Greece: The Land and People

Sources

Geographic and Political Divisions . Greece itself is a terrain divided by the Pindos mountain chain into small sections of land (the mountain chain extends out into the Aegean Sea as well, forming small islands). These mountains create natural pocketlike regions, often large enough to contain just one settlement. The geography of Greece, therefore, had important ramifications for the development of political structure: Greece did not develop as a “nation” with a unified purpose and common outlook, but as a collection of small and dissimilar settlements, each with its own customs, ways of life, and dialect. The Greeks, in fact, did not speak of their country as “Greece,” but merely in terms of individual city-states (poleis) such as Athens, Thebes, Sparta, and so on. Poleis would sometimes band together for a limited period to unite against a common enemy, as when Greece fought its wars with Persia in the early fifth century b.c.e.; for purposes of retaining what had been won in such wars, as in the Delian League of 478 (so called because the treasury of the league was located on the island of Delos); or for purposes of foreign policy, such as the collection of Greek states organized by the Macedonian king Philip II in 338 b.c.e. However, rarely did individual poleis unify in pursuit of a common goal, and for much of Greece’s history the city-states were rivals, competing among themselves for land and power. The natural divisions of the Greek region also made for political divisions.

Barbarians . Nevertheless, the Greeks did possess a sense of common ancestry and myth (the Greeks’ word for themselves was Hellenes, after Hellen, a mythical figure whom the Greeks took as their common ancestor), and Greeks in Classical times (the fifth century b.c.e. and beyond) collectively felt that they were somehow different from the inhabitants of other countries. They called all non-Greeks (regardless of where they were from) barbaroi, from the way these foreign languages sounded to the Greek ear: an incomprehensible ba-ba-ba. The modern English word barbarian comes from barbaroi, and the ancient word had all the derogatory connotations of its modern counterpart: most Greeks seem to have looked at foreigners with a definite recognition of their own superiority and sense of national pride. Some Greek intellectuals stretched this polarity between Greeks and barbarians to its limits: the philosopher Aristotle, for instance, claimed that certain (mainly Eastern) races of people were “natural slaves” simply by virtue of the fact that they were barbarians.

Greek World . Greece was found, therefore, wherever Greek was spoken: in mainland Greece; on the small islands that dotted the Aegean Sea; even, through colonization, in such diverse and faraway places as the west coast of Asia Minor or southern Italy. The physical range of the Greek world in antiquity was extensive and fragmented.

Sources

Peter D. Arnott, An Introduction to the Greek World (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967).

Nancy Demand, A History of Ancient Greece (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1996).

The World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture. Joint Association of Classical Teachers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).