THE GREEK WORLD

The world

The Greek world at the start of the classical period looked rather like the playing space of a Greek theatre: a flat disk with a drainage ditch around the edge and a strong focus on the point of balance at the centre. Hecataeus in around 500 BC drew a map of the world which looked like this (see figure 7).

For Hecataeus the centre is his own city of Miletus, greatest of the many Greek cities on the coast of what is now Turkey. Those cities had once been economically and culturally dominant in the Greek world, but by 500 BC they were under the control of the Persian empire. Miletus was destroyed after an uprising in 494 BC, and the Greek centre of gravity shifted westwards. The sacred centre in the classical period was normally taken to be Delphi, home of Apollo's oracle, where a stone called the omphalos symbolized the navel of the world. Orestes in Aeschylus' Eumenides is shown clinging for safety to this navel stone before retreating to the law court in Athens.

To the east of the Greek world ran the road to Susa, capital of the Persian empire (in today's Iran), and to the far west were the straits that led out of the Mediterranean and beyond the normal limits of navigation; to the south were the deserts of Africa (considered part of Asia), to the north a mountainous Europe, and this whole earth was thought to be encircled by ocean.