The Greeks didn’t (and don’t) call themselves “Greeks’ or Greece ‘Greece.’ That comes from the Latin Graecia.  In Greek Greece is Έλλάδα (Hellada), Greeks are Έλληνες (Hellenes), and Greek is Έλληνικά (Hellenika).

Historians sometimes debate when history begins. There was a theory that history begins when there are written records. So the Stone Age occupants 12 millennia ago don’t count. Besides those peoples aren’t the ancestors of historical Greeks.

Another civilization flourished in the area in the 34^th through 21^st centuries – the Minoans (of King Minos fame).  The 21^st century BC is as far removed from the advent of the Christ as we are.

Around the 21^st century BC the Mycenaeans moved into the area. They were ‘Greek speaking.’ The center of this civilization, which dominated the eastern Mediterranean was Mycenae in the Peloponnese, that part of Greece that extends south of the Gulf of Corinth which nearly divides northern and southern Greece. I hope to do a day trip from Athens to visit that site, famous for its walls and Lion Gate. There are some early written records, but they consist mostly of inventories and tax records. And some are in a script which hasn’t been deciphered yet.

That civilization was followed by the Early Iron Age, sometimes referred to as the ‘Greek Dark Ages’ – mostly because we don’t know much about it. During this period writing seems to have disappeared.

In the 8^th century BC Greece began to emerge from that ‘Dark Age’ into an age known as ‘Archaic Greece.’ Written records reappear.

The major period that interest most of us is known as ‘Classical Greece.’ This is a roughly 200 year period in the 5^th and 4^th centuries BC. This is the era of the philosophers Socrates and Plato; of Greek tragic and comic drama, of the famous politicians such as Pericles and of democracy. It began with the Persian Wars in which the Greeks successfully repulsed the attempts of Persia to conquer the Greeks. Herodotus is generally credited with writing the first history – an account of the Persian Wars. (Marathon and Thermopylae are the famous battles.) Toward the end it saw the Athens controlled Delian League that dominated the Mediterranean. Toward the end of the period Greece underwent a kind of civil war (war among different Greek city states) known as the Peloponnesian War – recorded by another early historian – Thucydides.

Classical Greece came to an end with the conquests of the Macedonian Alexander the Great. That era is known as ‘Hellenistic Greece’ and the influence of Greece in that period is known as ‘Hellenization.’ (There are a couple of words deriving from the name the Greeks used for themselves coming into our language. In this period the Greek Greeks really do fade into the historical background as the focus of history shifts to Asia and Egypt – the areas conquered by Alexander.

Greece proper was drawn into the growing empire of the Roman Republic in the 2^nd century BC. Roman domination of Greece continued into the 4^th century AD. During this Roman period, Athens was sort of a ‘university town.’ Romans went there for advanced education. But it wasn’t all that important politically and certainly not militarily.

In 324 Constantine the Great divided the administration of the Roman Empire into Roman west and the east governed from his new capitol, Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey). Greece went with this eastern area and we refer to this as ‘Byzantine’ – Constantinople having been built on the site of the previous city, Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire finally fell to Islamic rulers in 1453. Greece was as much a victim of the Crusades as the Middle East. The Crusaders did more to weaken the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire as the armies of Islam that finally ended Byzantine rule.

This was followed by domination and control by the Ottoman Empire that lasted until 1821 when Greece won its independence for the first time since the Romans made it a province of their Empire. Modern Greece suffered during both World Wars. Liberation following WWII resulted in a communist regime and eventually civil war. A democratic government was established in 1974 which continues today.