Twenty flashcards spanning Greek city-states and Roman civilisation. Covers Athenian democracy, Spartan society, the great philosophers, Alexander the Great, the founding of Rome, the Punic Wars, the transition from Republic to Empire, Pax Romana, and the caus...
Twenty flashcards spanning Greek city-states and Roman civilisation. Covers Athenian democracy, Spartan society, the great philosophers, Alexander the Great, the founding of Rome, the Punic Wars, the transition from Republic to Empire, Pax Romana, and the causes of Rome's decline. Suited to AP World History, IB History and GCSE Ancient History.
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A polis — a self-governing city and its surrounding territory, with its own laws, army and civic identity, rather than part of a unified nation.
Cleisthenes, around 508 BC, established reforms giving citizens a direct vote in the assembly (ekklesia), laying the foundation for direct democracy.
Sparta was a militaristic oligarchy focused on producing elite warriors (agoge training), with limited citizen rights and reliance on a subjugated labour class, the helots.
Socrates: questioning method (Socratic method). Plato: theory of Forms, wrote The Republic. Aristotle: empirical logic and natural sciences, tutored Alexander the Great.
Rising tension between Athens and Sparta over influence in the Greek world, especially Athenian imperial expansion through the Delian League, led to war from 431–404 BC.
He conquered the Persian Empire, spread Greek (Hellenistic) culture across three continents, and built an empire stretching from Greece to India by 323 BC.
Romulus, along with his twin Remus, traditionally founded Rome in 753 BC after being raised by a she-wolf.
The Roman Republic, governed by elected officials (consuls), the Senate, and various assemblies, replacing the monarchy of the Roman Kingdom.
Three wars (264–146 BC) between Rome and Carthage for control of the Mediterranean, most famously featuring Hannibal's crossing of the Alps in the Second Punic War.
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were Roman reformers who championed land redistribution for the poor; their deaths marked the start of escalating political violence in the late Republic.
An informal political alliance between Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus around 60 BC, which dominated Roman politics before collapsing into civil war.
Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of senators, including Brutus and Cassius, who feared his accumulation of dictatorial power.
Augustus (Octavian), in 27 BC, after defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, ending the Republic and beginning the Empire.
A roughly 200-year period of relative peace and stability across the Roman Empire, beginning with Augustus, that enabled trade, infrastructure and cultural flourishing.
An extensive road network, aqueducts for water supply, and public buildings such as amphitheatres, baths and basilicas connecting and Romanising conquered territories.
It was one of the earliest codifications of law, providing a written legal foundation that influenced later legal systems including many modern civil codes.
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash, preserving remarkably detailed evidence of daily Roman life.
Dividing the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves (the Tetrarchy) around AD 285 to make its vast size more governable.
AD 476, when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus.
Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labour, military overextension and reliance on mercenaries, and repeated invasions by Germanic tribes such as the Visigoths and Vandals.
