Sparta in the context of History of Ancient Greece

Classical Athens, known contemporaneously simply as Athens (Ancient Greek: Ἀθῆναι, Athênai [atʰɛ̂ːnai̯]; Modern Greek: Αθήναι, Athine [aˈθine]), was the major urban centre of the notable polis (city-state) of the same name during the classical period (480–323 BC) of ancient Greece, located in Attica, Greece, leading the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. Athenian democracy was established in 508 BC under Cleisthenes following the tyranny of Isagoras. This system remained remarkably stable, and with a few brief interruptions, it remained in place for 180 years, until 322 BC (amid the aftermath of the Lamian War). The peak of Athenian hegemony was achieved during the Age of Pericles in the 440s and 430s BC.

In the classical period, Athens was a centre for the arts, learning, and philosophy, and it was the home of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. Athens was also the birthplace of Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and many other prominent philosophers, writers, and politicians of the ancient world. It is widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilization and as the birthplace of democracy, largely due to the impact of its cultural and political achievements during the 5th and 4th centuries BC on the rest of the then-known European continent.

Ancient Greece (Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάς, romanized: Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (c. 600 AD), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and communities. Prior to the Roman period, most of these regions were officially unified only once under the Kingdom of Macedon from 338 to 323 BC. In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period.

Three centuries after the decline of Mycenaean Greece during the Bronze Age collapse, Greek urban poleis began to form in the 8th century BC, ushering in the Archaic period and the colonization of the Mediterranean Basin. This was followed by the age of Classical Greece, from the Greco-Persian Wars to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and which included the Golden Age of Athens and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. The unification of Greece by Macedon under Philip II and subsequent conquest of the Achaemenid Empire by Alexander the Great spread Hellenistic civilization across the Middle East. The Hellenistic period is considered to have ended in 30 BC, when the last Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, was annexed by the Roman Republic.

A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory, as opposed to a regular state or country comprising a capital city and other cities and/or a countryside. City-states have existed in many parts of the world throughout history, including cities such as Rome, Carthage, Athens and Sparta and the Italian city-states during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan.

With the rise of nation states worldwide, there remains some disagreement on the number of modern city-states that still exist; Singapore, Monaco and Vatican City are the candidates most commonly discussed. Out of these, Singapore is the largest and most populous city-state in the world, with full sovereignty, international borders, its own currency, a robust military, and substantial international influence in its own right. The Economist refers to it as the "world's only fully functioning city-state".

The Trojan War was a legendary conflict in Greek mythology that took place around the twelfth or thirteenth century BC. The war was waged by the Achaeans (Greeks) against the city of Troy after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology, and it has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's Iliad. The core of the Iliad (Books II – XXIII) describes a period of four days and two nights in the tenth year of the decade-long siege of Troy; the Odyssey describes the journey home of Odysseus, one of the war's heroes. Other parts of the war are described in a cycle of epic poems, which have survived through fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid.

The ancient Greeks believed that Troy was located near the Dardanelles and that the Trojan War was a historical event of the twelfth or thirteenth century BC. By the mid-nineteenth century AD, both the war and the city were widely seen as non-historical, but in 1868, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann met Frank Calvert, who convinced Schliemann that Troy was at what is now Hisarlık in modern-day Turkey. On the basis of excavations conducted by Schliemann and others, this claim is now accepted by most scholars.

The Delian League was a confederacy of Greek city-states, numbering between 150 and 330, founded in 478 BC under the leadership (hegemony) of Athens, whose purpose was to continue fighting the Persian Empire after the Greek victory in the Battle of Plataea at the end of the Second Persian invasion of Greece. The League functioned as a dual—offensive and defensive—alliance (symmachia) of autonomous states, similar to its rival association, the Peloponnesian League. The League's modern name derives from its official meeting place, the island of Delos, where congresses were held within the sanctuary of the Temple of Apollo; contemporary authors referred to the organization simply as "the Athenians and their Allies".

While Sparta excelled as Greece's greatest power on land, Athens turned to the seas, becoming the dominant naval power of the Greek world. Following Sparta's withdrawal from the conflict with Persia, Athens took the lead of the Hellenic alliance accompanied by several states around the Aegean and the Anatolian coast. The Delian League was formed as an anti-Persian defensive association of equal city-states seeking protection under Athens, as the latter wished to extend its support towards the Ionian Greek colonies of Anatolia. The alliance held an assembly of representatives in order to shape its policy, while members swore an oath of loyalty to the coalition. By the mid-fifth century BC, it had developed into a naval imperial power, conventionally called the Athenian Empire, where Athens established complete dominion and the allies became increasingly less autonomous. The League successfully accomplished its principal strategic goal by decisively expelling the remaining Persian forces from the Aegean. As a result, Persia would cease to pose a major threat to Greece for the following fifty years.

The Second Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), often called the Peloponnesian War, was fought between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies for the hegemony of the ancient Greek world. The war remained undecided until the later intervention of the Persian Empire in support of Sparta. Led by Lysander, the Spartan fleet (built with Persian subsidies) finally defeated Athens, which began a period of Spartan hegemony over Greece.

Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases. The first phase (431–421 BC) was named the Ten Years War, or the Archidamian War, after the Spartan king Archidamus II, who invaded Attica several times with the full Hoplite army of the Peloponnesian League, the alliance network dominated by Sparta (then known as Lacedaemon). The Long Walls of Athens rendered this strategy ineffective, while the superior navy of the Delian League (Athens' alliance) raided the Peloponnesian coast to trigger rebellions within Sparta. The precarious Peace of Nicias was signed in 421 BC and lasted until 413 BC. Several proxy battles took place during this period, notably the battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, won by Sparta against an ad-hoc alliance of Elis, Mantinea (both former Spartan allies), Argos, and Athens. The main event was the Sicilian Expedition, between 415 and 413 BC, during which Athens lost almost all its navy in the attempt to capture Syracuse, an ally of Sparta.

The Peloponnesian League (/pɛləpəˈniːʃən/) was an alliance of ancient Greek city-states, dominated by Sparta and centred on the Peloponnese, which lasted from c. 550 to 366 BC. It is known mainly for being one of the two rivals in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), against the Delian League, which was dominated by Athens.

Isagoras (Ancient Greek: Ἰσαγόρας), son of Tisander, was an Athenian aristocrat in the late 6th century BC.

He had remained in Athens during the tyranny of Hippias, but after Hippias was overthrown, he became involved in a struggle for power with Cleisthenes, a fellow aristocrat. In 508 BC he was elected archon eponymous, but Cleisthenes opposed him, with support from the majority of the population. Isagoras requested support from the Spartan king Cleomenes I, an old friend who had earlier been given hospitality by Isagoras. According to Herodotus, Cleomenes had had an affair with Isagoras's wife.

Pericles (/ˈpɛrɪkliːz/ ; Ancient Greek: Περικλῆς; c. 495–429 BC) was a Greek statesman and general during the Golden Age of Athens. He was prominent and influential in Ancient Athenian politics, particularly between the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, and was acclaimed by Thucydides, a contemporary historian, as "the first citizen of Athens". Pericles turned the Delian League into an Athenian empire and led his countrymen during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War. The period during which he led Athens as its preeminent orator and statesman, roughly from 461 to 429 BC, is sometimes known as the "Age of Pericles", but the period thus denoted can include times as early as the Persian Wars or as late as the following century.

Pericles promoted the arts and literature, and it was principally through his efforts that Athens acquired the reputation of being the educational and cultural center of the ancient Greek world. He started an ambitious project that generated most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis, including the Parthenon. This project beautified and protected the city, exhibited its glory, and gave work to its people. Pericles also fostered Athenian democracy to such an extent that critics called him a populist. Pericles was descended, through his mother, from the powerful and historically influential Alcmaeonid family. He, along with several members of his family, succumbed to the Plague of Athens in 429 BC, which weakened the city-state during a protracted conflict with Sparta.

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.

Slavery was a widely accepted practice in ancient Greece, as it was in contemporaneous societies. The principal use of slaves was in agriculture, but they were also used in stone quarries or mines, as domestic servants, or even as a public utility, as with the demosioi of Athens.

Modern historiographical practice distinguishes between chattel slavery slavery (where the slave was regarded as a piece of property, as opposed to a member of human society) and land-bonded groups such as the penestae of Thessaly or the Spartan helots, who were more like medieval serfs (an enhancement to real estate). The chattel slave is an individual deprived of liberty and forced to submit to an owner, who may buy, sell, or lease them like any other chattel.

37°54′19″N 22°52′49″E / 37.9053455°N 22.8801924°E / 37.9053455; 22.8801924

Corinth (/ˈkɒrɪnθ/ KORR-inth; Ancient Greek: Κόρινθος Kórinthos; Doric Greek: Ϙόρινθος Qórinthos; Latin: Corinthus) was a city-state (polis) on the Isthmus of Corinth, the narrow stretch of land that joins the Peloponnese peninsula to the mainland of Greece, roughly halfway between Athens and Sparta. The modern city of Corinth is located approximately 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) northeast of the ancient ruins. Since 1896, systematic archaeological investigations of the Corinth Excavations by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens have revealed large parts of the ancient city, and recent excavations conducted by the Greek Ministry of Culture have brought to light important new facets of antiquity.

The Athenian coup of 411 BC was the result of a revolution that took place during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. The coup overthrew the democratic government of ancient Athens and replaced it with a short-lived oligarchy known as the Four Hundred.

In the wake of the financial crisis caused by the failed Sicilian Expedition of the Athenian military in 413 BC, some high-status Athenian men, who had disliked the broad-based democracy of the city-state for a long time, sought to establish an oligarchy of the elite. They believed that they could manage foreign, fiscal, and war policies better than the existing government.

The Thirty Tyrants (Ancient Greek: οἱ τριάκοντα τύραννοι, hoi triákonta týrannoi) were an oligarchy that briefly ruled Athens from 404 BCE to 403 BCE. Installed into power by the Spartans after the Athenian surrender in the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty became known for their tyrannical rule, first being called "The Thirty Tyrants" by Polycrates. Although they maintained power for only eight months, their reign resulted in the killing of 5% of the Athenian population, the confiscation of citizens' property, and the exile of other democratic supporters.

Thucydides (/θjuːˈsɪdɪˌdiːz/ thew-SID-ih-deez; Ancient Greek: Θουκυδίδης, romanized: Thoukudídēs [tʰuːkydǐdɛːs]; c. 460 – c. 400 BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.

Thucydides has been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by, and constructed upon, fear and self-interest. His text is still studied at universities and military colleges worldwide. The Melian dialogue is regarded as a seminal text of international relations theory, while his version of Pericles's Funeral Oration is widely studied by political theorists, historians, and students of the classics. More generally, Thucydides developed an understanding of human nature to explain behavior in such crises as plagues, massacres, and wars.