Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece refers to the Greek speaking world of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean from the Archaic period of the eighth century BCE through the Hellenistic period that followed Alexander the Great's conquests in the fourth century BCE. Rather than a single unified state, it was a shifting collection of independent city states, or poleis, the most influential of which, Athens and Sparta, developed sharply different political systems, direct democracy in Athens and a militarized oligarchy in Sparta. Greek civilization produced foundational work in philosophy, through figures such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, in drama and history writing, in mathematics and astronomy, and in art and architecture whose forms, including the classical orders of columns, shaped Western building for millennia afterward. Greek culture and language spread across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East after Alexander's conquests, forming the Hellenistic world that Rome later absorbed and that carried Greek learning into the Roman and, eventually, Byzantine and Islamic worlds.