Page 14 - Resources

islands as well. When people did come to live in Greece, they were sailors; the

Greeks have always spent a lot of time sailing on the ocean.
The combination of good sailing and poor farming tends to make Greeks try to get a
living from the sea. This can take several forms.

First, Greeks fish a good deal. Second, they sail trade routes from one city to

another, both Greek cities and elsewhere, all over the Mediterranean Sea and the
Black Sea, and make a living buying and selling things. Third, Greeks hire themselves
out as soldiers to fight for other people around the Mediterranean, especially in
Western Asia and Egypt (where there is money to pay them). And, less attractively,

Greeks also often turn to piracy or raiding to make a living, as in the Trojan War.
Another important aspect of the Greek environment is that it is very unstable.

Greece is in the middle of a very active volcanic zone, where the Europe tectonic
plate meets the Africa tectonic plate. There are several active volcanoes, and
earthquakes are also very common. There is a nervous feeling that there could be a
natural disaster at any time. This got the Greeks interested in a particular kind of

religion which we call oracles. Oracles are the gods speaking to people, often in the
form of minor earthquakes, and the gods tell the people what is going to happen in
the future.

One final observation: the Greek landscape does not look the same today as it did in
the Bronze Age. There used to be quite a lot of trees on the hillsides of Greece, but
people cut most of them down, and now the hills of Greece are mostly bare, or have
little bushes on them. We are not quite sure when exactly the trees were cut down,
but very likely it has to do with the beginning of using iron in Greece, around 800 BC.

You have to heat iron very hot (1537ºC) in order to melt it, and that takes a lot of
wood fires.

Teacher's Guide for Ancient Greece

People have been studying the Greeks for so long that we have learned
to see them in many different ways. Some people see the Greeks as the

beginning of Western Civilization: if you want to take this approach, you
might teach about how the Greeks invented the geometrical proof, and
the scientific method, and the writing of history, and plays, and you
might mention how much our literature owes to Greek mythology and

our civic architecture owes to the Greek temple and how much our churches owe to
the Greek basilica, and our theatres to the Greek theatre.

Other people are more interested in showing how much the Greeks themselves

learned from other, older cultures. If you took this approach, you might show how

(Greek Grandeur, Hebrew Heart) 12