Quotes from Roderick Beaton

the other, a fragile alliance of Thebes, Corinth, Argos, and Athens, backed by Persia.

After the death of Commodus in 192 CE, civil war and empire-wide chaos lasted

on and off, for almost a century.

the world's first functioning democracy is usually said to have been created in Athens during the years 508–507 BCE.

224 CE, a new Persian dynasty, the Sassanids, came to power.

In the minds of the ancient Greeks, it was the concept of the citizen that defined the state, rather than the other way round.

Flamininus was as good at his word. The legions departed. It was now up to the Greek city-states to manage their own affairs

The only large, centralised, developed state with a Mediterranean coastline was Egypt.

by a single proclamation all the Greeks inhabiting both Asia and Europe became free

they did so by invitation of the pharaoh.

And in this way was born the concept, central to all mathematics and science, of proof.

A commission arrived at Corinth headed by the victorious Roman general Titus Quinctius Flamininus.

Anywhere else on the coasts of the Mediterranean

you could beach your ship wherever you could find a sandy shore, put up your tent

Pythagoras of Samos, in the later sixth century BCE

Eratosthenes of Cyrene, a polymath and one of the first directors of the library

Sparta, by contrast, concentrated its power on land.

Eratosthenes was the first to use a scientific method to calculate the circumference of the earth

As the century wore on, the Delian League was matched by the 'Peloponnesian League'

during the 460s BCE, Athenian democracy had been radically overhauled.

Order was not restored until the emperor and four of his five sons had been apprehended and their severed heads displayed to the crowd in the Hippodrome

it seems to have been only at this time that the word demokratia came to be coined

This was what the Spartans had most dreaded for centuries. Now it came to pass.

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (the Great), better known in English as Pompey