EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ANCIENT GREECE

Q: What time period do we define as ancient Greece, and which events bookend that period?

There’s really no such thing as ‘ancient Greece’, in the sense there’s a ‘modern Greece’. Ancient Hellas is what the Greeks would have called it, and it was really wherever Greeks (Hellenes) lived permanently – where they made homes, spoke Greek, worshipped gods in the Greek way, and so on.

The Greek language is attested as early as c1400 BC in a script we know as Linear B – this was a syllabic script, with every sign standing for a syllable rather than a letter. Linear B was devised for a very different Greek civilisation than the one we’re exploring in this essential guide. So, you could say that ancient Greece goes back as far as 1400 BC, but I would date it from around 1000 BC until the end of the Hellenistic period and the death of Cleopatra – who was an Egyptian Greek – in 30 BC. After that, the Roman period of Greek history takes over.

Q: How many ‘periods’ of ancient Greece were there?

Within ancient Greece (c1000–30 BC) there were three