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Virtue & Power

Timeline

Ancient Greece Timeline

A chronology of ancient Greece from the Bronze Age and Homer through the Archaic and Classical ages to the conquests of Alexander and the Hellenistic world.

Greek civilization runs from the Bronze Age palaces through the rise of the city-state, the Classical age of Athens and Sparta, and the Macedonian conquest that opened the Hellenistic world.

  1. c. 1600–1100 BCE

    Mycenaean (Bronze Age) Greece; the world remembered in Homer.

  2. c. 1100–800 BCE

    The Greek Dark Age following the Bronze Age collapse.

  3. c. 776 BCE

    Traditional date of the first Olympic Games.

  4. c. 750–550 BCE

    The Archaic age — the rise of the polis, colonization, and the lawgivers (Lycurgus, Solon).

  5. 594 BCE

    Solon's reforms at Athens.

  6. 508 BCE

    Cleisthenes' reforms establish Athenian democracy.

  7. 490 & 480–479 BCE

    The Persian Wars — Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea.

  8. 461–429 BCE

    The age of Pericles; the building of the Parthenon.

  9. 431–404 BCE

    The Peloponnesian War; Athens defeated by Sparta.

  10. 399 BCE

    Trial and death of Socrates.

  11. 371 BCE

    Thebes under Epaminondas breaks Spartan power at Leuctra.

  12. 338 BCE

    Philip II of Macedon defeats the Greeks at Chaeronea.

  13. 336–323 BCE

    The conquests of Alexander the Great.

  14. 323–30 BCE

    The Hellenistic age — the Successor kingdoms; Greek culture across the Near East.

  15. 146 BCE

    Rome's sack of Corinth; Greece under Roman control.

The Greek genius for thought, art and political experiment, born in the small free city, outlived the political independence of the cities themselves, carried by Macedon and Rome to the future of the West.