LO3 Notes

Citizens and Communities: The Greek City-Sate

• ·         The tribal communities of the Dark Ages began to develop into city-states
• ·         Greek city-states were small places, generally consisting of no more than a town a few square miles of surrounding countryside. 
• ·         Athens and Sparta were the same size as a couple of the U.S. counties and were giants among city-states.
• ·         Athens and Sparta were the early Greeks
• ·         Athens population reached as 250,000
• ·         The town was built around a hill called an acropolis
• ·         An acropolis is a high fortified citadel religious center of an ancient Greek town.
• ·         Both fortresses and temples were important to the Greek city-states.
• ·         In their small size, their competitiveness, and their reliance on community gods and goddesses, Greek city-states were much the same as those of the Sumerians or Phoenicians, but they differed in on important in one important respect: for the Greeks, the city-state was a community in which all of its members had a share and in which all were entitled to participate to a greater or lesser extent.
• ·         The Greek language is the first to be known to have had a specific word for a member of community: citizen
• ·         The Greek city-states developed at exactly the time that the Assyrians were reaching got power westward from Mesopotamia, but Greece was protected by many miles of land and sea.
• ·         Citizens who could afford to serve as hoplites equipped themselves with bronze helmets and armor, round shields, long spears with iron blades, and short iron swords.
• ·         A hoplite was a heavily armed and armored citizen- soldier of ancient Greece.
• ·         They fought in formidable shock units of several hundred men known as phalanxes.
• ·         Phalanxes were a unit of several hundred hoplites, who closed ranks by joining shields when approaching the enemy.
• ·         In the earliest times of classical Greek civilization, the communities that would become city-states were ruled by kings.
• ·         The development of citizen armies, monarchy gave to new forms of government that distributed power more widely among male citizens.
• ·         A monarchy is a state in which supreme power is help by a single, usually heredity ruler.
• ·         One of these forms was oligarchy- a state in which supreme power is held by a small group.
• ·         Big commercial cities needed navies as well as armies and depended in wartime on even the poorest citizens as oarsmen in the triremes.
• ·         Triremes are massive fighting vessels with three banks of oars, used to ram or board enemy ships.
• ·         In these large city-states, social conflicts sometimes led to the emergency of tyranny- the rule of a tyrant or self-proclaimed dictator who held power partly by force.
• ·         But tyranny was often only a passing phase on the way to democracy.
• ·         Democracy- a form of government in which all adult male citizens were entitled to take part in decision making
• ·         By the eighth century B.C., Spartans were a minority of landholders, ruling over a majority of helots.
• ·         Helots- non citizens forced to work for landholders in ancient city-state of Sparta.
• ·         Girls were required to participate in drills and exercises that were designed to develop them into healthy child bearing women. 
• ·         The freedom of Sparta women aroused both admiration and disapproval among other Greeks, depending on how they thought it affected the power of the city-state
• ·         To the Athens, the Spartan life was not worth living.
• ·         Sparta was a tightly controlled society, and the Athenians were proud to their free way of life.
• ·         Athens was also a warlike community
• ·         The Athenian homeland was the Peninsula of Attica in the central region of mainland Greece.
• ·         Over the next three centuries, Athens grew to be the wealthiest and one of the most powerful of Greek cities.
• ·         It had fertile land that allowed them to produce wine and oil, this helped them to become a trading and manufacturing center.
• ·         The disputes were usually between increasingly powerful and wealthy aristocrats
• ·         Aristocrats- members of prominent and long established Athenian families.
• ·         The boys were trained for physical fitness with sports as young and when they were eighteen, they would join the military for two years.
• ·         The girls got an education, particularly if they were sent off to live for a few years before marriage.- weren’t as important
• ·         Athenians passed through several stages of political growth.
• ·         The first was the Persian wars, in which Athenians led the Greek city0states to victory.
• ·         This was followed by the Golden Age (460-430 B.C.)
• ·         This was a period of high confidence, power, and achievement.
• ·         This was cut short by the second war, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. 
• ·         Sparta defeated them
• ·         Athens still continued a democracy to 338 B.C.
• ·         In the sixth century B.C. the Persians conquered a realm that stretched from the border of India to the Nile and the Aegean.
• ·         The leader of democratic Athens after the victory over Persia was another aristocrat, Pericles.
• ·         In Athenian democracy, ultimate government power rested in the Assembly of adult male citizens.
• ·         All major decisions were made there: for peace or war, for sending out expeditions, for spending public money, and for every other aspect of public affairs.
• ·         Ostracism- banishment for ten years by a majority vote of the Athenian Assembly.
• ·         The hundred thousand or so slaves in Athens were also a very diverse group, not all of them were living lives of total subjection and powerlessness.
• ·         Fine and Noble citizens were gave talented slaves education and kept them as tutors to their sons, state owned salves worked as clerks in government offices and even as policemen.
• ·         Aliens were people from outside of Greece, from elsewhere,
• ·         The Athenian laws and customs concerning women, aliens, and slaves were not a special feature of democracy.
• ·         They were local versions of traditional values and practices that the Athenians shared with most of the world at the time.
• ·         Near the end of Athens Golden Age, Pericles spoke at the funeral of citizen soldiers fallen in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta.
•       He turned the speech into a famous proclamation of the values of Athenian democracy