The great law-giver, Solon, having served as Archon of Athens for 22 years, retired from public life and saw the city, almost immediately, fall under the dictatorship of Peisistratus.
Though a dictator, Peisistratus understood Solon's wisdom, carried on his policies and after his death, his son Hippias continued this tradition (though maintaining a dictatorship that favored the aristocracy).
His younger brother was assassinated (inspired, according to Thucydides, by a love affair gone wrong and not, as later thought, politically motivated) Hippias then became wary of the Athenians, instituted a rule of terror and was finally overthrown by the army under Kleomenes I of Sparta and Cleisthenes of Athens.
According to Will Durant, "The Athenians themselves were exhilarated by this adventure into sovereignty...they knew the zest of freedom in action, speech and thought; and from that moment they began to lead all Greece in literature and art, even in statesmanship and war".
The list of thinkers, writers, doctors, artists, scientists, statesmen and warriors of the Hellenic World important contributions to western civilization: The statesman Solon, poets Pindar and Sappho, playwrights Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, the orator Lysias, historians Herodotus and Thucydides, philosophers Zeno of Elea, Protagoras of Abdera, Empedocles of Acragas, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, writer and general Xenophon, physician Hippocrates, sculptor Phidias, statesman Pericles, generals Alcibiades and Themistocles and many more lived during this period.
The Golden Age, according to the poet Shelley, "is undoubtedly...the most memorable in the history of the world" for the accomplishments and advancements made by the people of that time.
Major city-states and sacred places of pilgrimage in the Hellenic World were Argos, Athens, Eleusis, Corinth, Delphi, Ithaca, Olympia, Sparta, Thebes, Thrace and Mount Olympus, the home of the gods.
In his works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, immensely popular and influential in the Hellenic World, Homer depicted the gods and goddesses as intimately involved in the lives of the people.
[8] The journal publishes critical analyses of Greek social, cultural and political affairs, covering the period from the late Byzantine Empire to the present.
NYU's A.S. Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies[9] offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the language, literature, history and politics of post-classical Greece.
It offers a program of instruction in modern Greek at the elementary, intermediate and advanced levels and cooperates closely with Yale's Center for Language Study on the development of teaching aids.
Φυσιογνωμία: αλλοιωμένη αλήθεια (Physiognomy: distorted truth) by Nikos Toumaras is the most widely distributed Greek fiction title in libraries of the last decade.