WORLD HISTORY 1 TOPIC REPORT 1
...ginnings as the Greek colonies Syracusa, Neapolis, Massilia and Byzantium. By the 6th century, Greek had become a cultural and commercial area much larger than mainland Greece. Greek colonies were not politically controlled by their founding cities, although they often did retained religious and commercial links with them. The Greeks both at home and abroad organized themselves into independent communities, and the city-state (polis) became the basic form of Greek government. The Greek city-states were originally monarchies. But the rise of a merchant class introduced different classes into the larger cities. From 650 B.C. onward, the aristocracies were overthrown and replaced by leaders called tyrants. The most important contribution that Greece did was the creation of democracy in Athens. It was a “direct” democracy. It was created around 507 B.C. It took two centuries to develop. This form of democracy isn’t the same as is the government of the United States today. While democracy proved to be successful in Athens, other city-states chose it for their government too. But most of them allowed only the upper class to vote. Most of the other city-states only allowed free adult male citizens to vote if they owned land and owned their own property. The people were divided into 3 groups: Citzens, Slaves, and Metics. Only the men could be citizens. The women had fewer or no rights. Democracy in Greece would disappear once the Romans conquered Greece in the first century B.C. There was no military, political, or cultural in the Greek world during the six century B.C. Different city-states developed separate cultures; these developments, however, spread across the Greek world. The city-state culture was, in many ways, a national culture because of the incredible interactions between the city states. The greatest flowering of cult...