The Greeks enjoy a special place in the construction of western culture and
identity, and yet many of us have only the vaguest notion of what their
culture was like. A few Greek myths at bedtime when we are kids, maybe a
Greek tragedy like Sophokles' Oidipous when we are at school: these are often
the only contact we have with the world of the ancient Mediterranean. The
story of the Greeks, however, deserves a wider audience, because so much of
what we esteem in our own culture derives from them: democracy, epic poetry,
lyric poetry, tragedy, history writing, philosophy, aesthetic taste, all of
these and many other features of cultural life enter the West from Greece.
The oracle of Apollo at Delphi had inscribed over the temple, "Know Thyself."
For us, that also means knowing the Greeks. We will cover the period from the
Late Bronze Age, c. 1500 BC, down to the time of Philip of Macedon, c. 350
BC, concentrating on the two hundred year interval from 600-400 BC.