Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Maps
- Introduction
- PART I THE ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL PERIODS: PROGRESS AND PROBLEMS
- 1 Free-Standing Statues
- 2 Greek Temples and Their Decoration
- 3 Painting and Painted Pottery
- PART II THE FOURTH CENTURY BC AND THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD: INNOVATION AND RENOVATION
- PART III THE ROMAN WORLD: ADOPTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE GREEK LEGACY
- Epilogue
- Appendix: How We Know What We Think We Know
- Glossary
- Further reading
- Index
1 - Free-Standing Statues
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Maps
- Introduction
- PART I THE ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL PERIODS: PROGRESS AND PROBLEMS
- 1 Free-Standing Statues
- 2 Greek Temples and Their Decoration
- 3 Painting and Painted Pottery
- PART II THE FOURTH CENTURY BC AND THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD: INNOVATION AND RENOVATION
- PART III THE ROMAN WORLD: ADOPTION AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE GREEK LEGACY
- Epilogue
- Appendix: How We Know What We Think We Know
- Glossary
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
THE GREEKS
The beginnings of Greek civilisation after the decline of the Mycenaeans were not very glorious. By about 1000 bc, people speaking various Greek dialects were living around the Aegean Sea. Principal among them were the Dorians, who lived mostly on mainland Greece, and the Ionians, who populated many of the islands and the west coast of Asia Minor (Map 1). They gathered together in small, widely separated communities, many of which eventually developed into poleis (‘city-states’, as they are often, somewhat imprecisely, called; singular polis).
The earliest communities were poor, illiterate, and isolated from one another as well as from the rest of the world. Slowly they began to prosper and develop. By the middle of the 8th century bc, when the Homeric poems were being composed, craftsmen could already produce huge funerary monuments of pottery covered with precise and elegant decoration (Fig. 59). Soon an increase in population encouraged the now overcrowded Greeks to send out colonies, east to the area around the Black Sea and west to Sicily and southern Italy. The poleis eventually also began to trade more widely and so came into contact with the peoples and the cultures of Egypt and the Near East. These ancient, literate and brilliant civilisations, with their rich and accomplished art forms, awed and astonished the Greeks.
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- The Art of Greece and Rome , pp. 4 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004