Continued Notes on the Greeks Crucibles of Change

• In 508 B.C. ordinary people turn on rulers
• Clestanies thought that regular people should be able to govern themselves.
• Aristocrat - member of a ruling class (which Clestanies belonged to)
• Acropolis - a big area of rock that was build around a town
• Life in ancient Greece was really tough
• The lower classes were slaves to the higher classes
• Greece was an unlikely land to hold home to a great civilization because the region is very mountainous.
• Greece was divided into tiny nations called city - states.
• Sparta was one of the biggest city states were the people there were raised to be warriors
• The Spartans had no luxuries and comforts in there lives which made them so willing to die.
• The state of Athens was only the third greatest in Greece
• The Greeks stories inspired Clestanies
• The Iliad and the Odyssey were the greatest of the Greek stories. 
• Clestanies was interested in the heroes that belonged in these stories which than made Clestanies want to be a real - life hero
• The women in Sparta had a lot more of a role in the Spartan society rather than in the Athenian society.
• Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey
• Tyrant - someone who comes in and seizes control
• Pysistratus was Clestanies brother in law and takes over Athens and he was a tyrant but was a good tyrant
• Hippias is also a very important person of this time. His brother was killed and he became paranoid and thought that everyone was a enemy
• When this happened and all this confusion was taking place, Clestanies rose up against him and took leader of Athens
• Clestanies was one of the most powerful figures in Athens
• In olympia, there was  a the Olympic games were people competed for bragging rights. This is were anyone could race anyone no matter how much money you had.
• 40000 Greeks would go and watch the Olympics
• This was the first step for the Greeks to make a democratic culture.
• When Clestanies gained power, he found that others were conspiring against him. Isagoris was one of the main people.
• He turned to the Spartans to help take over the power of Clestanies
• He wanted to turn Athens into a subject state of Sparta
• The first targets of the new tyrant were the Aristocrats
• Over 700 households were cast out of Athens
• The people of Athens became angry and attacked the Tyrant and then he was forced to give up his position and when the Athenians over took him, they told Clestanies to come back and form an advanced government. This is the first time in history in which regular people over threw their own leader. The Athenians fought Isagoris for 2 days and nights and on the morning on the third day, they had won.
• So what Clestanies did when he got back he developed a democracy
• He made it so that the average person could contribute to the decisions that the government.
• They had a meeting place in which they discussed what the people wanted the government to do called the Agora. Everyone both poor and rich could discuss there feelings of what is going on and make there suggestions for how to fix or make better of what is going on in there civilization.
• The  people would gather there every nine days to discuss everything that was going on. 
• The thing that they voted with was white and black stones.
• Everyone except women could vote and make suggestions at the Agora.
• When Clestanies died, a new generation of Athenians took up his legacay. They were put up with many struggles and would have to defend there nation from other enemies.
• Pheidippedes made on of the most astonishing athletic achievements because he was running to Athens to say that they were being attacked by the Persian Empire.
• The Hoplites were the main people that defended the city from the Persians which landed in Marathon.
• The average person also went to defend Athens and they grabbed whatever they could use as weapons. They were out numbered by 2 to run
• Pheidippedes ran for help from Athens to Sparta 140 miles in just to days but when he got there, help was refused.
• However Athenians had won the battle.
• The Athenians killed over 6000 Persians in one day.
• They had defended their democracy.
• The Athenians returned to there city to celebrate their victory.
• Phemistocles was a Athenian General that helped them win the war
• Phemistocles was a man who had risen to power because of democracy
• Phemistocles had learned the skills of leader ship in Athens and he was now going to be one histories greatest leaders. 
• He realized that if the Persians came again, they were going to be sure that they weren't going to go on land
• Trireme was than invented because they would attack from sea. It was lightweight and it was made to ram and than sink the ship and 125 + men would be at the oars
• He wanted to make a Athenian navy but that would be really expensive and he was able to make the navy because they found in the year of 483 B.C. a whole lot of silver
• He was able to make 200 of those ships 
• The Persian king Darius died in 483 B.C.
• Xerxes took his position and he said that he would not rest until he took Athens and burnt it to the ground.
• His army numbered at over 2 million men
• 483 B.C. Xerxes set out to Greece
• The army consisted of many nations including Egypt
• The Athenians knew they were going to be the first target and so they turned to the gods by first sending a message to the Oracle to see how this would turn out for them
• The Oracle of Delphi was supposedly the best Oracle
• The question the Greeks asked was What could they do to save themselves.
• He said that the ships he had made are going to be a key to winning this war and he ordered the evacuation of Athens
• Salamis is an important island off of the coast of Athens
• The Persians burned the acropolis to the ground.
• The Persians now occupy Athens
• The Persians had a fleet 4 times the size of the Greeks forces 
• Phemistocles plan was to defeat the Persians at sea and he chose to fight them at the straights of Salamis
• Phemistocles sent a person to Xerxes to say to him that now is the time to strike which was a trap
• The Persians moved into the Straight over night and were supprized when they awoke they realized what trap they had fallen into
• They had moved so far up the straight that they had no room to move.
• They Triremes tore down on the Persians and they destroyed the Persian fleet
• By the end of the battle, the Persians had lost over 200 ships
• The Greeks had won the battle
• This forced the Persians to run back to their homeland because those ships also were the Persians supply ships
• The Athenians were now able to make a great empire of there own
• Throughout the next several decades in Athens, were probably the best years in Greece's history.
• 450 B.C. the Delian League had become all of Athens empire and they were keeping an eye on Persia
• Athens was now becoming one of the greatest supper powers in the world.
• It also became a great economical power because thats were a lot of traders would go and they had so many different goods from so many different countries
• The Athenians became a very rich country
• The rise to all of these powers came so fast in less than a few decades
• All of this was because of the democracy that the Athenians had
• The democracy was greatly protected and because of it they were able to form the great nation they had become.
• The Athenians also expelled anyone that had become to powerful because of the threat that the Athenians loosing their democracy.
• The Athenians had then ostracized Phemistocles
• He died in exile in Persia.
• Pericles wanted to glorify Athens even though he liked democracy
• He wanted Athens to be the most amazing city on the entire planet in all of history
• He wanted to do something to the Acropolis is Athens and wanted to reconstruct it 
• He wanted to build a Parthenon in the center of the Acropolis
• It was the most beautiful building ever built and it was built to show off Athens
• The total budget of building it was more than a billion dollars in modern day terms
• 20000 tones of marble was used to make the building
• The Acropolis is the most glorious thing of the Athenian empire
• When you walked in the door there was a 30 foot tall statue of Athena which had all gold and jewels over
• Frieze was on the wall going around the temple and were pictures of regular people doing their regular day thing
• The monument still stands on the Acropolis today
• It took 15 years to build the monument
• Aspasia was Pericles wife who is not even from Athens and she is very smart
• This relationship caused a scandle throughout Athens because he treated her as an individual
• The worlds first theater was in Athens
• The favored tales of the Greeks days were the tragedies
• One of the great Greek tragedies was Oedipus was a guy who was taken away from his parents and he than married his mom and had kids with her. He than gouged his eyes out.
• Pericles brought upon his own destruction
• He wanted to make Athens the undisputed leader on the Mediteranian
• Hubris was used to describe Pericles
• 431 BC Pericles was to wage war with the city state of Sparta
• The Athenians lost the Peleponnessian war
• Because they lost they were looking for someone to blame that lowered the moral of the city, they were looking for Socrates. 
• Socrates was arrested and than put to death
• He was put  to death by Hemlock poisoning