Magna graecia peloponnesian war
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The geography and topography of the Greek mainland and the Mediterranean region surrounding it influenced the history of the Greek people in a number of crucial ways. Furthermore, the Greek world in antiquity encompassed much more than present-day Greece, extending as far as Italy in the West and the territories of modern-day Turkey and Ukraine in the East. While the two most famous poleis, Athens and Sparta, controlled vast territories of farmland, most city-states were quite small, with a population of just a few thousand citizens. Each of these poleis (plural form of polis ) possessed its own form of government, law-code, army, cults of patron gods, and overall culture that set it apart from the other city-states. Historians estimate that close to 1,500 of these city-states dotted the ancient Greek landscape. Instead, the basic unit of organization in the period covered in this chapter was the polis, an independent city-state, which consisted of a walled city that controlled and protected the farmland around it.
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While Greece is a unified country today, the territory of the present-day country was not unified under one rule until the rise of the Macedonians in the fourth century BCE. Page | 175 CHAPTER 5: THE GREEK WORLD FROM THE BRONZE AGE TO THE ROMAN CONQUEST 5.5 GEOGRAPHY AND TOPOGRAPHY This chapter’s title refers to the Greek World, rather than Greece.