The Greek city-states of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE had a problem: they were run by aristocrats who had no intention of sharing power, governing populations that increasingly demanded a say.

Most early poleis were governed by small groups of wealthy landowners, often calling themselves the aristoi (ar-ISS-toy, "the best"), who controlled the best farmland, dominated the courts, monopolized military leadership, and made the laws. The gap between rich and poor was extreme and getting worse. Small farmers who fell into debt could be sold into slavery to pay what they owed, a practice that was perfectly legal and routinely enforced. Justice was administered by aristocratic judges who, unsurprisingly, tended to favor aristocratic interests. The laws themselves were unwritten, which meant the judges could interpret them however they pleased.

This was not a stable arrangement. Population growth, expanding trade, and the military revolution of the hoplite phalanx (HOP-lite FAY-lanks, the dense infantry formation of heavily armed citizen-soldiers, carrying large round shields, long spears, and wearing bronze helmets and breastplates, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder in tight ranks) were creating new classes of people who had economic and military importance but no political voice. A successful merchant who could afford hoplite armor and stood in the battle line defending the city had an increasingly compelling argument for why he should have a say in how the city was governed. The answer from the aristocrats was, essentially: because we said so. That answer was wearing thin.

The result was two centuries of political experimentation, as city-states across the Greek world tried different solutions to the question of who rules. Some solutions came from above, imposed by strongmen who seized power by force or popular acclaim. Others came from the slow, painful process of writing laws and expanding political participation. Two cities, Athens and Sparta, produced the most influential answers, and the contrast between them would define Greek history for centuries.

The strongmen came first. In Greek, they were called tyrannoi (tih-RAH-noy, singular tyrannos), a word borrowed from Lydian that originally meant simply "sole ruler" without the negative connotation it carries in English. A Greek tyrant was not necessarily cruel or oppressive (though some were both). He was a man who seized power outside the normal channels, usually with popular support, and ruled personally rather than through the aristocratic institutions he had displaced. Many tyrants were themselves aristocrats who broke ranks with their class to champion popular causes. The pattern was common across the Greek world in the 7th and 6th centuries: a charismatic leader exploits popular anger at aristocratic rule, seizes power with a bodyguard of supporters, redistributes some wealth, builds public works, patronizes the arts, and rules until he dies or is overthrown. His sons usually inherit, and the dynasty usually falls within a generation or two.

The most important tyranny for later history was at Athens.

Peisistratos (pie-SIS-trah-tos) seized power in Athens in 561 BCE, was expelled twice, and returned each time with a mixture of military force, foreign allies, and theatrical flair. On one memorable occasion, he staged his return by riding into the city in a chariot alongside a tall, beautiful woman dressed as the goddess Athena, as if the city's patron deity were personally escorting him back to power. The Athenians, according to the historian Herodotus (who tells the story with undisguised amazement), fell for it. Peisistratos ruled Athens, on and off, until his death in 527 BCE.

His tyranny was, by the standards of the time, relatively benign. He left the existing laws and political institutions largely in place, merely ensuring that his allies held the key positions. He funded major building projects, including a temple to Athena on the Acropolis and improvements to the Agora. He patronized the arts, commissioning the first official written text of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and establishing the Great Dionysia (dy-oh-NIS-ee-ah), the annual dramatic festival in honor of the god Dionysus (dy-oh-NY-sus) that would become the birthplace of Greek theater (Chapter 4). He promoted Athenian trade and diplomacy, making Athens a significant player in Aegean affairs for the first time. He left the city richer, more culturally vibrant, and more politically cohesive than he had found it.

His sons, Hippias (HIP-ee-as) and Hipparchus (hip-PAR-kus), were less successful. Hipparchus was assassinated in 514 BCE by two aristocrats, Harmodius and Aristogeiton (har-MOH-dee-us and ar-IST-oh-GY-ton), who became celebrated in Athenian tradition as the "Tyrannicides" (tyrant-killers), though their motives were personal rather than political. Hippias, the surviving brother, grew increasingly paranoid and repressive, and was finally overthrown in 510 BCE with the help of Spartan military intervention. The tyranny was over. What came next would change the world.

But before Athens got to democracy, it had to go through lawgivers.

The problem with unwritten law is that nobody can check what the law actually says. When the judges are the aristocrats, and the laws are whatever the aristocrats say they are, justice is whatever power wants it to be. The first step toward fixing this was simple: write the laws down.

Draco (DRAY-ko) did this for Athens in 621 BCE, producing the city's first written law code. The code was notorious for its harshness. Later Athenians said Draco's laws were "written in blood, not ink," and the word draconian (dray-KOH-nee-un) still means excessively severe in English. The death penalty was prescribed for crimes as minor as stealing a cabbage. When asked why, Draco supposedly replied that small crimes deserved death and he could think of no harsher punishment for large ones. The severity was the point: at least now everyone knew what the rules were. Written law, even harsh written law, was an improvement over the arbitrary whims of aristocratic judges.

The real reformer was Solon (SOH-lon), appointed in 594 BCE as a special mediator (archon, AR-kon, a chief magistrate) with extraordinary powers to resolve the social crisis that was tearing Athens apart. By this point, the debt problem had become catastrophic. Small farmers who could not repay their debts were being sold into slavery, some of them shipped overseas and lost forever. The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting desperate, and civil war seemed imminent.

Solon's reforms were sweeping. He cancelled all existing debts (seisachtheia, say-SAKH-thee-ah, the "shaking off of burdens"), freed Athenians who had been enslaved for debt, and made it illegal to use personal freedom as collateral for loans. He restructured Athenian political classes based on wealth rather than birth, creating four tiers based on agricultural production: the pentakosiomedimnoi (pen-tah-KOS-ee-oh-med-IM-noy, "five-hundred-bushel men," the richest), the hippeis (hip-PAYS, "horsemen," wealthy enough to maintain a horse for cavalry service), the zeugitai (ZYOO-gih-tie, "yoke men," farmers who could afford a yoke of oxen and hoplite equipment), and the thetes (THEH-tees, the poorest laborers). Each class had defined political rights. The top two classes could hold the highest offices. The zeugitai could serve on juries and in the assembly. The thetes could attend the assembly and vote, though they could not hold office.

This was not democracy. It was a property-based oligarchy that was wider than what had come before but still excluded most people from real power. Solon himself was clear about his intentions: he was trying to prevent revolution by giving the poor enough to survive and the rich enough to stay invested. He compared himself to a man standing between two armies. After completing his reforms, Solon left Athens for ten years, reportedly to prevent people from pressuring him to change the laws. He told the Athenians that his laws were the best they would accept, not the best he could imagine.

Solon's reforms did not stick. Within a generation, Peisistratos had seized power as tyrant, bypassing the very institutions Solon had tried to strengthen. But the principles Solon established, especially the abolition of debt slavery and the idea that political rights should be based on wealth rather than birth, created the foundation on which democracy would later be built.

That foundation was completed by Cleisthenes (KLYS-theh-neez), an Athenian aristocrat who, in 508 BCE, introduced the most radical political reform in the ancient world.

Cleisthenes had come to power in the messy aftermath of the tyranny's overthrow. Rival aristocratic factions were fighting for control of Athens. Cleisthenes, outmaneuvered in the aristocratic power struggle, made a revolutionary move: he appealed to the ordinary people of Athens for support, promising them political rights in exchange for their backing. The strategy worked. With popular support, Cleisthenes pushed through a complete reorganization of the Athenian political system.

The key innovation was breaking the power of the old aristocratic kinship groups. Cleisthenes divided all Athenian citizens into ten new tribes (phylai), each composed of demes (DEE-mees, local districts) drawn from three different regions: one from the city, one from the coast, and one from the inland countryside. This meant that each tribe was a cross-section of the entire population, mixing urban merchants with coastal fishermen and inland farmers. The old aristocratic families could no longer dominate politics by controlling their local kinship networks, because the new tribes deliberately cut across those networks.

He established the Boule (BOO-lay), a Council of 500 composed of fifty citizens from each tribe, selected by lot (random drawing, not election). The Boule set the agenda for the Ekklesia (eh-KLAY-see-ah), the assembly of all citizens, which had the final vote on laws, treaties, and war. He also introduced ostracism (OSS-trah-sizm), a mechanism by which citizens could vote to exile any individual for ten years. Each citizen scratched a name on a piece of broken pottery (an ostracon, OSS-trah-kon), and if enough votes were cast against one person (a minimum of 6,000), that person was banished. Ostracism was designed to prevent any one individual from becoming too powerful, a safeguard against tyranny.

This was demokratia (deh-moh-KRAH-tee-ah), literally "power of the people" (from demos, the people, and kratos, power). Athens had invented democracy.

It is worth pausing to appreciate how radical this was. In 508 BCE, every other major civilization on earth was governed by kings, emperors, or priestly elites. The Persian Empire under Darius (Persian Empire Ch 2) ruled fifty million people through appointed provincial governors. Egypt had been ruled by pharaohs for over two thousand years. Mesopotamia had never known anything but monarchy. China under the Zhou Dynasty (Zhou Dynasty Ch 7-9) was fragmented into warring states ruled by hereditary aristocrats. India's Mahajanapadas were kingdoms and tribal republics, some with oligarchic assemblies but nothing approaching universal male citizen suffrage. In this world, the idea that every citizen, regardless of wealth, had an equal vote in the assembly was genuinely unprecedented. Athens was not the first place to have assemblies or councils. But it was the first to give final sovereign authority to the assembled body of all citizens.

The limitations were real. Athenian "citizens" meant free adult men born to Athenian parents. Women, slaves, and resident foreigners (called metics, MEH-tiks) were excluded, which meant that the democratic citizenry was probably 30,000 to 50,000 out of a total Athenian population (including women, children, slaves, and metics) of perhaps 250,000 to 300,000. The system was democratic for its participants but built on a foundation of exclusions that modern observers rightly find troubling. Still, within its own terms, it was the most radically egalitarian political system the ancient world had ever produced.

While Athens was experimenting with popular government, its future rival was perfecting a completely different model.

Sparta (SPAR-tah), located in the valley of the Eurotas River in the region of Laconia (lah-KOH-nee-ah) in the southern Peloponnese, had solved the problem of social instability in a way that horrified and fascinated the rest of Greece in equal measure. The Spartans had conquered the neighboring region of Messenia (mess-EH-nee-ah) in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE and enslaved its entire population as helots (HEL-uts), state-owned serfs who worked Spartan-assigned land and turned over a fixed portion of their harvest to their Spartan masters. The helot population vastly outnumbered the Spartans, by a ratio of perhaps seven to one, and the ever-present threat of helot revolt shaped every aspect of Spartan life.

The Spartan constitution, traditionally attributed to a legendary lawgiver named Lycurgus (ly-KUR-gus, whose historical existence is debated; he may be a mythical composite), created a society organized entirely around military readiness. At the top were two hereditary kings from two royal families, who served as military commanders and religious leaders. Below them sat the Gerousia (geh-ROO-see-ah), a council of 28 elders (men over sixty) plus the two kings, which proposed laws and served as the supreme court. The Apella (ah-PEL-ah), the assembly of all full Spartan citizens, voted on proposals by acclamation (shouting, not ballot), but could not propose or amend legislation. Five elected ephors (EH-forz, "overseers") supervised the kings and managed daily government, holding office for one year.

The military training system was the core of the whole arrangement. Spartan boys were inspected at birth by tribal elders. Those judged unfit were supposedly exposed on a mountainside, though modern scholars debate how systematically this was practiced. At age seven, boys entered the agoge (ah-GOH-gee, "upbringing"), a state-run program of physical training, military education, and deliberate hardship that lasted until age twenty. Boys were kept perpetually hungry, lightly clothed in all weather, trained in wrestling and weapons, organized into units with elected leaders, and taught that the highest virtue was obedience to the state and courage in battle. They slept in communal barracks until age thirty, even if married, and ate at communal mess halls called syssitia (sis-SIH-tee-ah) for their entire adult lives.

Spartan women had more freedoms than women in most Greek poleis. They managed households and property while their husbands were in barracks, exercised publicly (shocking to other Greeks), and were expected to produce healthy sons for the state. The Spartan view was brutally functional: healthy mothers produce healthy warriors.

The result was the most formidable military force in Greece. A Spartan army in the 6th century BCE was, polis for polis, unmatched in discipline, training, and fighting quality. Spartans defined themselves through warfare and were defined by others the same way. Their reputation would be tested, spectacularly, within a generation.

Outside Athens and Sparta, the rest of the Greek world was producing its own innovations.

In the Ionian cities on the coast of Anatolia, something entirely new was happening in how people thought about the world. Around 585 BCE, Thales of Miletus (THAY-leez of my-LEE-tus), a man from the prosperous trading city of Miletus on the Anatolian coast, reportedly predicted a solar eclipse and proposed that the fundamental substance underlying all of nature was water. This does not sound revolutionary. But it was. Thales was the first person in the surviving record to propose a natural explanation for natural phenomena, seeking causes in the physical world rather than in the actions of gods. When he said "everything is water," he was not making a religious claim. He was proposing a testable (even if wrong) hypothesis about the nature of reality.

Thales was followed by other Ionian thinkers: Anaximander (ah-NAK-sih-MAN-der), who proposed that the fundamental substance was an indefinite, boundless material called the apeiron; Anaximenes (ah-NAK-SIM-eh-neez), who argued it was air; Xenophanes (zen-OFF-ah-neez), who noted that Thracians depicted their gods as red-haired and that Ethiopians depicted theirs as dark-skinned, and concluded that mortals create gods in their own image rather than the reverse. Xenophanes also recognized fossils of marine creatures in mountain rock and correctly deduced that the land had once been under the sea, some 2,400 years before modern geology confirmed the same conclusion.

This was the birth of philosophy (fih-LOSS-uh-fee, literally "love of wisdom"), the systematic attempt to understand the world through reason rather than tradition or revelation. It was also the birth of what we would now call natural science, the search for physical explanations of physical phenomena. These early thinkers were not building on any known precedent. Egyptian and Mesopotamian scholars had made extraordinary advances in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, but their work was typically embedded in religious and practical contexts (predicting floods, computing taxes, reading omens). The Ionian innovation was asking "what is reality made of?" as a question worth pursuing for its own sake.

Across the Greek colonial world, another thinker was approaching the same questions from a different angle. Pythagoras (pih-THAG-or-as), born on the island of Samos around 570 BCE, traveled to Egypt and possibly Babylon before founding a philosophical and mathematical community at Croton (KROH-ton) in southern Italy around 530 BCE. The Pythagoreans (as his followers were called) discovered that musical intervals could be expressed as mathematical ratios and concluded that the universe itself was structured by number. The Pythagorean theorem (the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides) may have been known earlier in Mesopotamia, but the Pythagoreans proved it deductively, from first principles, a method that would become the hallmark of Greek mathematics. The Pythagorean community was part religious brotherhood, part philosophical school, and part political organization, with strict rules about diet, behavior, and secrecy. It was also one of the ancient world's oddest social experiments: a commune of mathematicians who believed that numbers were divine.

Around the same time, the first Greek dramatic performance was taking shape. In 534 BCE, at the Great Dionysia festival in Athens (the festival that Peisistratos had established), a performer named Thespis (THES-pis) reportedly stepped out of the chorus and spoke as an individual character, inventing the concept of the actor. Before Thespis, religious performances at festivals were choral: groups singing and dancing together. Thespis created the radical innovation of one person stepping forward and pretending to be someone else. The word thespian (meaning "actor") still honors his name.

Meanwhile, on the island of Lesbos (LEZ-boss) in the northeastern Aegean, a poet named Sappho (SAF-oh) was composing lyric poetry of such emotional intensity that Plato would later call her "the Tenth Muse." Sappho's poems, composed around 610-570 BCE and surviving only in fragments, are intensely personal: love, jealousy, desire, loss, the beauty of moonlight. In a world where poetry was typically public and heroic (Homer, Hesiod), Sappho wrote about the interior life of individual feeling. She was the first great poet of personal experience in the Western tradition.

Greek religion during this period was not a unified theology but a vast, flexible, sometimes contradictory collection of local cults, myths, and rituals organized around the twelve Olympian gods (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, Hephaestus, Demeter, and either Hestia or Dionysus, depending on the tradition). The gods were worshipped through animal sacrifice, libation (pouring wine or oil), prayer, and festival. The Eleusinian Mysteries (Chapter 1) promised initiates a blessed afterlife. Other mystery cults offered similar promises through secret initiation rituals. But Greek religion had no bible, no creed, no professional clergy with theological authority, and no prohibition on questioning the gods. This openness to questioning, combined with the competitive intellectual culture of the poleis, created the conditions for philosophy to flourish. You could ask "what is the nature of reality?" without being executed for blasphemy, at least usually.

By 500 BCE, the Greek world was poised. It had literacy, philosophy, democratic governance (in Athens, at least), military discipline (in Sparta, at least), a network of colonies stretching across the Mediterranean, and a shared cultural identity expressed through Homer, the Olympics, and Delphi. What it did not yet have was a unifying crisis, a test that would force the fractious Greek poleis to stop fighting each other and fight together.

That test was about to arrive from the east. The Persian Empire, the largest the world had ever seen, was coming.

Ancient Greece

Out of the Dark Ages

Tyrants and Lawmakers

The Persian Wars

The Golden Age of Athens

The Peloponnesian War

Crisis and Philip

Alexander

The Hellenistic World and Rome