Ancient Greece reaches us through stone, papyrus and a great deal of argument. These thirty-six stories stay with what the record supports: the machine that picked Athenian juries, the runner who went to Sparta rather than Athens, the statues paid for by cheating athletes, and the town on Thera that was emptied before the volcano buried it.
Every tile in a Ancient Greece game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Leaders and Thinkers
nine stories
1The debt cancellation with a soothing name
On the tile: Solon
Before Solon, an Athenian could borrow against his own body, so a bad harvest could hand a farmer to his creditor as property. Plutarch says Solon's first public measure wiped out existing debts and forbade anyone from lending on the person of a borrower ever again. He also had an ear for language. Athenians came to soften ugly things with kindly names, calling taxes contributions and the prison a chamber, and Plutarch says Solon was the first to try it, calling his cancellation of debts a disburdenment. Some writers, he adds, thought the relief was only a cut in the interest.
The old Athenian tribes ran on bloodlines, which meant a handful of families ran Athens. Cleisthenes replaced the four tribes with ten, and built each new one from three districts assigned by lot, the land having been split into ten parts around the city, ten along the coast and ten inland, so that no tribe was a single neighborhood. The Constitution of the Athenians credits him with one more touch: citizens were to be named by their home district rather than their father, so that new citizens would not stand out.
At the height of his career, Pericles proposed that only those with Athenian parents on both sides should count as Athenians. Plutarch says that years later, with his house short of an heir, Pericles stood before the assembly he had persuaded and asked it to suspend that same law for one case, so the family name would not die out. The Athenians, who had recently apologized for turning on him, agreed.
Athenian women were not supposed to be public figures, and Aspasia was argued over for centuries afterward. Plutarch pauses in the middle of a war story to ask what art or power this woman had, that the leading men of the city did as she wished. He reports that she was known as a teacher of rhetoric, that Socrates came to see her with his students, and that his friends brought their wives along to hear her talk.
5Convicted, he proposed free dinners as his sentence
On the tile: Socrates399 BC
An Athenian jury of 501 citizens convicted Socrates in 399 BC. By his own account in Plato, thirty votes the other way would have acquitted him. Athenian procedure then let the convicted man propose his own punishment, and Socrates suggested that the city owed him his meals at public expense, the honor given to Olympic chariot winners. He later offered a fine instead, at his friends' urging. The jury was not persuaded.
Cicero said that if Plato's prose was silver, Aristotle's was a river of gold. Anyone who opens Aristotle today wonders what he meant, because the polished works Cicero read are gone. What survives reads like what it probably is: lecture notes, drafts written and reworked, running records of investigations kept for use inside his own school. Scholars still argue over which treatises were stitched together by later editors.
Later Greeks thought so highly of Sappho that they called her the Tenth Muse, and her songs filled nine books. What survives is one complete poem, or two if you count a piece put back together in this century. Everything else comes in scraps: lines quoted in ancient books on grammar, and torn papyrus dug out of the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. New fragments still turn up. Even her birthplace on Lesbos is unsettled, Eressos or Mytilene, the island's main city.
Herodotus reports that an Egyptian king sent Phoenician crews down the Red Sea with orders to keep going until they came home past the Pillars of Heracles. They were gone three years, stopping each autumn to sow grain and wait for the harvest. On their return they said that while sailing around Africa they had the sun on their right hand. Herodotus wrote that down and added that he did not believe it. It is exactly what a crew south of the equator would see.
Pausanias says Aeschylus had won great renown both for his poetry and for his part in the sea fights at Artemisium and Salamis. Then he reports what stood on the tragedian's grave: his name, his father's name, his city, and the claim that the grove at Marathon and the Persians who landed there could speak for his courage. The plays go unmentioned. Whether Aeschylus chose those words is another question. The epitaph is only said to be self-penned, and he died far from Athens, at Gela in Sicily.
1The palace you visit was partly poured in concrete
On the tile: Knossos1900-1931
Arthur Evans began digging at Knossos in 1900 and kept at it until 1931, and he did not leave the ruins as ruins. Where the excavation found the imprints of wooden columns, his architects replaced them in concrete. The collapsing Grand Staircase was rebuilt on steel joists and brick vaulting. Evans called the process reconstitution. Visitors have argued about it ever since, and the crisp modern lines are part of what they are looking at.
On Thera, houses still stand two and three stories high because a volcano buried them. The order of events is the good part. An earthquake came first, wrecking the town; the survivors recovered their dead, buried them, and left the island. The archaeologist Christos Doumas told Current World Archaeology that repair work had already been started when the eruption came, which means some of them had come back to patch the place up.
Later Greeks looked at the fortifications of Mycenae and nearby Tiryns, built from blocks no crew of theirs could shift, and concluded that giants had done the work. Pausanias says the walls, and the gate where the lions stand, were held to be the work of the Cyclopes. Strabo adds that seven of them came from Lycia to wall Tiryns for Proetus. The masonry is still called cyclopean, and at Tiryns it runs up to eight meters thick and thirteen high.
The sanctuary where the oracle of Apollo spoke lay under a working village called Kastri. Archaeologists had known where Delphi was for a long time; the obstacle was the people living on top of it. An earthquake in 1870 wrecked much of the village and made the idea thinkable. The houses were bought out and pulled down, a small railway was laid to carry off the spoil, and the French began their Great Excavation in October 1892.
Bronze statues of Zeus stood at Olympia that no worshipper had paid for. Pausanias says they were funded out of the fines levied on athletes who broke the rules, and the locals called them Zanes. The first six went up after Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three boxers, one of them the defending champion. Six more followed when Callippus of Athens bought off his fellow pentathletes. Athens refused to pay the fine, so Delphi stopped answering Athenian questions until the money arrived.
Built between 447 and 438 BC, the Parthenon spent most of its long life in use as something other than a temple: first a Christian church, later a mosque, with the old stairway rebuilt as a minaret. Its ruin took one afternoon. In 1687 Venetian forces besieging the Acropolis bombarded the rock while the Ottoman garrison was storing gunpowder inside the building. The explosion brought down large parts of it, and that is the ruin visitors photograph.
The theater at Epidaurus was not part of an entertainment district. It stood inside the sanctuary of Asklepios, a healing center where the sick came looking for a cure, with baths, a library, guest quarters and sports grounds around it. UNESCO credits the design to Polykleitos the Younger of Argos and calls the proportions and acoustics a masterpiece of Greek architecture. The building has been in use again every summer since 1955, for an annual festival.
Sailing around the Peloponnese was slow and dangerous, so Corinth built a shortcut for boats. The diolkos was a paved road across the isthmus, up to six meters wide, laid in blocks of poros stone with two grooves cut down the middle a meter and a half apart. Boats were hauled across on a platform and put back in the water at a paved quay. The Greek culture ministry dates it to the sixth century BC and says warships were still using it in the ninth century AD.
Delos was Apollo's birthplace in myth, and during the war with Sparta an oracle told the Athenians to purify the island for him. Thucydides says they took away every grave of everyone who had died there. Then came a rule: no one was to die on Delos and no woman was to give birth there. Anyone close to either was ferried to Rheneia, near enough that Polycrates, a tyrant of Samos, had once dedicated it to Apollo by chaining the two islands together.
Michael Ventris published his first article on the undeciphered script of the Bronze Age palaces at eighteen, then went off to train as an architect and kept working on the problem in his spare hours. Invited onto BBC radio in 1952 to discuss the Knossos tablets, he announced instead that he could read them, and that the language was an early form of Greek. A Cambridge classicist named John Chadwick heard the broadcast and wrote to him. Ventris died in a car crash four years later.
The Greeks did not invent writing. They borrowed a Phoenician system that recorded consonants and left the vowels to the reader's guess. Their change sounds small and was not. Phoenician had signs for sounds that Greek did not use, so the Greeks took those spare signs and assigned them to vowels. Now every sound in a word could be written down, which is why the result is usually called the first true alphabet. The borrowing dates to about 800 BC.
Once a year Athens could exile a man before he grew dangerous. Each voter scratched a name on a potsherd. If fewer than six thousand sherds were cast the vote was void; otherwise the leading name left the city for ten years, keeping the income from his property. Plutarch tells the story everyone repeats: a voter who could not write handed his sherd to a stranger and asked him to put down Aristides. The stranger was Aristides.
Athenian juries were not summoned by a clerk, they were drawn by lot on the day. Every juror carried a boxwood ticket with his name, his father's name, his district and a letter of the alphabet. The tickets went into ledged frames in the balloting rooms, and copper dice, black and white, were thrown in, one white die for every five tickets. As each die was drawn the herald called out the men the lot had chosen. There was no panel to pack the night before.
Scholars spent centuries arguing about how a trireme could work three banks of oars without the rowers fouling one another, and most of them concluded it could not. A historian and a naval architect drew one anyway, and the Hellenic Navy built it. Olympias was launched in 1987 with 170 oars on three levels. Six sea trials between 1987 and 1994 showed that a crew could row her efficiently and fast. She is now a museum ship, and on open days the public can take an oar.
Greek tragedy started as a chorus telling a story together in song. Aristotle records the change that turned it into drama: Aeschylus raised the number of actors from one to two, cut back the chorus, and gave the dialogue the leading part. Sophocles then brought in a third actor and painted scenery. Dramatic dialogue, and everything built on it since, started with adding one more person to the stage.
The marble serenity we associate with Greek art is an accident of weathering. Statues and temples were painted, in strong colors, and the Greeks pictured their gods that way. Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann have spent decades recovering the schemes with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light and powdered mineral pigments; under ultraviolet, paint that wore away centuries ago still leaves a shadow on the stone. Fourteen of their full-size reconstructions went on show at the Met in 2022, beside forty of the museum's own antiquities.
Democritus of Abdera, born about 460 BC, taught that everything is made of indivisible bodies moving through empty space. The word atom is his side of the argument: atomos, uncuttable. He and his teacher Leucippus held that these bodies are infinite in number, vary in size and shape, are perfectly solid with no gaps inside, and catch on one another by tiny hooks. It was reasoning rather than evidence, and almost none of his own writing survives.
The line everybody quotes, first do no harm, is not in the Hippocratic Oath. The classical text opens by swearing to Apollo the Physician, Asclepius, Hygieia and Panaceia. It promises to keep the sick from harm and injustice, which is close but not the same thing. It rules out giving a deadly drug. And it forbids the swearer to use the knife, even on patients suffering from stones, leaving the cutting to the men who did that work.
Herodotus counts the dead at Marathon in 490 BC as about six thousand four hundred on the Persian side and one hundred ninety-two Athenians. He follows the tally with something stranger. An Athenian named Epizelus, fighting bravely, lost his sight in the middle of the battle although nothing had struck him anywhere on his body, and he remained blind for the rest of his life. Herodotus repeats the man's own account and offers no explanation.
A runner did run, but not the run we remember. Herodotus says the Athenian generals sent a professional distance runner, whose name comes down as Philippides or Pheidippides, to Sparta to ask for help before the fighting at Marathon started, and that he reached Sparta the day after leaving Athens, a distance Isocrates put at 150 miles. Herodotus says nothing about a dash from Marathon to Athens and nothing about the runner dying. That story came later, and in 1894 Michel Bréal turned it into a race for the first modern Olympics.
Herodotus lists who was actually holding the pass in 480 BC: three hundred Spartans, a thousand men from Tegea and Mantinea, a hundred and twenty from Orchomenus and a thousand more Arcadians, four hundred Corinthians, two hundred from Phlius, eighty Mycenaeans, seven hundred Thespians and four hundred Thebans, joined by a thousand Phocians and the Opuntian Locrians in full force. At the end, when Leonidas sent the other allies home, the Thespians chose to stay under their general Demophilus, and the Thebans stayed because Leonidas kept them. The number everyone remembers leaves all of them out.
Artemisia took over Halicarnassus when her husband died and sailed with Xerxes against Greece, bringing five ships that Herodotus rates the best in the fleet after the ships of Sidon. At Salamis, cornered, she rammed a vessel on her own side. The watchers on shore assumed it was an enemy, and nobody from the sunken ship survived to correct them. Herodotus says the king then remarked that his men had become women and his women men, and adds that this is only what people say.
After the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, thirty-one Greek cities paid a tithe of the spoils for a golden tripod at Delphi, set on a bronze column of three snakes twisting together. The Phocians melted down the gold in the next century. The column survived, and in AD 330 Constantine had it hauled to his new capital, where it still stands in the old hippodrome, minus the serpents' heads. Delphi got a bronze copy of its own monument in 2015.
6He wrote the sickness down so it could be known again
On the tile: The plague
When sickness swept Athens in the second year of the war with Sparta, Thucydides did something unusual for a historian. He refused to argue about causes, he said, and would instead set down what the disease looked like, so that anyone who met it again would recognize it. He could do that, he explains, because he had caught it himself and watched it work on other people. He recovered, and the passage he left is why we can still read what it did.
The Athenian expedition to Sicily had failed, the ships were loaded, and the army was about to slip away from Syracuse when the full moon went dark. The European Space Agency dates that eclipse to 27 August 413 BC. Thucydides says the soldiers took it for a sign, and that the general Nicias, whom he thought far too fond of divination, would not discuss leaving until they had waited out the twenty-seven days his seers demanded. They waited.
Athens had been shielded for decades by long walls running down to its harbor, and losing the war meant losing them. Xenophon writes that the Spartan admiral Lysander sailed into Piraeus, the exiles came home, and the victors set about the demolition with great enthusiasm, working to the music of flute players, in the belief that the day was the beginning of freedom for Greece. The defeat of Athens was, to the men swinging the picks, a festival.
A stone lion stands on the battlefield at Chaeronea, where Philip of Macedon defeated the allied Greek cities in 338 BC and where the Theban unit called the Sacred Band is believed to have died. Nineteenth-century diggers clearing the ground before the broken sculpture was rebuilt found a mass grave around the lion and recorded what they saw. Those excavation notebooks were lost, and have only recently been found again. Since 2022 a team has used the old drawings to match scattered bones to individual men.