Ancient Greece
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
Not a country, a collection of cities
Ancient Greece was not one state but hundreds of independent CITY-STATES (poleis), each with its own laws, army and gods in common. Athens and Sparta were the largest and were very different: Athens traded, argued and built; Sparta organised itself almost entirely around its army. They cooperated against Persia and fought each other for a generation afterwards.
Democracy, and who was left out
Athens developed DEMOCRACY — rule by the people — where citizens voted directly on laws rather than electing representatives. It is genuinely the root of the idea. It is also true that citizens were adult men born in Athens: women, enslaved people and foreigners could not vote, and enslaved people were a large part of the population. Both facts belong in the same sentence.
What survived
The words: democracy, politics, history, physics, theatre, athlete. The shapes: columns on courthouses and museums. 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 deliberately in 1896.
Athens around 430 BCE had perhaps 300,000 people. Take away women: not citizens. Take away enslaved people, perhaps a third of the population. Take away metics, foreign-born residents, some of whom had lived there for generations. What remains is roughly 30,000 to 50,000 adult male citizens — around 10 to 15%. It was a genuine first in the world, and it was not what we mean by the word today.