Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity (also the classical era or classical period) is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome collectively known as the Greco-Roman world. It is the period in which Greek and Roman literature (such as Aeschylus, Ovid, Homer and others) flourished.

It is conventionally taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Greek poetry of Homer (8th–7th century BC), and continues through the rise of Christianity and the decline of the Roman Empire (5th century AD). It ends with the dissolution of classical culture at the close of Late Antiquity (AD 300-600), blending into the Early Middle Ages (AD 600-1000). Such a wide sampling of history and territory covers many disparate cultures and periods. "Classical antiquity" may refer also to an idealized vision among later people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poe's words, "the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome!"

The civilization of the ancient Greeks has been immensely influential on the language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, science, art and architecture of the modern world, fueling the Renaissance in Western Europe and again resurgent during various neo-classical revivals in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Archaic period (8th to 6th centuries BC)
The earliest period of Classical Antiquity takes place before the background of gradual re-appearance of historical sources following the Bronze Age collapse. The 8th and 7th centuries BC are still largely proto-historical, with the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions appearing in the first half of the 8th century. Homer is usually assumed to have lived in the 8th or 7th century, and his lifetime is often taken as marking the beginning of Classical Antiquity. In the same period falls the traditional date for the establishment of the Ancient Olympic Games, in 776 BC.

Phoenicians
The Phoenicians originally expanded from Levantine ports, by the 8th century dominating trade in the Mediterranean. Carthage was founded in 814 BC, and the Carthaginians by 700 BC had firmly established strongholds in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia, which brought about conflicts of interest with Etruria.

Greece
The Archaic period followed the Greek Dark Ages, and saw significant advancements in political theory, and the rise of democracy, philosophy, theatre, poetry, as well as the revitalisation of the written language (which had been lost during the Dark Ages). In pottery, the Archaic period sees the development of the Orientalizing style, which signals a shift from the Geometric Style of the later Dark Ages and the accumulation of influences derived from Phoenicia and Syria.

Pottery styles associated with the later part of the Archaic age are the black-figure pottery, which originated in Corinth during the 7th century BC and its successor, the red-figure style, developed by the Andokides Painter in about 530 BC.

Iron Age Italy
The Etruscans had established political control in the region by the late 7th century BC, forming the aristocratic and monarchial elite. The Etruscans apparently lost power in the area by the late 6th century BC, and at this point, the Italic tribes reinvented their government by creating a republic, with much greater restraints on the ability of rulers to exercise power.

Roman Kingdom
According to legend, Rome was founded on April 21, 753 BC by twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, Romulus and Remus. As the city was bereft of women, legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins and the Sabines.

Archaeological evidence indeed shows first traces of settlement at the Roman Forum in the mid 8th century BC, though settlements on the Palatine Hill may date back to the 10th century BC.

The seventh and final king of Rome was Tarquinius Superbus. As the son of Tarquinius Priscus and the son-in-law of Servius Tullius, Tarquinius was of Etruscan birth. It was during his reign that the Etruscans reached their apex of power. Tarquinius removed and destroyed all the Sabine shrines and altars from the Tarpeian Rock, enraging the people of Rome. The people came to object to his rule when he allowed the rape of Lucretia, a patrician Roman, at the hands of his own son. Lucretia's kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus (ancestor to Marcus Brutus), summoned the Senate and had Tarquinius and the monarchy expelled from Rome in 510 BC. After Tarquinius' expulsion, the Senate voted to never again allow the rule of a king and reformed Rome into a republican government in 509 BC. In fact the Latin word "Rex" meaning King became a dirty and hated word throughout the Republic and later on the Empire.

Classical Greece (5th to 4th centuries BC)


The classical period of Ancient Greece, corresponds to most of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. (i.e. from the fall of the Athenian tyranny in 510 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC).

In 510, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow their king, the tyrant Hippias, son of Peisistratos. Cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy conducted by Isagoras.

The Greco-Persian Wars (499-449 BC), concluded by the Peace of Callias resulted in the dominant position of Athens in the Delian League, which led to conflict with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League, resulting in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), ending in a Spartan victory.

Greece entered the 4th century under Spartan hegemony. But by 395 BC the Spartan rulers removed Lysander from office, and Sparta lost her naval supremacy. Athens, Argos, Thebes, and Corinth, the latter two formerly Spartan allies, challenged Spartan dominance in the Corinthian War, which ended inconclusively in 387 BC. Then the Theban generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas won a decisive victory at Leuctra (371 BC). The result of this battle was the end of Spartan supremacy and the establishment of Theban hegemony. Thebes sought to maintain its position until finally eclipsed by the rising power of Macedon in 346 BC.

Under Philip II, (359–336 BC), Macedon expanded into the territory of the Paionians, Thracians, and Illyrians. Philip's son Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) managed to briefly extend Macedonian power not only over the central Greek city-states, but also to the Persian Empire, including Egypt and lands as far east as the fringes of India. The classical period conventionally ends at the death of Alexander in 323 BC and the fragmentation of his empire, divided among the Diadochi.

Hellenistic period (330 to 146 BC)
Classical Greece entered the Hellenistic period with the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander the Great. Greek becomes the lingua franca far beyond Greece itself, and Hellenistic culture interacts with the cultures of Persia, Central Asia, India and Egypt. Significant advances are made in the sciences (geography, astronomy, mathematics etc.), notably with the followers of Aristotle (Aristotelianism).

The Hellenistic period ended with the rise of the Roman Republic to a super-regional power in the 2nd century BC and the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC.

Roman Republic (5th to 1st centuries BC)
The Roman Forum was the central area around which ancient Rome developed.

The republican period of Ancient Rome began with the overthrow of the Monarchy c.509 BC and lasted over 450 years until its subversion, through a series of civil wars, into the Principate form of government and the Imperial period. During the half millennium of the Republic, Rome rose from a regional power of the Latium to the dominant force in Italy and beyond. The unification of Italy under Roman hegemony was a gradual process, brought about in a series of conflicts of the 4th and 3rd centuries, the Samnite Wars, Latin War, and Pyrrhic War. Roman victory in the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars established Rome as a super-regional power by the 2nd century BC, followed up by the acquisition of Greece and Asia Minor. This tremendous increase of power was accompanied by economic instability and social unrest, leading to the Catiline conspiracy, the Social War and the First Triumvirate, and finally the transformation to the Roman Empire in the latter half of the 1st century BC.

Roman Empire (1st century BC to 5th century AD)


Determining the precise end of the Republic is a task of dispute by modern historians; Roman citizens of the time did not recognize that the Republic had ceased to exist. The early Julio-Claudian "Emperors" maintained that the res publica still existed, albeit under the protection of their extraordinary powers, and would eventually return to its full Republican form. The Roman state continued to call itself a res publica as long as it continued to use Latin as its official language.

Rome acquired imperial character de facto from the 130s BC with the acquisition of Cisalpine Gaul, Illyria, Greece and Iberia, and definitely with the addition of Iudaea, Asia and Gaul in the 1st century BC. At the time of the empire's maximal extension under Trajan (117 AD), Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean as well as Gaul, parts of Germania and Britannia, the Balkans, Dacia, Asia Minor, the Caucasus and Mesopotamia.

Culturally, the Roman Empire was significantly hellenized, but also saw the rise of syncratic "eastern" traditions, such as Mithraism, Gnosticism, and most notably Christianity. The empire began to decline in the crisis of the third century

Late Antiquity (4th to 6th centuries AD)


Late Antiquity sees the rise of Christianity under Constantine I, finally ousting Roman imperial cult with the Theodosian decrees of 393. Successive invasions of Germanic tribes finalize the decline of the Western Empire in the 5th century, while the Eastern Empire persists throughout the Middle Ages as the Byzantine Empire. Hellenistic philosophy is succeeded by continued developments in Neoplatonism and Epicureanism, with Neoplatonism in due course influencing the theology of the Church Fathers.

Many individuals have attempted to put a specific date on the symbolic "end" of antiquity with the most prominent dates being the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476, the closing of the last Platonic Academy by Justinian I in 529, or the invasion of Italy in 535 by the forces of Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I. This last act, ironically, resulted in damage or destruction to Rome and much of the Italian countryside, inorexorably and permanently altering the socioeconomic structure of classical Rome.

In spite of this fact, the original Roman Senate continued to express decrees into the late sixth century and so some historians even place the symbolic end of antiquity at the death of Justinian I in 565, because Justinian was the last emperor to speak Latin and the last to use wholly Roman (as opposed to Greek) customs and rules for his court and government. Furthermore, the ascendency of Heraclius in 610, in Constantinople, who truly emphasized the Eastern, and Greek nature of what remained of the Roman Empire, may have contributed to turning the Eastern Roman Empire into the medieval Byzantine Empire.

Ultimately, though, it was a slow, complex, and graduated change in the socioeconomic structure in European history that led to the changeover between Classical Antiquity and Medieval society and no specific date can truly exemplify that.

Revivalism
Respect for the ancients of Greece and Rome affected politics, philosophy, sculpture, literature, theater, education, and even architecture and sexuality.

In politics, the presence of a Roman Emperor was felt to be desirable long after the empire fell. This tendency reached its peak when Charlemagne was crowned "Roman Emperor" in the year 800, an act which led to the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. The notion that an emperor is a monarch who outranks a mere king dates from this period. In this political ideal, there would always be a Roman Empire, a state whose jurisdiction extended to the entire civilized western world.

Epic poetry in Latin continued to be written and circulated well into the nineteenth century. John Milton and even Arthur Rimbaud got their first poetic education in Latin. Genres like epic poetry, pastoral verse, and the endless use of characters and themes from Greek mythology left a deep mark on Western literature.

In architecture, there have been several Greek Revivals, which seem more inspired in retrospect by Roman architecture than Greek. Still, one needs only to look at Washington, DC to see a city filled with large marble buildings with façades made out to look like Roman temples, with columns constructed in the classical orders of architecture.

In philosophy, the efforts of St Thomas Aquinas were derived largely from the thought of Aristotle, despite the intervening change in religion from Hellenic Polytheism to Christianity. Greek and Roman authorities such as Hippocrates and Galen formed the foundation of the practice of medicine even longer than Greek thought prevailed in philosophy. In the French theater, tragedians such as Molière and Racine wrote plays on mythological or classical historical subjects and subjected them to the strict rules of the classical unities derived from Aristotle's Poetics. The desire to dance like a latter-day vision of how the ancient Greeks did it moved Isadora Duncan to create her brand of ballet.

In the 18th and 19th centuries reverence for classical antiquity was much greater in Western Europe and the United States than it is today. "Classical antiquity", then, is the contemporary vision of Greek and Roman culture by their admirers from the more recent past. It remains a vision that many people in the twenty-first century continue to find compelling.

Subtopics
Geographical:
 * Ancient Greece
 * Hellenistic Greece
 * Ancient Rome
 * Dacia
 * Roman Dacia
 * Roman Britain
 * Roman Iberia
 * Ancient Macedonia
 * Ancient Troy
 * Gaul
 * Ancient history of Cyprus
 * Carthage
 * The Balkans in classical antiquity
 * Late Antiquity

Topical:
 * Classical architecture
 * Classical order
 * Classical education