Classical antiquity

Macedonia (/ˌmæsɪˈdoʊniə/ MASS-ih-DOH-nee-ə; Greek: Μακεδονία, Makedonía), also called Macedon (/ˈmæsɪdɒn/ MASS-ih-don), was an ancient kingdom on the periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece, which later became the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. The kingdom was founded and initially ruled by the royal Argead dynasty, which was followed by the Antipatrid and Antigonid dynasties. Home to the ancient Macedonians, the earliest kingdom was centred on the northeastern part of the Greek peninsula, and bordered by Epirus to the southwest, Illyria to the northwest, Paeonia to the north, Thrace to the east and Thessaly to the south.

Before the 4th century BC, Macedonia was a small kingdom with its capital at Aigai, outside of the area dominated by the great city-states of Athens, Sparta and Thebes, and briefly subordinate to the Achaemenid Empire. During the reign of the Argead king Philip II (359–336 BC), Macedonia (with its capital at Pella) subdued mainland Greece and the Thracian Odrysian kingdom through conquest and diplomacy. With a reformed army containing phalanxes wielding the sarissa pike, Philip II defeated the old powers of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. Philip II's son Alexander the Great, leading a federation of Greek states, accomplished his father's objective of commanding the whole of Greece when he destroyed Thebes after the city revolted. During Alexander's subsequent campaign of conquest, he overthrew the Achaemenid Empire and conquered territory that stretched as far as the Indus River. For a brief period, his Macedonian Empire was the most powerful in the world – the definitive Hellenistic state, inaugurating the transition to a new period of Ancient Greek civilization. Greek arts and literature flourished in the new conquered lands and advances in philosophy, engineering, and science spread across the empire and beyond. Of particular importance were the contributions of Aristotle, tutor to Alexander, whose writings became a keystone of Western philosophy.

The Archaeological Museum of Nafplio is a museum in the town of Nafplio of the Argolis region in Greece. It has exhibits of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Helladic, Mycenaean, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods from all over southern Argolis. The museum is situated in the central square of Nafplion. It is housed in two floors of the old Venetian barracks.

The art of Europe, also known as Western art, encompasses the history of visual art in Europe. European prehistoric art started as mobile Upper Paleolithic rock and cave painting and petroglyph art and was characteristic of the period between the Paleolithic and the Iron Age. Written histories of European art often begin with the Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. However a consistent pattern of artistic development within Europe becomes clear only with Ancient Greek art, which was adopted and transformed by Rome and, with the Roman Empire, was carried across much of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia.

The influence of the art of the Classical period waxed and waned throughout the next two thousand years, seeming to slip into a distant memory in parts of the Medieval period, to re-emerge in the Renaissance, suffer a period of what some early art historians viewed as "decay" during the Baroque period, to reappear in a refined form in Neo-Classicism and to be reborn in Post-Modernism.

Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the common Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, was divided into several varieties.

Most of these varieties are known only from inscriptions, but a few of them, principally Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic, are also represented in the literary canon alongside the dominant Attic form of literary Greek.

The incipit (/ˈɪnsɪpɪt/ IN-sip-it) of a text is the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of notes, having the same purpose. The word incipit comes from Latin and means "it begins". Its counterpart taken from the ending of the text is the explicit (Latin: explicitum est, lit. 'it has been unfolded'). The unfolding refers to a papyrus scroll. The end is also referred to as desinit, 'it is finished'.

Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits, as with for example Agnus Dei. During the medieval period in Europe, incipits were often written in a different script or colour from the rest of the work of which they were a part, and "incipit pages" might be heavily decorated with illumination. Though the word incipit is Latin, the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several millennia and can be found in various parts of the world. Although not always called by the name of incipit today, the practice of referring to texts by their initial words remains commonplace.

The Greco-Roman world /ˌɡriːkoʊˈroʊmən, ˌɡrɛkoʊ-/, also Greco-Roman civilization, Greco-Roman culture or Greco-Latin culture (spelled Græco-Roman or Graeco-Roman in British English), as understood by modern scholars and writers, includes the geographical regions and countries that culturally—and so historically—were directly and intimately influenced by the language, culture, government and religion of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. A better-known term is classical antiquity. In exact terms the area refers to the "Mediterranean world", the extensive tracts of land centered on the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, the "swimming pool and spa" of the Greeks and the Romans, in which those peoples' cultural perceptions, ideas, and sensitivities became dominant in classical antiquity.

That process was aided by the universal adoption of Greek as the language of intellectual culture and commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean and of Latin as the language of public administration and of forensic advocacy, especially in the Western Mediterranean.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema OM, RA, RWS (/ˈælmə ˈtædeɪmə/ AL-mə TAD-ay-mə; born Lourens Alma Tadema, Dutch: [ˈlʌurəns ˈɑlmaː ˈtaːdəmaː]; 8 January 1836 – 25 June 1912) was a Dutch painter who later settled in the United Kingdom, becoming the last officially recognised denizen in 1873. Born in Dronryp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in London, England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there.

A painter of mostly classical subjects, he became famous for his depictions of the luxury and decadence of the Roman Empire, with languorous figures set in fabulous marbled interiors or against a backdrop of dazzling blue Mediterranean sea and sky. One of the most popular Victorian painters, Alma-Tadema was admired during his lifetime for his draftsmanship and accurate depictions of Classical antiquity, but his work fell out of fashion after his death, and only since the 1960s has it been appreciated for its importance within Victorian painting.

The image of Britannia (/brɪˈtæniə/) is the national personification of Britain as a helmeted female warrior holding a trident and shield. An image first used by the Romans in classical antiquity, the Latin Britannia was the name variously applied to the British Isles, Great Britain, and the Roman province of Britain during the Roman Empire. The Roman Britannia was typically depicted reclining or seated, with not a trident but a spear and shield, appearing on Roman coins of the 2nd century AD. The classical allegory was revived in the early modern period. On coins of the pound sterling issued by Charles II of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Britannia appears with her shield bearing the Union Flag. To symbolise the Royal Navy's victories, Britannia's spear became the trident in 1797, and a helmet was added to the coinage in 1825.

By the 1st century BC, Britannia had replaced Albion as the prevalent Latin name for the island of Great Britain. After the Roman conquest in 43 AD, Britannia came to refer to the Roman province that encompassed the southern two-thirds of the island (see Roman Britain). The remaining third of the island, known to the Romans as Caledonia, lay north of the River Forth in modern Scotland. It was intermittently but not permanently occupied by the Roman army. The name is a Latinisation of the native Brittonic word for Great Britain, Pretanī, which also produced the Greek form Prettanike or Brettaniai.

In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek, Eastern Mediterranean, and West Asian (or Middle Eastern) history following Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, in which these regions were under the influence of Greek leadership, culture, and language. The Hellenistic period was followed by the ascendancy of the Roman Empire, the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt the following year, which eliminated the last major Hellenistic kingdom. Its name stems from the Ancient Greek word Hellas (Ἑλλάς, Hellás), which was gradually recognized as the name for Greece, from which the modern historiographical term Hellenistic was derived. The term "Hellenistic" is to be distinguished from "Hellenic" in that the latter refers to Greece itself, while the former encompasses all the ancient territories of the period that had come under significant Greek influence, particularly the Hellenized Ancient Near East, after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

After the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BC and its disintegration shortly thereafter in the Partition of Babylon and subsequent Wars of the Diadochi, Hellenistic kingdoms were established throughout West Asia (Seleucid Empire, Kingdom of Pergamon), Northeast Africa (Ptolemaic Kingdom) and South Asia (Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Indo-Greek Kingdom). This resulted in an influx of Greek colonists and the export of Greek culture and language to these new realms, a breadth spanning as far as modern-day India. These new Greek kingdoms were also influenced by regional indigenous cultures, adopting local practices which were deemed beneficial, necessary, or convenient. Hellenistic culture thus represents a fusion of the ancient Greek world with that of the Western Asian, Northeastern African, and Southwestern Asian worlds. The consequence of this mixture gave rise to a common Attic-based Greek dialect, known as Koine Greek, which became the lingua franca throughout the ancient world.

Classics, also classical studies or Ancient Greek and Roman studies, is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Ancient Greek and Roman literature and their original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics may also include as secondary subjects Greco-Roman philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, architecture, art, mythology, and society.

In Western civilization, the study of the Ancient Greek and Roman classics was considered the foundation of the humanities, and they traditionally have been the cornerstone of an elite higher education.