The History of an empire
The civilization of Ancient Greece was one of the greatest ever known. Two thousand years before the birth of Jesus (Christ), there existed in Crete and Greece a civilization called Aegean, which took its name from the Aegean Sea. From about the 6th century B.C., the Greeks lived in a number of small, separate states each centred round a city; the most important of these were Athens, Sparta and Thebes. In the 5th century B.C. Persia, which owned a mighty empire, invaded Greece after being defeated by the Greeks in the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. During the first part of the 5th century, the Athenians and Spartans won many victories over the Persians but in 431 B.C. a great war between Athens and Sparta broke out. A year later a great plague spread through the city of Athens which killed many of the inhabitants. The war between Athens and Sparta ended in 404 B.C., by which time Sparta had built up a strong navy and with this, managed to win a final, crushing victory over Athens. From that date, the great days of Athens were over and Sparta retained its leading position for thirty years. But the constant wars between the larger states of Greece greatly weakened the civilisation and this gave Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, the chance to bring the whole of Greece under their control. Weakness in the established states promoted the rise of a new power, Macedonia, under the inspired military leadership of Alexander the Great. Alexander left no legacy of stable governance, however, and the Macedonian Empire that he created fragmented shortly after his death into a shifting collection of minor states. In the 2nd century B.C. the Romans conquered the Macedonians, and Greece then became part of the Roman Empire. The independent civilisation of ancient Greece had come to an end.