Ancient Greece
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
Not a country, a collection of cities
Ancient Greece was not one country. It was hundreds of independent CITY-STATES, called poleis. Each had its own laws and its own army. They shared their gods. Athens and Sparta were the largest, and they were very different. Athens traded, argued and built. Sparta organised itself almost entirely around its army. They worked together against Persia. Then they fought each other for a generation afterwards.
Democracy, and who was left out
Athens developed DEMOCRACY, which means rule by the people. Citizens voted directly on laws. They did not elect representatives. This is genuinely the root of the idea. It is also true that citizens were adult men born in Athens. Women could not vote. Enslaved people could not vote. Foreigners could not vote. And enslaved people were a large part of the population. Both of those facts belong in the same sentence.
What survived
Look at what survived. The words: democracy, politics, history, physics, theatre, athlete. The shapes: columns on courthouses and museums. And the habits of mind. Socratic questioning. Euclid's geometry. Hippocrates separating illness from divine punishment. And the idea of writing history by asking what actually happened. The Olympics were revived on purpose in 1896.
Athens around 430 BCE had perhaps 300,000 people. Take away the women, who were not citizens. Take away enslaved people, perhaps a third of the population. Take away metics, the foreign-born residents. Some of those had lived there for generations. What remains is roughly 30,000 to 50,000 adult male citizens. That is around 10 to 15 per cent. It was a genuine first in the world. And it was not what we mean by the word today.