CSET Social Science (114, 115, 116)

This chapter covers the Greek and Roman portions of requirement 0001, Ancient Civilizations. It focuses on how geography shaped Greek and Roman societies, their political experiments, their intellectual achievements, the rise of Christianity and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The CSET treats Greece and Rome, along with the Judeo-Christian tradition, as the foundations of Western political and philosophical thought, so expect questions linking ancient ideas to later governments, including the United States.

Greece is a mountainous peninsula with little fertile land and a long, jagged coastline. Mountains divided Greeks into independent communities, while the sea encouraged trade, colonization and contact with Egypt and Phoenicia. The result was not a unified kingdom but hundreds of city-states, each called a polis, with its own government, army and patron deity. Greeks shared a language, religion (the Olympian gods) and festivals such as the Olympic Games, first recorded in 776 BCE, but rarely united politically.

Earlier Bronze Age cultures, the Minoans on Crete and the Mycenaeans on the mainland, collapsed around 1100 BCE. After a "Dark Age," the poleis emerged, and between about 750 and 550 BCE Greeks founded colonies from the Black Sea to southern Italy and southern France, spreading Greek culture widely.

Greek city-states experimented with monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy and tyranny (rule by one who seized power, not necessarily cruel). Athens and Sparta represent opposite paths.

Athens moved gradually toward democracy. Draco's harsh written laws (about 621 BCE) were followed by Solon's reforms (about 594 BCE), which canceled debts, ended debt slavery and opened some offices to wealthy non-nobles. Cleisthenes, around 508 to 507 BCE, reorganized citizens into ten tribes based on residence and created the Council of 500, which is why he is often called the father of Athenian democracy. Under Pericles in the mid-fifth century BCE, Athens paid citizens for public service so that poorer men could participate. Athenian democracy was direct: adult male citizens voted personally in the Assembly, and many officials and jurors were chosen by lot. Women, enslaved people and foreign residents (metics) were excluded.

Sparta was a militaristic oligarchy with two kings, a council of elders and elected ephors. A large population of state-owned laborers called helots farmed the land, and the fear of helot revolt drove Sparta's military discipline. Boys entered military training at age seven. Spartan women had more freedom than Athenian women, could own property and were expected to be physically fit to bear strong children.

Athens and Sparta Compared

Common Trap: Athenian democracy was not representative democracy and did not include universal suffrage. If a question asks which modern feature Athens lacked, look for elected representatives or broad citizenship.

In the Persian Wars (490 to 479 BCE), Greek city-states defeated the Persian Empire at Marathon (490 BCE), held the pass at Thermopylae long enough to delay the Persians (480 BCE) and won decisive victories at Salamis (naval, 480 BCE) and Plataea (479 BCE). Victory boosted Greek confidence and launched the Athenian golden age. Athens led the Delian League, an alliance against Persia that it gradually turned into an Athenian empire, using league funds to build the Parthenon.

Fear of Athenian power led to the Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta's Peloponnesian League. The historian Thucydides argued that Sparta's fear of Athens' growth made war inevitable. A plague killed Pericles, the Sicilian Expedition ended in disaster, and Sparta, with Persian money, won. The war weakened all the poleis and left them open to conquest by Macedonia.

Greek thinkers sought rational, natural explanations for the world. Socrates (died 399 BCE) questioned assumptions through dialogue, the Socratic method, and was executed by Athens for corrupting the youth and impiety. His student Plato wrote The Republic, describing an ideal state ruled by philosopher-kings and expressing distrust of democracy. Plato's student Aristotle studied nearly every field, emphasized observation and logic, and in Politics classified governments by whether one, few or many ruled and whether they ruled for the common good. He favored a mixed constitution combining elements of each, with a strong middle class. That idea, developed further by the Greek historian Polybius in analyzing Rome, influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution.

Greek achievements also include history writing (Herodotus, the "father of history," and Thucydides), drama (tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; comedies by Aristophanes), epic poetry attributed to Homer (the Iliad and Odyssey), architecture based on columns and proportion, and mathematics and science (Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates in medicine).

Philip II of Macedonia conquered the Greek city-states in 338 BCE. His son Alexander the Great, tutored by Aristotle, conquered Persia, Egypt and lands to the Indus River between 334 and 323 BCE. After his death his empire split into kingdoms ruled by his generals, such as the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Southwest Asia. The resulting Hellenistic era blended Greek, Persian, Egyptian and Indian cultures. Alexandria in Egypt, with its great library and museum, became a center of learning where Euclid wrote on geometry and Eratosthenes estimated Earth's circumference. Hellenistic philosophies such as Stoicism, which taught virtue, reason and a universal brotherhood under natural law, later shaped Roman law and Christian ethics.

Exam Tip: The most significant consequence of Alexander's conquests is usually framed as cultural diffusion: the spread of Greek language and ideas across Southwest Asia and Egypt, which later helped Christianity spread in Greek.

Rome, founded according to legend in 753 BCE, sat on the Tiber River in central Italy, with good farmland and a central position in the Mediterranean. Romans expelled their Etruscan king in 509 BCE and founded a republic, a government in which citizens elect leaders. Two consuls, elected annually, led the government and army, each able to veto the other. The Senate, made up of aristocrats serving for life, advised the consuls and controlled finances and foreign policy. In emergencies, a dictator could rule for up to six months.

The early Republic was dominated by patricians, the aristocratic class. In the Conflict of the Orders, the plebeians (commoners) won concessions, including tribunes who could veto actions harmful to plebeians, and the Twelve Tables (about 450 BCE), Rome's first written laws, displayed publicly so all could know them. Roman legal ideas such as innocence until proven guilty and the equal application of law influenced later Western legal systems.

Rome conquered Italy, then defeated Carthage in three Punic Wars (264 to 146 BCE), despite the Carthaginian general Hannibal's famous crossing of the Alps. Rome next absorbed Greece and much of the eastern Mediterranean.

Conquest brought wealth but also crisis. Large estates worked by enslaved captives (latifundia) pushed small farmers off the land, and the urban poor swelled. The Gracchi brothers proposed land reform in the 130s and 120s BCE and were killed. The general Marius recruited landless volunteers who became loyal to their commanders rather than to the state. Civil wars followed between strongmen such as Marius and Sulla, then Pompey and Julius Caesar. Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, defeated his rivals and became dictator for life, and was assassinated by senators in 44 BCE. His adopted heir Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE and in 27 BCE received the title Augustus. He kept republican forms but held real power, becoming the first emperor.

From Republic to Empire: Causes and Effects

The Pax Romana, about two centuries of relative peace from 27 BCE to 180 CE, allowed trade, roads, aqueducts and Roman law to spread across an empire from Britain to Mesopotamia. Romans adapted Greek culture, wrote in Latin (the root of the Romance languages), and engineered concrete, arches and domes.

Memory Aid: For the Republic's structure, think of the U.S. parallel: consuls resemble an executive, the Senate a legislative body, and tribunes a check protecting common citizens, an early form of checks and balances.

Christianity arose in Roman-ruled Judea. Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher, preached love of God and neighbor, forgiveness and the coming Kingdom of God, and was crucified by Roman authorities around 30 CE. His followers proclaimed his resurrection. The apostle Paul spread the faith to non-Jews (Gentiles) across the eastern Mediterranean, using Roman roads, the common Greek language and the peace of the empire. Christianity appealed to the poor and enslaved, women and city dwellers with its promise of salvation and its community support. Some emperors persecuted Christians for refusing to honor the Roman gods and emperor. Constantine legalized Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, and Theodosius made it the official religion of the empire in 380 CE. The Church developed a hierarchy of bishops, with the bishop of Rome, later called the pope, claiming leadership in the West.

In the third century CE, Rome suffered civil wars, rapid turnover of emperors, inflation, plague and pressure on its frontiers. Diocletian (ruled 284 to 305) divided the empire into eastern and western administrative halves. Constantine founded a new capital, Constantinople, in 330 CE. In the West, Germanic peoples entered the empire, some as allies and soldiers; the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, and in 476 the Germanic leader Odoacer deposed the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, the traditional date for the fall of Rome. The eastern half survived as the Byzantine Empire.

Historians debate causes. Explanations include political instability, economic decline and heavy taxation, overreliance on mercenaries, invasion and migration, epidemic disease, and the empire's vast size. Edward Gibbon, writing in the eighteenth century, blamed in part the rise of Christianity, a view most historians now reject. Many scholars now speak of a gradual transformation rather than a sudden fall.

Common Trap: Avoid single-cause answers about Rome's fall. If an exam question asks which factor contributed, any one major factor can be correct, but a question asking for the best overall explanation usually favors multiple internal weaknesses combined with external pressure.

Greece's mountains and coastline produced independent city-states, overseas colonies and active trade rather than a unified kingdom.

Athens developed direct democracy for male citizens; Sparta was a militaristic oligarchy built on helot labor.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle laid foundations of Western philosophy; Aristotle's and Polybius's idea of a mixed constitution influenced American founders.

The Roman Republic's consuls, Senate, tribunes and Twelve Tables pioneered republican government and written law; conquest and civil war turned it into an empire under Augustus.

Christianity spread through Roman roads, the Greek language and Paul's missions, becoming legal in 313 and official in 380.

The Western Empire fell in 476 through combined internal weaknesses and external pressures, while the East endured as Byzantium.