Introduction to the Ancient World: Greece

Lecture 7

A Time of Change: Greek Colonization (c. 750-600 B.C.) 

I. Colonization

A. significance: geographic and mental expansion
B. impetuses: e.g. primogeniture (or its opposite),
increased population, entrepreneurialism
C. relation with mother city (metro-polis)  

II. The areas 

A. Already there: Ionia, e.g. Miletus -
grid plan; early thinkers/philosophers/poets
(e.g. Thales, Xenophanes)

B. Northern Aegean, Black Sea

C. Syria, Egypt (Naucratis); Libya (Cyrene)

D. west (Phocaeans defeated in 540 B.C.); Massilia (Marseille)
Magna Graecia (so. Italy): Neapolis (nea polis), Sybaris ("sybaritic");
Pythagoreans
Sicily: Syracuse, Segesta, Acragas (Agrigento); temple architecture: Doric order

D. how to relate the new places to Greece; Herakles (and Odysseus), Hellenocentrism 

III. Social and political change 

A. rise of the city-state (polis); incl. surrounding countryside

B. timocracy (plutocracy)

C. hoplite phalanx

D. tyranny, e.g. Corinth (655-585 B.C.): first tyrant often champion of demos

IV. The new individualism in poetry: Sappho, Archilochus, Xenophanes (7th/6th cents. B.C.)

V. Other

A. An Odyssey derivative: O Brother Where Art Thou (See Lect. 6)

B. Heads-ups for the Quiz

Lecture 7 Images