Shadowing Practice: Ancient Greece in 18 minutes - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon We might think we already know everything about ancient Greece.
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The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon The Parthenon We might think we already know everything about ancient Greece.
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The Parthenon, the 300 Spartans,
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and blind Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are familiar to all.
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Yet there were far more than 300 Spartans.
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The Parthenon was actually built as a kind of central bank bank
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and no such unified state as ancient Greece with Athens as its capital ever existed.
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The Trojan War was as distant in time to Alexander the Great as the Vikings are to ourselves.
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So let's try to get our heads around ancient Greece and hopefully a little quicker than in 2000 years.
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3,716 years ago, the pyramids of Egypt were already standing,
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and Babylon was the world's first megapolis,
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home to a prototype of the Tower of Babel.
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On Crete, however, a mysterious civilization was flourishing.
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It had three-storied palaces, and all this with no defenses.
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The Cretans apparently led a relatively peaceful life,
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admiring flowers, blue monkeys and beautiful women,
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walked around topless, while the men preferred loincloths or skirts.
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The Cretans had a navy and their own writing system,
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and nobody has yet succeeded in deciphering them.
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Until one day, on the island of Thera,
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the modern-day wedding paradise of Santorini,
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all this ended in the greatest volcanic eruption in European history.
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Part of Thera sank beneath the waves,
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presumably giving rise to the myth of Atlantis,
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tsunamis hundred meters high, and vast ash clouds stretching for thousands of miles around.
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Crete never recovered from this eruption,
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and invaders soon swarmed in.
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The once peaceful island then filled with bronze weapons and tablets written in a new strange language,
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which turned out to be the earliest known form of Greek,
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spoken by warlike tribes, which had settled the nearby Greek mainland,
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building such cities as Thebes, Athens, Mycenae and Pylos.
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But these cities already sheltered behind six-meter walls.
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Life here was not peaceful at all.
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A few centuries later, the Greeks themselves explained them with legends of Cyclopean builders
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and were no longer aware that any other civilization had come before them on Crete.
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By this logic, even the half-bull Minotaur was half-Greek.
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Nobody batted an eyelid at the fact that games with bulls were a purely Cretan form of entertainment.
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Greeks appropriated everything they met on their way with great virtuosity.
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In conquering Crete, they had conquered the seas.
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Marine trade saw them grow even richer.
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Almost all the inscriptions found among the heaps of gold in the tombs of Mycenae are financial accounts.
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Mycenae took the lead in the fight against Troy in Homer's Iliad.
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As recently as 150 years ago,
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this story was considered a fairy tale,
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until a millionaire and amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, excavated Mycenae.
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And Troy, a replica of the legendary Trojan horse, now stands here.
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Archaeologists have indeed found traces of fire and destructions at Troy,
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but this was accompanied by the decline of virtually all regional settlements.
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Unceasing attacks by barbarian tribes turned the whole Mediterranean into a war zone.
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The next 400 years were a dark age.
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Literacy fell into oblivion, leaving us with nothing to read about the events then taking place.
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Fortunately, what we do have is Homer.
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Everybody has heard about the blind poet,
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the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
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In actual fact, we don't know what Homer looked like,
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or when he lived, whether he was one man or many.
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But even though the Iliad and Odyssey were written down after the Dark Ages,
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the daily routines of its characters take us right back to this time.
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Odysseus, for instance, was only king by virtue of his larger flocks of flesh pigs and goats.
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His father slept on the ground in ashes with his slaves.
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Homer's characters were illiterate and used heads of cattle in place of money,
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a far cry from Crete and Mycenae with their three-storied palaces.
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What had happened?
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The Mycenaean civilization was destroyed by the Dorians,
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who, though Greek, were totally savage.
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The earlier population either hid in the mountains or fled to the east.
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Of all the achievements of the previous civilization,
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the Dorians left only the essentials,
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the sailing ship and the potter's wheel.
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It took a further four centuries for them to start adding the most primitive depictions of animals and people.
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At around the same time,
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the turn of the ninth and eighth centuries BC,
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the Greeks in Ionia borrowed a completely new alphabet from their Phoenician neighbors.
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This bore little resemblance to the linear writing styles of Crete and Mycenae.
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Do you recognize the modern Greek letters?
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The fog of Dark Ages had started to clear.
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Only here do we begin to recognize ancient Greece,
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the country that never actually existed.
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This was no state with an established border or capital,
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but rather a multitude of distinct and completely independent cities, polices.
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How did this come about?
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Greece is a land divided by sea and mountains into separate little parts of which only a handful was suitable for agriculture.
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Even grain had to be imported.
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But why not grow it yourself,
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over there, across the sea?
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Thus, the great colonization began.
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If the first historians are to be believed,
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Miletus alone founded 90 colonies.
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The heel of the Italian boot was colonized too,
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followed by the alphabet that would form the basis for Latin,
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for Latin and take over the world.
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Greek civilizations spread from the modern-day Rostov-on-Don to Marseille,
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laying the foundations of the French wine industry.
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Fragments of amphoriae scattered from Gibraltar to Georgia.
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These were containers for grain and wine.
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The latter was diluted with water in proportions of one to three.
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Only barbarians would drink it neatly.
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For trading purposes, coins appeared.
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Like the alphabet, these too were borrowed from their neighbors.
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According to Plato, a few centuries saw the Greeks settled around the Mediterranean like frogs around a pond.
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And yet, two cities, Athens and Sparta,
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almost did not participate in colonization.
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The Spartans descended from the warlike Dorians that had destroyed the Mycenaean civilization.
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They solved the land issue by conquering their neighbors in the broad,
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fertile region of Massinia.
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The locals were declared helots,
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something midway between slaves and serfs,
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and greatly outnumbered the Spartans proper.
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Sparta transformed from an ordinary polis into a military camp,
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whose main task was the prevention of any uprising.
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Things were quite different in Athens.
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Land hunger there had forced the aristocracy and the people to come to terms.
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And from this, democracy was born.
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But first, the tyrants took power.
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A Greek tyrant did not necessarily terrorize people, rather the opposite.
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Typically, he was an aristocrat who had quarreled with his peers,
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holding out promises of a better life.
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He used the common people's support to seize power by force.
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From then on, all his energies were focused on retaining power.
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The tyrant therefore made no reforms and simply drove any rival aristocrats from the polis.
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To divert the attention of the populace,
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tyrants introduced and fostered new festivals and cults.
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The dissatisfied could perish in the brazen bull.
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But you can't roast everyone.
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The tyrants were overthrown, and the suppressed aristocracy attempted to negotiate with the people,
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giving birth to Greek democracy.
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If an ancient Greek were to see modern democracy,
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he would just say one word, oligarchy.
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Ancient democracy was direct, with no representatives.
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If a polis had 6,000 citizens,
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they could all freely participate in the assembly.
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Admittedly, the number of citizens was less than a quarter of all residents,
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excluding slaves, women, and the migrant workers called metics.
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By the middle of the 6th century,
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the Ionian cities were most advanced, eclipsing Athens and Sparta.
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They were the first to master such Eastern innovations as the alphabet,
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coinage, mathematics, naval fleets, and complex trade logistics.
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Meanwhile, a sudden threat appeared to their rear, the vast Persian Empire.
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Meletus still hoped to preserve its independence,
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and with Athenian aid attempted to resist.
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Unfortunately, this was in vain,
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and the Persians torched the city and pressed on.
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Their attempts to subdue Greece lasted 20 years.
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We owe our knowledge of this to the first historian, Herodotus.
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According to his account, as many Greeks fought for the Persians as supported Athens and Sparta,
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how did they win?
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The first reason was military innovation.
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At the Battle of Marathon,
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the Greeks used the phalanx,
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a body of troops fighting in close formation.
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The Persians allegedly lost 6,400 men and the Athenians a mere 192.
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Plus the messenger who ran the 42,192 meters to Athens to announce the victory,
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after which he dropped dead.
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The second reason was already becoming a meme.
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At the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae,
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King Leonidas led the 300 Spartans,
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who held back hundreds and thousands of Persians for three days.
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Sure, a few thousand Greeks from other cities and their helot subjects were a big help,
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yet the Spartan spirit was key.
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Not for nothing did they live in barracks,
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even during times of peace.
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And the third reason was the fleet.
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Several years prior to the invasion,
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silver deposits had been found near Athens.
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This windfall might have been spent on anything,
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but it was decided to put towards a construction of 200 trirums.
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Fast and maneuverable warships with three rows of oars.
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Thanks to this new naval force,
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the Greeks broke the Persians in a decisive naval battle.
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A counter-offensive began.
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The Greeks of Sicily defeated their old rival Carthage.
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A scattered array of polices thus defended the territory in which classical Greek culture was born.
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To permanently defeat Persia and liberate the cities in Asia,
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Athens founded a maritime union.
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Finally, Athens had become the center of the Greek world.
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150 cities agreed to make annual payments for the maintenance of a common army and navy.
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The treasure was kept on Delos,
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the sacred island of Apollo.
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Shortly afterwards, however, patronage was passed to Athene,
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motivated by greater fiscal reliability, of course.
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Little imagination is required to suppose which polis was chosen for her headquarters.
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The most elite real estate in the 5th century BC was the Parthenon.
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It was constructed not so much as a temple,
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but as a kind of central bank,
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housing all the Allied treasury.
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Without these funds, the Greek classics wouldn't have existed at all.
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No sculpture, drama, philosophy.
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The strategist and orator Pericles became the head of this new financial center.
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He concluded a 30 years peace with Sparta,
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restored the Acropolis that had been sacked by the Persians,
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and extended fortress walls to the city harbor.
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This was rebuilt to a grid layout,
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a forerunner to New York.
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While the sculptor Phidias was immortalizing grease and stone,
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the philosopher Anaxagoras expressed an outrageous idea But the sun was not the god Helus,
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but a burning body equal in size to Theloponnese.
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A whole great culture was created in half a century.
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Sparta and its allies grew jealous of Athens' prosperity.
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A Cold War had smoldered between them ever since the victory over the Persians,
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and things warmed up in 431 BC.
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The Spartans and their allies besieged impregnable Athens.
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The two inhabitants took cover behind the walls.
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The grain supply from Africa was cut off,
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and those shipments that made it through brought either typhus or the plague.
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Even Pericles himself perished.
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He was replaced by demagogues.
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Whoever promised the most was elected strategist.
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So Alcibiades, the unscrupulous nephew of Pericles,
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became the head of the Athenian armed forces.
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He proposed a short but victorious war.
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Let's pack it all in and sail for Sicily,
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as if the altercations with Sparta weren't enough.
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The fleet was ready, but something inexplicable happened the night before the voyage.
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All around the city, someone smashed off the most prominent parts of the Hermes statues.
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Alcibiades was accused of provocation,
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but he fled to Spartan to beg political asylum.
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The chief strategist then proceeded to advise the enemy.
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The Allies began to drop out one by one.
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Athens agreed to a humiliating peace with the condition of demolishing its defensive walls.
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They had targeted Hermes, and the might of Athens was crushed.
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On the bright side, this was the heyday for Greek tragedy and comedy.
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Aeschylus, Sophotus, and Euripides, the three great tragedians,
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and the comedic playwright Aristophanes,
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created plays that are still relevant today.
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And yet they penned them in the full confidence that the first production would be the last,
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as was the way in theatre at the time.
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Classical drama was always about current events,
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and while things may have been getting worse in the city, culture flourished.
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There was no winner in the Peloponnesian War.
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All Greek cities fell into decline.
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On the other hand, unexpected surprises would come from the Macedonians,
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distant relatives of the Greeks who had always been regarded as semi-barbarians.
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And then even the great philosopher Aristotle went to work in Macedonia as tutor to an extremely talented boy boy.
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The boy's father was Philip II.
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It was he who built up the Macedonian kingdom, defeating a Greek coalition.
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He almost managed to unite Greece in order to fight the Persians.
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But Philip was killed, and his son,
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known to us as Alexander the Great,
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blazed his way through Asia,
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broke the army of the Persian king Darius,
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but still refused to turn back, reaching India.
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Thus, A new world was born, the Hellenistic world.
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Greek and Eastern culture blended to form a new home,
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as cities by the name of Alexandria sprang up in almost every land,
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though without any democracy.
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All officials in Asia spoke Greek,
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and new Oriental gods became neighbors with the old Greek ones at Mount Olympus.
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Alexander was proclaimed a god himself in Egypt.
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Protocol obliged all to follow Eastern tradition and fall at his feet.
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We can only wonder at how this might have ended.
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Greek decrees have been found urging the spread of Buddhism,
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but Alexander died young.
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Babylon, the place of his death,
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had become the capital of an empire,
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which immediately began to crack at the seams.
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While the successors of Alexander warred with one another,
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a new ambitious power was growing in the West.
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In 146 BC, the Romans conquered Greece,
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and in 30 BC, they conquered the last stronghold of Hellenism, Egypt.
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But Greek culture was victorious even here.
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Spread by the Romans, it finally conquered the world.
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Romans began to read the Iliad and Odyssey in Greek,
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followed by the Greek New Testament too.
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In 330, Emperor Constantine built a new city on the site of the old Greek colony of Byzantium, Constantinople.
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This was the starting point for the history of the Byzantine Empire,
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which extended the life of Greek culture another thousand years,
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leaving us the weird Russian alphabet for instance.
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Did you like our video?
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We have another one.
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This time about ancient Rome.
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Or you can watch the shortest history of Russian art of the 20th century.
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We've squeezed 100 years into just 25 minutes.
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And that's not all.
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Subscribe to the Arzamas channel and you'll be sure not to miss out anything.
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Context & Background
The video "Ancient Greece in 18 Minutes" presents a fast-paced exploration of the fascinating history of Ancient Greece. The speaker highlights significant events and cultures, such as the construction of the Parthenon, the tales of heroic figures like the Spartans, and the legendary events detailed in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. This informative content not only enlightens viewers about the intricate past of this civilization but also offers a rich tapestry of language and cultural nuance that English learners can absorb. By focusing on the early civilizations of Greece, the speaker provides a thorough overview that is both engaging and educational, making it an excellent resource for practice.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- “There were far more than 300 Spartans.” - A historical reference that illustrates the importance of perspective.
- “Built as a kind of central bank.” - A phrase that teaches vocabulary related to economics and history.
- “A mysterious civilization was flourishing.” - Useful for describing unknown or intriguing topics.
- “The greatest volcanic eruption in European history.” - A strong statement that can enhance storytelling.
- “Filled with bronze weapons and tablets.” - A phrase demonstrating the importance of archaeology in history.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
If you're looking to improve your English pronunciation and speaking skills using the shadowing technique, here’s a simple guide based on the video:
- First Listen: Watch the video once without any interruptions. Focus on understanding the main ideas presented.
- Select Clips: Choose short segments (10-30 seconds) to avoid feeling overwhelmed. The nuances of historical terms will be easier to grasp.
- Use a Shadowspeak App: Utilize a shadowing app to play the selected clips. It will help you repeat after the speaker more easily.
- Practice Aloud: Listen to the chosen clips a few times and practice speaking along with the speaker. Pay close attention to intonation, stress, and pauses.
- Record and Compare: Record your voice while using the shadowing technique. Compare your pronunciation to the original speaker's delivery to identify areas for improvement.
By integrating these practices into your study routine, you can enhance your speaking abilities and find confidence in using complex language. Shadow speak will enable you to communicate more fluently, using historical and cultural references effectively in everyday conversations.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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