and which will defeat Athens.
This struggle led to a transformation of the classical world,
although it still runs until the year 338 BC, when Alexander the Great, son of Philip,
a king from Macedonia, northern Greece,
conquered all city-states and organized the Greek Empire.
Alexander resumed hard the fighting against the Persians,
embarking on a triumphant march which will conquer Egypt,
reaching even into India and form the first universal empire in history.
After the death of Alexander in 323 BC,
the empire was divided into kingdoms, leagues and small states,
but the ancient Greek civilization, even in its final stage,
knew a period of splendor, the Hellenistic.
While Athens continues to maintain its prestige cultural and artistic,
cities such as Antioch, Rhodes, Pergamum, Miletus and Alexandria
will become very important cultural centers.
Architecture and art are tending to the grandiloquence,
the quest for the emotional, exalting the luxury of the power.
The strength of Greece and its art is such that,
despite its final fall under the dominion of Rome in 146 BC,
Hellenistic language successfully survives until the arrival of Augustus to power,
to the point of becoming part of Roman expression.
Foundation, essence and soul of Western thought and culture,
ancient Greece is a fundamental part of the Mediterranean and Europe,
the root of civilization.
The passage of time, Cronos relentless,
leaving the stone as the main witness to what once was,
But the fascination for centuries, still remains alive, because,
as a traveler wrote about Greece in the seventeenth century,
“the mind loves, the body fails and eyes delight and get wet”.