Greeks: Did you mean...?

EPISODE 1: THE REVOLUTION The first part tells the story of the troubled birth of the world's first democracy, ancient Athens, through the life of an Athenian nobleman, Cleisthenes. In...

In which John compares and contrasts Greek civilization and the Persian Empire. Of course we're glad that Greek civilization spawned modern western civilization, right? Maybe not. From Socrates and...

Your vowels were invented in Greece, giving birth to the first "true" alphabet. Watch as your new toga-clad friend turns your consonant abjad into a consonant-vowel alphabet...

Cyrus the Great (558-530 BCE) built the first universal empire, stretching from Greece to the Indus River. This was the famous Achaemenid Empire of Persia. An inscription at Naqsh-i-Rustam, the tomb...

Thermopylae is a mountain pass near the sea in northern Greece which was the site of several battles in antiquity, the most famous being that between Persians and Greeks in August 480 BCE. Despite being greatly inferior in...

The Battle on the plain of Marathon in September 490 BCE between Greeks and the invading forces of Persian king Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE) was a victory that would go down in folklore as the moment the Greek city-states showed...

The Battle of Plataea was a land battle between Greeks and Persians near the small town of Plataea in Boeotia in 479 BCE. Following up their naval victory at the Battle of Salamis in September 480 BCE against the same enemy...

The Trojan War was fought between Greeks and the defenders of the city of Troy in Anatolia sometime in the late Bronze Age. The story has grabbed the imagination for millennia but a conflict between Mycenaeans and Hittites may well...

Macedon was an ancient kingdom located in the north of the Greek peninsula first inhabited by the Mackednoi tribe whose identity was challenged by some southern Greeks but who, according to Herodotus (5:22...

Artemisia I of Caria (l. 480 BCE) was the queen of the Anatolian region of Caria (south of ancient Lydia, in modern-day Turkey). She is most famous for her role in the naval Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE in which she fought...