Classical Greece was never one country. It was hundreds of small self-governing states that traded, argued and fought, and produced an unreasonable amount of lasting thought while doing it.
The Greek world ran on the polis, a city plus the land around it, governing itself with its own laws, coins and festivals. Athens experimented with putting decisions in the hands of ordinary citizens, an idea that looked reckless to most of its neighbours and produced a century of loud political argument. The same cities supported philosophers, mathematicians and doctors who were often outsiders passing through. Several of the names here worked in Alexandria rather than Greece itself, which is a reminder that the Greek world stretched a long way past the Aegean by the time this thinking was written down.
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
Play it insteadAnswer: B. Polis
Why: A polis meant the town together with the farmland and villages around it, running its own laws and calendar. There were several hundred of them scattered across the Greek world and its colonies.
Answer: A. Ostracism
Why: Voters scratched a name onto a broken piece of pottery, and the man named most often had to leave, though he kept his property and his status. It was aimed at anyone thought to be getting dangerously powerful rather than at any particular crime.
Answer: D. Pericles
Why: Pericles dominated Athenian politics for around thirty years and redirected money collected from allied states into the building works. Later writers record critics accusing him of dressing the city up like a vain woman with other people's funds.
Answer: C. The Peloponnesian War
Why: Sparta and its allies eventually won, helped by Persian money that paid for a fleet capable of beating Athens at sea. The main surviving account was written by Thucydides, an Athenian commander who was exiled partway through the war.
Answer: B. Cleisthenes
Why: By mixing men from the city, the coast and the inland districts into every tribe, Cleisthenes cut across the old family power blocs. Solon's earlier reforms had eased debt slavery but left those blocs intact.
Answer: A. Diogenes
Why: Diogenes of Sinope is the figure most associated with the Cynics, who treated property and reputation as obstacles to living well. Nearly all the stories about him come from writers working centuries afterwards, so how much is true is anyone's guess.
Answer: D. Stoicism
Why: The name comes from the Stoa Poikile, the painted colonnade in Athens where Zeno taught in the open. Roman writers including Seneca and Marcus Aurelius carried the ideas on three centuries later.
Answer: C. Euclid
Why: Euclid worked in Alexandria around 300 BC and set everything out from a handful of definitions and postulates. The Elements stayed in use as a working textbook for well over two thousand years.
Answer: B. Eratosthenes
Why: He measured the midday Sun at Alexandria and at Syene to the south, then scaled the difference up using the distance between them. Depending on the length of the unit he used, his figure lands within a few percent of the modern one.
Answer: A. Hippocrates
Why: The oath belongs to a collection of medical texts associated with the island of Kos, written by many hands rather than by one man. The famous line about doing no harm does not actually appear in the oath's original wording.
Floods, tricksters and dying gods turn up across unconnected cultures. Three explanations, and how to tell which applies.
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