The ruins of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens

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Ancient Greece: A Timeline

From Olympic origins and the birth of Athenian democracy to Alexander's conquests and the spread of Greek culture across the Mediterranean.

Interactive timeline — click any point

c. 776 BC First Olympic Games c. 508–507 BC Birth of democracy 480 BC Battle of Salamis 447 BC Parthenon construction begins 431 BC Peloponnesian War begins 336 BC Alexander begins conquests

c. 776 BC Traditional date of the first Olympic Games

The first Olympic Games are traditionally dated to 776 BC, held at Olympia in honour of Zeus and drawing competitors from across the Greek world.

c. 508–507 BC Cleisthenes' reforms establish Athenian democracy

Cleisthenes reorganises Athenian citizenship and political structure, laying the foundations of what is generally regarded as the world's first democracy.

480 BC Greek fleet defeats Persia at Salamis

Following the Spartan-led stand at Thermopylae and the Athenian victory at Marathon a decade earlier, an allied Greek fleet defeats the Persian navy at Salamis, turning the tide of the Persian Wars.

447 BC Construction begins on the Parthenon

Under the leadership of Pericles, work begins on the Parthenon atop the Acropolis, a centrepiece of Athens' mid-5th-century Golden Age.

431 BC War breaks out between Athens and Sparta

The Peloponnesian War begins between the Athenian and Spartan alliance systems, a conflict that lasts until 404 BC and ends in Spartan victory over a weakened Athens.

336 BC Alexander the Great comes to the Macedonian throne

Alexander succeeds his father Philip II and, over the following decade, conquers the Persian Empire and beyond, spreading Greek language and culture across a vast territory before his death in 323 BC.

Last updated: August 2026

History Timelines. (August 2026). Ancient Greece: A Timeline. Retrieved from https://history-timelines.org.uk/places/ancient-greece/

From Scattered City-States to a Shared Culture

The Greek world that emerges from roughly the 8th century BC was never a single nation but a patchwork of independent city-states, or poleis, sharing a common language, religion, and sense of identity while frequently competing, and sometimes warring, with one another. The traditional date of 776 BC for the first Olympic Games at Olympia reflects this shared culture: city-states that fought each other in most years still sent athletes to compete under a sacred truce. Two poleis came to dominate the historical record more than any others: Athens, which developed an unusually participatory form of government, and Sparta, a militarised society built around a professional warrior class. Around 508–507 BC, the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes carried out a set of reforms reorganising citizens into new political units and giving ordinary male citizens a direct voice in the Assembly, a system generally credited as the first democracy in recorded history, though it excluded women, slaves, and foreign residents.

The Persian Wars and the Golden Age of Athens

In the early 5th century BC, the expanding Persian Empire brought the Greek city-states into direct conflict with a far larger power. An Athenian-led force turned back a Persian invasion at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, and a decade later a second Persian invasion was met first by a small Spartan-led force at Thermopylae and then decisively defeated at sea at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Greek victories preserved the independence of the mainland city-states and set the stage for Athens’ rise to prominence. Under the statesman Pericles in the mid-5th century BC, Athens entered what is often called its Golden Age: construction began on the Parthenon in 447 BC, and the city became a centre of drama, philosophy, and the visual arts, supported in large part by its position at the head of the Delian League, an alliance of city-states that Athens increasingly treated as an empire of its own.

A close-up of a fluted marble column capital and ancient pottery fragment

War, Conquest, and the Hellenistic World

Athenian power and the resentments it generated among other Greek states, especially Sparta, led to the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC and dragged on for nearly three decades before ending in Athens’ defeat in 404 BC. The war left the Greek city-states militarily and economically weakened, and none was able to reassert the kind of dominance Athens had once held. Into this vacuum stepped the kingdom of Macedon, on the northern fringe of the Greek world. Philip II brought the mainland city-states under Macedonian influence, and his son, Alexander the Great, who came to the throne in 336 BC, went on to conquer the Persian Empire and lead his armies as far as Egypt and northwestern India before his death in 323 BC. Alexander’s conquests scattered Greek-speaking rulers, soldiers, and settlers across a vast territory, inaugurating the Hellenistic period, in which Greek language and culture blended with local traditions from Egypt to Central Asia. The independent political power of the Greek mainland itself, however, continued to decline, and in 146 BC the Roman sack of Corinth marked the effective end of Greek political independence, as the region was absorbed into the expanding Roman world, even as Greek culture, philosophy, and language continued to shape that world for centuries afterward.