Ancient Greek History and Historiography
This domain tests chronological control, institutional knowledge and source criticism across Greek history from the archaic polis to the Hellenistic kingdoms. Questions typically pair an event with a date, an institution with a procedure, or a passage with the historian who wrote it and the method behind it.
Dates that anchor everything
- 776 BC traditional first Olympiad; 508/7 Cleisthenes' reforms; 490 Marathon; 480 Thermopylae and Salamis; 479 Plataea and Mycale.
- 478/7 Delian League founded; 454 treasury moved to Athens; 431–404 Peloponnesian War; 404 Thirty Tyrants; 399 death of Socrates.
- 371 Leuctra; 338 Chaeronea; 336 Alexander's accession; 323 his death; 146 destruction of Corinth.
- Greek years run by eponymous officials: the Athenian archon, the Olympiad (mid-summer to mid-summer), the Spartan ephors. An archon year straddles two Julian years, so a summer campaign belongs to the archon then in office.
Institutions
- Athens: ekklesia (sovereign assembly, quorum 6,000 for some votes), boulē of 500 chosen by lot with prytaneis, ostracism, dokimasia, liturgies, graphē paranomōn.
- Sparta: dual kingship, gerousia (28 elders plus the kings), five annually elected ephors, apella, syssitia, helots, perioikoi.
- Delian League: tribute (phoros), ships instead of money, cleruchies, and the progressive loss of autonomy that turned alliance into empire.
Historians and method
- Herodotus: inquiry (historiē), causal logos, ethnography, divine phthonos.
- Thucydides: 1.22 promises a possession for all time; he says he kept speeches as close as possible to the general sense of what was said, and uses stasis at Corcyra and the Melian Dialogue to argue general propositions.
- Xenophon continues to 362; Diodorus preserves a universal chronicle; Plutarch writes moral biography, not history; inscriptions and coins correct the literary record.
Worked example
A question asks how far Thucydides' speeches are evidence for what was actually said. Reasoning: his preface concedes that speeches are reconstructions of what was fitting (τὰ δέοντα) to each occasion. They are therefore reliable for a speaker's likely argument and for Thucydides' interpretation, not for wording. The Melian Dialogue is excellent evidence for Athenian imperial ideology as Thucydides analyses it; it is not a transcript.
Traps
- Treating Thucydides as covering the whole war - his text breaks off in 411.
- Confusing Delian League tribute with Spartan allied contributions.
- Using Plutarch as a primary source for fifth-century politics.
- Mis-sequencing the Peace of Nicias (421) and the Sicilian Expedition (415).