Ancient Greece Tyranny and Democracy 800-399BC

This unit covers the broad sweep of ancient Greek history from the eighth century when Greeks began to settle ('colonize') outside Balkan Greece, through the extraordinary developments of the Late Archaic and High Classical periods, to the end of the fifth century when Athens lost her long war with Sparta. During these years Greeks were ruled by kings, aristocrats, oligarchs, tyrants, and (some of them) by themselves, in the world's first democratic systems. The unit focuses on political and economic development, the conflict with Persia, and the Peloponnesian War. It examines how literary, archaeological, and epigraphic sources are used to reconstruct the past.