Discover the ideas, achievements and city-states of ancient Greece.
Ancient Greece was one of the most influential civilisations in human history. From around 800 BCE, Greece was not one unified country but a collection of independent city-states, each with its own government, culture and army. Athens and Sparta were the most powerful. Athens gave the world one of its greatest ideas: democracy โ a system where citizens could vote on important decisions. The Greeks were extraordinary thinkers: mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, scientists like Archimedes, and philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle laid ideas that still shape our world today. The Greeks also gave us the Olympic Games (first held in 776 BCE at Olympia), epic poetry, theatre, and architecture. Many English words, including ‘democracy’, ‘mathematics’ and ‘theatre’, come directly from Greek.