History of Greece

This course is a chronological narrative history of the Greeks — the civilization that invented the free man who argues in the open — told top-down and in order: the Bronze Age palaces and the Dark Age that forgot how to write, Homer, the birth of the polis, Sparta and Athens, the invention of democracy, the Persian Wars, the golden age, the self-destruction of the Peloponnesian War, the fourth century, Alexander, and the Hellenistic world. Everything gets the space it earned by what it changed: the wars are told as events, and the famous ones carry real weight — but weight follows consequence, not fame, and the pages go where the influence ran deepest. The default posture is admiration for what the Greeks built, kept credible by plain honesty about slavery, the helots, the subjection of women, and Athenian imperialism.

It is a reading course, not a drill packet. A lesson day runs about fifteen minutes of clean narrative prose — opening on a real person or moment, drawing on primary sources in fresh, plain English — then talk at the table, then about twenty minutes of writing; evenings belong to the bookshelf. A five-minute check lands each Monday and two cumulative tests come at the story's great arc breaks, all auto-graded: the gradebook fills itself, and the parent has nothing to grade. The course is the first movement of a one-year ancient history, paired with History of Rome: the final unit follows the power out of Greek hands and passes the inheritance — and the student — to the course that picks up the story.

One half of History of Greece & Rome — a ≈1 credit year taken in two parts. The other half is History of Rome.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.