Read the sea first
Open a map of ancient Greece and look at the water before the land. The Aegean Sea, scattered with islands, joins mainland Greece to the coast of Asia Minor; the islands lie close enough to work like stepping stones across a stream. The mainland, by contrast, is cut up by mountains, so many Greek cities faced the sea and lived from it.
That is why the Greek world looks the way it does on a map: a ring of cities around a sea, with more cities planted along distant coasts. Each was an independent city-state with its own laws and gods, so the map has no capital, only centres of different weight.
The mainland: Attica, the Isthmus and the Peloponnese
Start with Athens, in the region of Attica. The city stands a few kilometres inland, around the rock of the Acropolis, and its harbour was Piraeus. From about 458 BCE the two were joined by the Long Walls, about 7 kilometres long (40 stades), so the city could not be cut off from the sea.
To the west lies Corinth, at the crossing of the land routes between central Greece and the Peloponnese, the large peninsula that hangs below the mainland on a narrow neck of land, the Isthmus. That crossroads position explains much of Corinth’s weight, and in the seventh century its potters invented painting in black silhouette.
In the Peloponnese, the region of Argolis in the north-east holds the Bronze Age citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns. Sparta lies further south, in Laconia, with its sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. And in Elis, in the north-west, Olympia sits in a river valley, where the Kladeos flows into the Alpheios. Its sanctuary of Zeus held the Olympic Games regularly from 776 BCE, and its temple housed Pheidias’ gold and ivory Zeus.
Central Greece: Delphi, the navel of the world
North of the Gulf of Corinth, in the region of Phocis, Delphi lies between two towering rocks on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The Greeks considered it the navel of the world, the omphalos, and its sanctuary of Apollo, which grew from the eighth century BCE, belonged to all Greeks. Unlike Olympia, Delphi climbs a mountainside in terraces, so the same idea, a sanctuary shared by all Greeks, took two very different shapes.
The islands: Cyclades and Dodecanese
In the middle of the Aegean, the Cyclades form a rough circle (the name comes from kyklos, circle) around the small island of Delos, sacred to Apollo, whose sanctuary goes back at least to the ninth century BCE. Two other Cycladic islands, Naxos and Paros, supplied the marble of statues such as the New York Kouros and the Peplos Kore. Further east, Samos had the great temple of Hera, and in the south-east Rhodes, the largest island of the Dodecanese, built its acropolis in the Hellenistic age (third and second centuries BCE).
Ionia: the Greek cities of Asia Minor
On the far side of the Aegean, the coast of Asia Minor (today western Turkey) was lined with Greek cities, the region called Ionia. Ephesus, near modern Selçuk, had the famous Temple of Artemis, of which little remains today. Miletus was the home of Hippodamus, the planner who divided cities into regular blocks. This is the coast where the Ionic order of architecture took shape, and where the cities competed in colossal stone temples in the sixth century BCE.
The west: Magna Graecia, and Cyprus to the east
From the eighth century BCE Greek cities founded colonies overseas, and the richest cluster grew in southern Italy and Sicily, an area known as Magna Graecia, Great Greece. Syracuse, on the south-east coast of Sicily, was founded by Corinthians in the eighth century BCE. Agrigento (Greek Akragas), on the south coast, was founded in the sixth, and its Valley of the Temples is still lined with temples. Paestum, south of Naples, was Poseidonia, a colony of Sybaris, with three Doric temples that still stand.
Further east, on Cyprus, Palaepaphos (near modern Kouklia) had a sanctuary of Aphrodite. And after Alexander the Great (died 323 BCE) the map stretched dramatically, with Greek rulers and cities from Egypt to the edge of India.
Where to see it
Every name on this map is a site you can visit today. In Greece: the Acropolis and Agora of Athens, Corinth, Mycenae and Tiryns, Sparta, Olympia, Delphi, Delos, Samos and Rhodes. In Turkey: Ephesus. In Italy: Syracuse, Agrigento and Paestum. In Cyprus: Palaepaphos. Opening hours change with the season, so check each official site before you plan the trip.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Acropolis, Athens (404); Archaeological Site of Delphi (393); Archaeological Site of Olympia (517); Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns (941); Delos (530); Medieval City of Rhodes (493); Ephesus (1018); Archaeological Area of Agrigento (831); Syracuse and the Rocky Necropolis of Pantalica (1200); Paphos (79).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: “Greek Art in the Archaic Period” (2003); “Ancient Greek Colonization and Trade and their Influence on Greek Art”; “Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition”.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Ancient Corinth; Acropolis of Sparta; Acropolis of Rhodes.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.107.1 and 2.13.7; Aristotle, Politics 2.1267b (Perseus Digital Library).
