In Our Time

The epic attributed to Homer tells of an episode in the Trojan War framed by the wrath of Achilles, who withdraws after being insulted by Agamemnon and returns only when his friend Patroclus is killed by the Trojan hero Hector.

Many historians give the name Bronze Age Collapse to what appears to have been a sudden, uncontrolled destruction around 1200 BC, and the reasons for the changes remain open to debate.

With John Bennet, Yannis Hamilakis, Ellen Adams

In 1900 the British archaeologist Arthur Evans began excavating ruins at Knossos on Crete, uncovering a palace complex belonging to a Bronze Age civilisation that flourished for twelve centuries and reached its height three and a half thousand years ago.

The lower orders of society were ravaged by debt in Solon's Athens, to the point where some were being forced into slavery.

The Battle of Salamis halted the further Persian conquest of Greece, and further Greek victories the next year at Plataea and Mycale brought Persian withdrawal and the immediate threat of conquest to an end.

Plato's Crito and Phaedo describe the last days of Socrates in prison in 399 BC awaiting execution by hemlock, arguing in the Crito that escape would be wrong and in the Phaedo for the soul's immortality.

Pericles dominated Athenian politics for thirty years while its democracy strengthened and its empire grew and the Parthenon rose on the Acropolis, then in 431 BC gave a funeral oration before dying of plague within two years.

In 4th century BC Athens, Demosthenes delivered speeches against Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, urging resistance before it was too late, speeches later imitated by Cicero against Mark Antony in Rome.

Born into the Macedonian royal family in 356 BC, Alexander the Great gained control of Greece and conquered the Persian Empire by defeating its king Darius III, spreading Greek culture and language into regions it had not reached before.

The Greek city of Thebes, home in myth to Heracles, Dionysus, Oedipus and Cadmus among others, was infamous for supporting Xerxes in the Persian War and was defeated by the rising force of Macedon at Chaironea in 338 BC.

Plutarch was clear he was writing lives, not histories, pairing famous Greeks and Romans to contrast and compare their virtues and vices side by side, a focus on great men's inner lives that fascinated Shakespeare.

Plato alone tells of the island of Atlantis, lost long before his time, across the Timaeus and the Critias, using the tale to test what an ideal republic might be and whether Athens could ever become one.

Aristotle explored what happiness means and how to live a good life in his Nicomachean Ethics, addressed to the elite of Athens on the argument that knowing how to live well would let them rule others better.

First performed in Athens in 405 BC as the city faced defeat by Sparta, Euripides' tragedy has Pentheus, king of Thebes, torn apart by his own mother for denying the divinity of his cousin Dionysus.

Researchers worked out that the Antikythera Mechanism was some kind of astronomical analogue computer, and detailed examination indicates that it showed the positions of planets, the sun and moon.

While living by the Sea of Marmara and on Lesbos, Aristotle examined a wide range of life forms and recorded the development of the dogfish embryo, some conclusions such as the spontaneous generation of flies later proving wrong.

Writing around 380BC, Plato applied the question of whether it is always better to be just than unjust to both the individual and the city-state, imagining an ideal city that might be ruled by philosophers.

Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic philosopher from c490-430 BC, argued against motion with paradoxes such as an arrow in flight moving at none of the points it occupies, and Achilles never overtaking a tortoise given a head start.

Owing to a series of accidents the bulk of Sappho's work was lost to posterity, though the fragments that survive give a glimpse of her poetry.

The Muses were Greek goddesses of poetry, song, music and dance, consistently linked to artistic inspiration despite varying in number and role across different accounts, raising for philosophers the question of how far a creative person shaped that inspiration.

Thucydides wrote The History of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC about a conflict in which he had himself taken part, arguably the first historian to attempt a rational, impartial and objective approach to his scholarship.

According to some accounts Aesop was a strikingly ugly slave granted the power of speech by the goddess Isis, remembered today as the supposed author of fables that remain among the most popular works of Ancient Greek literature.

Written in the 4th century BC, Plato's Symposium sets a dialogue at a dinner party where Socrates and the playwright Aristophanes are among the guests speaking of Eros, giving rise to the modern notion of Platonic love.

Founded in Athens in the fourth century BC, Epicureanism held that everything in the Universe is built from atoms and void, and that the goal of human life is pleasure, which Epicurus defined as the avoidance of pain, not luxury.

A large body of work originally attributed to Hippocrates, the Hippocratic Corpus, cannot have been written by a single author.

Written in the 4th century BC, Aristotle's Poetics is the first known work of literary theory, examining drama and epic poetry and analysing tragedy, and defends poetry against attacks by other thinkers including Aristotle's own teacher Plato.

On the fields of Troy, according to Homer, Achilles told a fallen soldier he too had his death and strong destiny before killing him, prompting the question of how the Greeks defined their heroes in classical society.

For over a thousand years between approximately 800 BC and 400 AD, Delphi on Mount Parnassus was the most sacred place in the ancient world, its Oracle consulted through a priestess called the Pythia believed to speak for Apollo.

Sparta was a ferocious opposite to cosmopolitan Athens, instilling military discipline in its young men through communal living while subjugating the Helots, yet it also produced poets, as Tyrteaus wrote marching songs and Alcman wrote choral lyrics.

Aristotle developed a language of oligarchies, democracies and monarchies, and having witnessed his home town of Stagira destroyed by Philip of Macedon, he tried to establish a way of preserving a good society.

The Greek myths, a collection of stories with a cast including mighty Zeus, Jason and the Argonauts, wily Odysseus, beautiful Aphrodite and the three-headed dog Cerberus, were constantly rewoven across centuries of Greek and Roman civilisation.

Born in 469 BC into the golden age of Athens, Socrates so profoundly influenced philosophy that every thinker before him is simply known as pre-Socratic, though he refused to write anything down and left nothing in his own hand.

Neoplatonism, founded in the 3rd century AD by Plotinus, reinterpreted the works of the Greek thinker Plato and outlined a complex cosmology linking the human with the divine, headed by a power the Neoplatonists called the One.

Heraclitus criticised the poets Homer and Hesiod as ignorant and separately accused the mathematician Pythagoras of fabricating claims.

In his Almagest, written in the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy proposed that the Earth sat at the centre of the universe and explained the motions of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars through uniform circular epicycles.

Pythagoras is probably best known for the theorem that bears his name, though it remains uncertain he developed it himself, and the Pythagoreans, who said they were his followers, held that number could explain the truths of the world.

In Aristophanes' The Birds, two Athenians sought a Utopian refuge and founded a city of birds christened, in 414 BC, 'Cloud Cuckoo Land'.

To Pythagoras, numbers were mystical and were said to prove God, and to Plato the ideals beyond life's reality are found in mathematical perfections, immutable truth, and God again in numbers.