800 BC), archaeologically characterised by the protogeometric and geometric styles of designs on pottery. įurther information: Timeline of ancient GreeceĬlassical antiquity in the Mediterranean region is commonly considered to have begun in the 8th century BC (around the time of the earliest recorded poetry of Homer) and ended in the 6th century AD.Ĭlassical antiquity in Greece was preceded by the Greek Dark Ages ( c. For this reason, Classical Greece is generally considered the cradle of Western civilization, the seminal culture from which the modern West derives many of its founding archetypes and ideas in politics, philosophy, science, and art.
The Hellenistic period ended with the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean world by the Roman Republic, and the annexation of the Roman province of Macedonia in Roman Greece, and later the province of Achaea during the Roman Empire.Ĭlassical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on ancient Rome, which carried a version of it throughout the Mediterranean and much of Europe. The conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon spread Hellenistic civilization from the western Mediterranean to Central Asia. This was followed by the age of Classical Greece, from the Greco-Persian Wars to the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Roughly three centuries after the Late Bronze Age collapse of Mycenaean Greece, Greek urban poleis began to form in the 8th century BC, ushering in the Archaic period and colonization of the Mediterranean Basin. In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period.
AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other territories-unified only once, for 13 years, under Alexander the Great's empire (336-323 BC). Ancient Greece ( Greek: Ἑλλάς, romanized: Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( c.