Ancient Greece was a large area in the north-west of the
Mediterranean where people spoke Greek. It was much bigger than
the Greece we know today. It was the civilization of Greece from
the Archaic period of the 8th/6th centuries BC to 146 BC. The
period ended with the Roman conquest of Greece in the Battle of
Corinth. For most of this time the Greeks did not have a single
government or ruler. There were a number of city states, each of
which had its own constitution. Athens, Sparta and Corinth are
examples. Some had kings, and some, like Athens had a form of
democracy. In the middle of this period was Classical Greece,
which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Athenian
leadership successfully repelled the threat of Persian invasion
in the Greco-Persian Wars. The Athenian Golden Age ends with the
defeat of Athens at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War
in 404 BC. Greek culture had a powerful influence on the Roman
Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the
Mediterranean regi