Category Classical World B.C. 1000 – 500 A.D.

The two hundred years after 800 B.C. saw a great expansion of the Greeks by colonisation. Colonisation is a more orderly kind of migration. The Greeks now lived in numerous small communities, often no more than towns with surrounding farmlands.…

The “Dark Age” of Greece (c. 1100 – 800) was a time of migration and settlement. Whole peoples were in migration mode. People on the move do not have time to write records for us to read later nor do…

Parts of the story of the Trojan War are told in two poems the Iliad (Ilium = Troy) and the Odyssey (Odysseus was one of the Greek Generals) by Homer, the earliest Greek poet. A hundred years ago the war…

In the tenth year of the war the Greek hero Achilles slew Hector, the Trojan, in single combat. (Paris, the cause of all the trouble, never distinguished himself very much in the fighting.) The death of Hector was a cruel…

Helen “of Troy“ was in fact Helen of Sparta where she was the wife of King Menelaus. She only spent part of her life in Troy, but it was those years which made her famous. The cause of her going…

So much for the legend. What of the facts? At Cnossos, near Herakleion, in Crete are the ruins of an enormous palace, which must have needed somebody like Daedalus to design it. Its honeycomb of cavernous cellars, traces of which…

The Greeks, then, had their story of the creation of the world, of a great flood and a heroic ancestor; but the only fact we have met so far is that a tribe called Hellenes did in fact exist in…

GREECE is a country that people go to on cruises in spring, summer and autumn. Like other people who go on cruises, they are in search of sunshine. They pack bathing suits. But, unlike most other people who go on…