This page will take you through the history of Ancient Greece from its beginning after the collapse of the Mycenaeans in the 11th c. BC to its demise in 146 BC when Ancient Rome conquered the region.
There were three distinctive periods of Ancient Greece: Archaic Greece (800-480 BC), Classical Greece (480-323 BC) and Hellenistic Greece (323-146 BC).
Click Here for the Timeline of Ancient Greece
It took nearly three hundred years after the collapse of the Mycenaeans for Greek cities to begin to form in the 8th c. BC, which ushered in the period of Archaic Greece and the colonisation of the Mediterranean Basin. This was followed by the period of Classical Greece, which began with the end of the Greco-Persian Wars in the early 5th c. BC, and included the Golden Age of Athens. In the late 4th c. BC, Greece was conquered by their neighbours the Macedonians under Philip II and his son Alexander the Great. The death of Alexander the Great ushered in the period of Hellenistic Greece until again Greece was conquered and annexed by the Romans in 146 BC.
Classical Greek culture had a powerful influence on Ancient Rome, which carried its own version of this culture to all areas of its empire. For this reason, Classical Greece is generally considered the cradle of Western civilization, the formative culture from which the modern West derives many of its founding archetypes and ideas in politics, philosophy, science and art.
Hellenistic Greece (323-146 BC)
Digital Maps of the Ancient World 