ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history of Greece from the early Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations of the Bronze Age to the thought of the philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. Before the fifth-century conflict that the Athenians referred to as the Peloponnesian War, the Greek city-states had combined to fight a war against Persia, which was a dominant power at the time and represented a different culture against which the Greeks could measure and define themselves. The emphasis in Greek art was not so much on depicting individual human beings as it was on making general observations about human physicality. The Greeks had placed a strong emphasis upon the cultivation of the mind. Even though most of the Greeks continued to believe in their gods and goddesses and to accept the Homeric myths, they had no dominant priesthood to censor or restrict intellectual inquiry.
