Classical antiquity spans thirteen centuries of Mediterranean culture
Convention pins classical antiquity between Homer's eighth-century BC epics and the Western Roman Empire's fall in 476 AD. Greek culture, mixed with Near Eastern influences, shaped Mediterranean art, philosophy, and schooling until Rome absorbed and remade it.
The era opened as writing returned to Greece after the Late Bronze Age collapse. The first Greek alphabetic inscriptions appear in the early 8th century BC, around the time Homer is usually placed. Meanwhile Phoenician ports dominated Mediterranean trade, Carthage was founded in 814 BC, and within about a century Carthaginian strongholds dotted Sicily, Sardinia and Italy. Greek potters moved from geometric designs to an Orientalizing style, then to Corinthian black-figure ware and, around 530 BC, the red-figure technique credited to the Andokides Painter.
Rome's origins blend legend and digging. Tradition sets the founding by Romulus and Remus on 21 April 753 BC, while excavation finds settlement at the Forum by the mid-8th century and possibly on the Palatine two centuries earlier. The seventh king, the Etruscan-born Tarquinius Superbus, was driven out, and around 509 BC the Republic began, lasting more than 450 years as Rome grew from a Latin power into master of Italy.
Greece's classical age is usually bracketed by the fall of the Athenian tyrant Hippias in 510 BC and Alexander's death in 323 BC. Victory over Persia in wars fought from 499 to 449 BC left Athens leading the Delian League, which set it against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War that Sparta won in 404 BC. Thebes then broke Spartan power at Leuctra in 371 BC, before Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander carried Greek rule to Egypt and the edge of India. Greek became a common tongue from Egypt to Central Asia, and science flourished among Aristotle's followers.
Rome conquered Greece in 146 BC and reached its widest extent under Trajan in AD 117, holding the whole Mediterranean plus Britain, Dacia and Mesopotamia. Even its first emperors insisted the Republic still survived. The Renaissance of the 14th century and the neo-classical movements of the 18th and 19th centuries both drew on the surviving fragments of this world.
Source: Classical antiquity
