How did geography contribute to the development of independent Greek city states?
357540
had good trading routes
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It's hard for textbooks to say anything nice about the Spartans. Take up any world history textbook and read; you'll find that the Spartans were "an armed camp," "brutal," "culturally stagnant," "economically stagnant," "politically stagnant," and other fun things. The reality, of course, lies somewhere behind the value judgements. Greek history does, after all, come down to us through the eyes of the other major city-state in Greece, Athens, a bitter enemy and rival of Sparta. The two represent diametrically opposed concepts of the Greek polis and its relations with other city-states; they also represent diametrically opposed concepts of the individual's relationship to the state. Despite all the rhetoric in Athens and in the European historical tradition, we should keep in mind that the Spartans believed they lived in the best of all Greek worlds, and many of their Greek neighbors agreed with them. The rivalry, then, between Sparta and Athens, which would erupt into a disastrous war for Athens, was also an ideological and cultural rivalry.\n\n   The single, overwhelming fact of Spartan history is the Messenean War. In the eighth century BC, Sparta, like all her neighbors, was a monarchy with a limited oligarchy. In 725, however, needing land to feed a dramatically growing population, the Spartans marched over the Taygetus mountains and annexed all the territory of their neighbor, Messenia. The Messenians occupied a fertile plain and the Spartans found themselves with more than enough land to support themselves and their newly conquered people. However, like all conquered people, the Messenians did not appreciate the loss of their independence. With the help of the city-state of Argos, the Messenians revolted in 640 BC. This was no ordinary revolt, for not only did the Messenians almost win, they almost destroyed Sparta itself.\n\n   Here's how the situation stood for Sparta at the end of the Messenian revolt. Almost defeated, controlling the territory of a subject population that outnumbered their population ten to one , it was only a matter of time before this subject population would overrun their conquerors. So the Spartans invented a new political system as dramatically revolutionary as Athenian democracy in the north: they turned their state into what amounts to a military state.\n\n   The Messenians were turned into agricultural slaves called helots . We describe their lives as the life of a "serf," for they worked small plots of land on estates owned by Spartans; part of their produce went to the master of the estate, and the remainder went to the helot farmer and his family. There's no question that the life of the helots was a miserable life. Labor was long and hard and the helots always lived right on the border of subsistence.\n\n   But Spartan society itself changed. The military and the city-state became the center of Spartan existence. The state determined whether children, both male and female, were strong when they were born; weakling infants were left in the hills to die of exposure. Exposing weak or sickly children was a common practice in the Greek world, but Sparta institutionalized it as a state activity rather than a domestic activity. At the age of seven, every male Spartan was sent to military and athletic school. These schools taught toughness, discipline, endurance of pain (often severe pain), and survival skills. At twenty, after thirteen years of training, the Spartan became a soldier. The Spartan soldier spent his life with his fellow soldiers; he lived in barracks and ate all his meals with his fellow soldiers. He also married, but he didn't live with his wife; one Athenian once joked that Spartans had children before they even saw the face of their wives. The marriage ceremony had an unusual ritual involved: at the end of the ceremony, the man carried his wife off as if he were taking her by force (this did not
263039
It is spelled "Arcadia" and the orgin of the word came from a region of ancient Greece frequently chosen as background for pastoral poetry.
53957
The old Greece.They had first improvised banks in history.
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Fear of the growing power of Athens\n\nCauses of the war\nAccording to Thucydides, the cause of the war was the "fear of the growth of the power of Athens" throughout the middle of the 5th century BC. After a coalition of Greek states thwarted an attempted invasion of the Greek mainland by the Persian empire, several of those states formed the Delian league in 478 BC in order to create and fund a standing navy which could be used against the Persians in areas under their control. Athens, the largest member of the league and the major Greek naval power, took the leadership of the league and appointed financial officers to oversee its treasury, which was located on the island of Delos, the League headquarters. Over the following decades Athens, through its great influence in the League, was able to convert it into an Athenian empire. Though some members of the League embraced Athenian conversion, just as many were bitterly opposed to the governments imposed upon them. Gradually League funds went more directly into Athenian projects, rather than into defending the Aegean and Greece from Persia. Pericles had the League treasury relocated from its home on Delos to Athens, from whence most of the funds were used in vast building projects such as the Parthenon. As the member states of the League gradually lost their independence, it transformed into the Athenian Empire, whose growth Sparta watched with concern. The League, based around the Ionian and Aegean Sea, was by its very nature reliant on ships for trade and to fend off pirates and Persian fleets. As the League developed into the Athenian Empire, member states gradually lost control of their own ships, which they gave to Athens annually as tribute. Consequently, Athens began to accumulate a huge navy. This increase in Athenian military power allowed it to challenge the Lacedaemonians (commonly known as the Spartans), who, as leaders of the Peloponnesian League, had long been the sole major military power in Greece.\n\nThe immediate cause of the war comprised several specific Athenian actions that affected Sparta's allies, notably Corinth. The Athenian navy intervened in a dispute between Corinth and Corcyra, preventing Corinth from invading Corcyra at the Battle of Sybota, and placed Potidaea, a Corinthian colony, under siege. The Athenian Empire also levied economic sanctions against Megara, an ally of Sparta. These sanctions, known as the Megarian decree, were largely ignored by Thucydides, but modern economic historians have noted that forbidding Megara to trade with the prosperous Athenian empire would have been disastrous for the Megarans. The decree was likely a greater catalyst for the war than Thucydides and other ancient authors admitted, more so than simple fear of Athens supremacy.\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponesian_war#Causes_of_the_war
1033928
Extremely interesting.  In a small country, which you can drive north to south in seven hours and east to west in 5, you have very diverse geography and vegetation.  The mediterranean is all along the coast with either cliffs or sandy or pebble beaches.  Mountains can be extremely high, which you can reach the top of in two hours of driving from the coast line, Cedar forests are as old as 3,000 years and mentioned in the Bible.  A valley - the Bekaa - between two mountain chains, green and fertile and producing wonderful food.  The coast itself has citrus, olives, salads, and much more.  The mountains and valleys have numerous grains, fruits, grapevines.  Some towns and cities are highly developed, some still have no running hot water.  It can be cold and hot within three hours of driving but there are no abrupt changes of temperature in one town at a time.  Some mountains have snow year round.  There is no desert.  It is a sunny country with almost 350 days of sun a year.  The country has many rivers.
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Actually, since the 60's and the 70's Greece's education policy has had an eye to multi-culturalism (which is to which I assume you refer by heterogeniety rather than to the types of courses offered) as a nod to the move toward courting EU membership and offering an adequate education to foreigners residing in Greece (up to 10 percent of the population).\n\nThe Greek government was also looking to transform Greece from a sending state to a host state, which would necessitate accomodating the children of immigrants.  I'm not really sure to what you refer when you say "oriental in their needs" "eastern" referring to the immigrants to Greece?
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It is an arbitrary geopolitical map. It was drawn by government cartographers. There were no permanent settlements, so one could simply draw a line down a map based on lattitude and longitude. This was easy, try Yugoslavia.
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Do you mean arcadia in greece?\nArcadia was home of the temples of Zeus and Hera, and was also the location of the Olympic Stadium, where the Olympic Games were held in Classical times.\n\nDue to its remote, mountainous character, Arcadia has always been a classical refuge. So during the Dorian invasion, when Mycenaean Greek was replaced with Doric Greek along the coast of the Peloponnes, it survived in Arcadia, developing into the Arcadocypriot dialect of Classical Antiquity. Arcadocypriot never became a literary dialect, but it is known from inscriptions. Tsan is a letter of the Greek alphabet occurring only in Arcadia, shaped like cyrillic И; it represents an affricate that developed from labiovelars in context where they became t in other dialects. Tsakonian Greek , still spoken on the coast of the modern prefecture of Arcadia, in the Classical period considered the southern Argolid coast immediately adjoining Arcadia, is a descendant of Doric Greek, and as such is an extraordinary and much noted example of a surviving regional dialect of Classical Greek. The capital of Tsakonia is the Arcadian coastal town of Leonidi.\n\nOne of the birth-places reported for Zeus is Mount Lycaeum in Arcadia. Lycaon, a cannibalistic Pelasgian king, was transformed into a werewolf by Zeus. Lycaon's daughter was Callisto. It was also said to have been the birthplace of Zeus' son, Hermes.\n\nArcadia remained a rustic, secluded area, and its inhabitants became proverbial as primitive herdsmen leading simple pastoral unsophisticated yet happy lives, to the point that Arcadia may refer to some imaginary idyllic paradise, immortalized by Virgil's Eclogues, and later by Jacopo Sannazaro in his pastoral masterpiece, Arcadia (1504); see also Arcadia (paradise).\n\nThe phrase Et in Arcadia ego traces back to a 1647 painting by Nicolas Poussin, also known as "The Arcadian shepherds". In the painting the phrase appears as an inscription on a tomb. This phrase is said to be an anagram which, when the letters are rearranged, spells out the message "I tego arcanum dei", which loosely translates to "I conceal the secrets of God". This meaning is given in Baigent and Leigh's book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", which is the main inspiration for Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code".\n\nIn the 20th century, Arcadia experienced extensive population loss through emigration, mostly to the Americas. Many Arcadian villages lost almost half their inhabitants, and fears arose that they would turn into ghost towns. Arcadia now has a smaller population than Corinthia. Demographers expected that its population would halve between 1951 and the early 21st century.\n\nIn the mid to late 20th century a power plant began operating.
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Did you mean Zeus? If so it would appear his host city was Oylmpia, Greece.\n\nOlympia is an ancient city in Greece which was the site of the Ancient Olympic Games. \nThe Olympics were of fundamental religious importance, contests alternating with sacrifices and ceremonies honouring both Zeus (whose colossal statue stood at Olympia), and Pelops, divine hero and mythical king of Olympia famous for his legendary chariot race, in whose honour the games were held
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Ancient Athens, for much of its history, had a direct democracy, which however worked much like an oligarchy, because only land-owning male Athenians were full citizens. There was a a small, representative body called a Boule that decided small issues that came up on a day to day basis, but any major issue, such as declarations of war, was put up to a vote of all citizens.
638576
There were a couple of reasons. Greece and the Mediterranean Sea are very much connected. Greece besides being part of the continent of Europe is also many islands, which in effect were stepping stones across the sea. The Med. is a relatively calm body of water with good sailing and one is never too far from land. \n\nAlso Greece is not know as a fertile cornucopia as was the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. It was a lot easier to depend on the sea.
33890
In Greece...I think...when the first Olympics occured
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He strengthened the government by getting the people's support.  Athens had been very thrifty, but Pericles spent huge somes of money on plays and buildings and other things the people enjoyed.  He basically spoiled the people so that they supported the government more.
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The earliest on record go back to Greece in the Hellenic period------approx. 500 B.C. All Greek citizens were able to vote. Citizenship was held by free males who held property.
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Hi,\n\nI think I can answer the question.\n\nRome and Greece are in close proximity. Ideas would have flowed between them even as early as the Bronze Age.\n\nHowever, later on, Rome conquered Greece and the other Greek kingdoms in what we now would call the Middle East. Remember, Alexander the Great conquered the whole Persian Empire and ended up at the Indus River in India. (I am not saying Rome got that far. The Roman Empire settles around the Mediterranean. But, a lot of the Greek kingdoms were assimilated.)\n\nNow Rome was a backwater as far as culture was concerned. When the Romans conquered Greece etc they borrowed a lot of Greek culture. The Greeks used to describe everything in terms of their own culture and the Romans picked up the habit. For example, Zeus in Greece was equated with Jupiter in Rome. Both were sky gods. Venus, the Roman goddess of love was equated with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Because Greek culture was seen as superior, mythologies were copied.\n\nTo give you some idea of the strength of Greek culture, when the Roman Empire fell in the west (Approx 450 AD), it continued in the east and is now known as the Byzantine Empire. The interesting thing is that the official language was Greek, not Latin. Greek had been preserved in the Roman Empire in the east for over 500 years and Latin had not really penetrated the area.
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The ancient Greek scholar and librarian (in fact, the Head Librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria) Eratosthenes is called the "father of geography"