A marble statue of a standing young man, a kouros, from Archaic Greece
Marble statue of a kouros (youth), ca. 590–580 BCE
Marked Delphi

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Early Greece: Homer and the city-states

After centuries without writing, Greeks took up the alphabet, set down the poems of Homer, founded colonies from Spain to the Black Sea and organised themselves into hundreds of independent city-states.

Place
Delphi · Corinth · Miletus · SyracuseEurope
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IHomer and the Iliad
  2. IIThe polis
  3. IIIColonies across the sea
  4. IVDelphi and its oracle
  5. VTyrants and lawgivers
  6. VISappho of Lesbos

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Homer
  • Sappho
  • Solon

Objects

  • Painted pots
  • Kouros statues
  • The Dipylon vases

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

800 BC to 500 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?