LO3- Greek city-states

• CITIZENS AND COMMUNITIES: THE GREEK CITY-STATES
• the tribes of the dark ages began to develop city-states.
• communities like this had been developed before (the Sumerians and Phoenicians).
• no powerful kingdom or empire to limit their independence.
• social  and political development of the Greek city-state took this type of community in unprecedented new directions.
• Greeks called the city-states polis.
• Greek city-states were small places
• generally consisting of no more than a town and a few square miles of surrounding countryside.
• Athens and Sparta - considered giants among the city-states of Greece.
• both about the size of some US counties.
• population of both town and country ordinarily numbered only a few thousand 
• Athens reached about 250,000.
• the town of Athens was built around a hill, at the top of which stood an acropolis.
• ACROPOLIS - a combination of fortress and temple precinct.
• both fortresses and temples were vitally important to the Greek city-states.
• they were fiercely competitive communities that continually fought one another.
• their single most important civic activity was the worship of the god or goddess on whom each community was thought to depend.
• Athens, worshiped the goddess of Athena, and from the Athenian acropolis her temple, the Parthenon, or "Place of the Maiden", overlooked the whole city.
• Greek city-states were much like the Sumerians or Phoenicians, but they differed in one important respect: for the Greeks, the city-state was a community in which all of its members had a share and in which all are entitled to participate to a greater or lesser extent.
• the Greek language is the first to have been known to specific word for a member of such a community:"citizen."
• CITY-STATES AND CITIZENS
• The notion of citizen participation seems to have originated partly in geography.
• The Greek city-states first developed at exactly the time that the Assyrians were reaching for power westward from Mesopotamia.
• but Greece was protected by many miles of land and sea.
• with no universal empire to keep them in order, the city-states were free to struggle among themselves.
• they occupied a land that was far less wealthy than Mesopotamia or Phoenicia.
• in their conflicts with one another, they could not afford professional soldiers or large Calvary forces.
• instead, they had an infantry army made up of their own male citizens.
• they fought in formidable shock units of several hundred men each.
• PHALANXES - "rollers"
• poorer citizens fought as light-armed infantry.
• they were harassing they enemy ahead of the phalanx's charge 
• or, covering its vulnerable flanks.
•  this way of fighting was not new.
• much of the hoplites' equipment seems to have been modeled on that of Assyrian heavy infantry.
• among the Greeks, it was ordinary male citizens fighting in this way on whom the city-states depended for survival.
• the scene of the city-state as a community of all its citizens was reinforced by tradition and myth.
• each city-state was believed to have been founded by a family or clan form a divine or semi-divine founder.
• MONARCHY, OLIGARCHY, TYRANNY, DEMOCRACY
• monarchy - a state in which supreme power is held by a single, usually hereditary ruler (a monarch) 
• oligarchy - a state in which supreme power is held by a small group.
• tyranny - rule by a self-proclaimed dictator. (a tyrant)
• democracy - in ancient Greece, a form of government in which all adult male citizens were entitled to take part in decision making.
• earliest - monarchy.
• most powerful oligarchy - Sparta
• tyrannies were not successful so they turned into democracies.
• women were big on meeting and organizing things.
• Spartans were dependents of Greeks who conquered the southern mainland
• they wanted to push west for rich soil.
• age of 7 - boys were taken from their families to be taught how to fight
• age 20 - age of marriage.
• age 30 - free form the barracks
• women were praised if they gave great military ideas.
• Athens was one of the most wealthy and powerful city-states in Greece.
• voting was by a show of hands.
• women - not a big part of the democracy - neither were slaves.