Практика Shadowing: Ancient Greece in 18 minutes - Изучайте разговорный английский с 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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В этом видео мы знакомимся с древней Грецией всего за 18 минут. Рассматриваются ключевые моменты ее истории, такие как Партенон, война при Трое и загадочная цивилизация критян. Спикер подробно объясняет, как в течение веков культура и искусство Греции влияли на образ жизни людей, и как различные исторические события формировали их представления о войне, мире и мифах. Эта информация не только интересна, но и полезна для изучения английского языка через видео.
Топ-5 фраз для повседневного общения
- “The Parthenon was built as a kind of central bank.” – Партенон был построен как своего рода центральный банк.
- “The Trojan War was as distant in time to Alexander the Great as the Vikings are to ourselves.” – Троянская война была так же далека для Александра Великого, как викинги для нас.
- “The Cretans had a navy and their own writing system.” – У критян был флот и своя система письма.
- “Life here was not peaceful at all.” – Жизнь здесь вовсе не была мирной.
- “The next 400 years were a dark age.” – Следующие 400 лет были темным временем.
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