I continue to read books about Greece, ancient and modern.

The timeline was fuzzy, but I started watching a history channel documentary on disney+ and I think I have (some) things straight now.

Here’s the documentary, I watched it with my kids, it’s great:

Importantly, there perhaps three key time periods I needed to sort out:

  1. Bronze Age Greece
  2. Greek Dark Age (the gap)
  3. Golden Age

The Greek or Aegean Bronze Age captures the Minoan civilization on Crete (3100-1100 BC), followed by the Mycenaean civilization in the Peloponnese (1750-1050).

This is the time of the myths, such as Minos (king in Crete) and stories of Theseus and Agamemnon (king of Mycenae) and epic poems of the Illiad and Odyssey.

The Greek Dark Ages was after the fall of the Mycenae empire and lasted for perhaps 400 years (1180 o 800 BC). This coincides with a general collapse in the Mediterranean.

The Golden Age or Ancient Greece is the classical stuff we know and love. Athens, Sparta, Philosophy, and on (800-31 BC). This was the time when the Greeks were looking back and promoting the myths and building themselves up. This ends by conquest by the Roman Empire.

Wikipedia breaks Ancient Greece down into:

  • Archaic Greece (800 BC-480 BC): settled across the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.
  • Classical Greece (500 BC-323 BC) the peak flourishing of democratic Athens; the First and Second Peloponnesian Wars; the Spartan and then Theban hegemonies; and the expansion of Macedonia under Philip II.
  • Hellenistic Greece (323 BC-31 BC): the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the annexation of the classical Greek Achaean League heartlands by the Roman Republic.
  • Roman Greece (146 BC-395 AD): A part of the Roman Republic then Empire.

This clears things up a lot for me. The division into epochs and tying of specific mythos/people/paces to time periods.

These chronologies are also interesting/helpful:

Also the Greece portal is interesting.