Greek History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Greek History’
Socrates was placed on death row while Athens celebrated a religious festival.
The philosopher Socrates (470/469 - 399 BC) was sensationally tried for ‘corrupting youth and for impiety’, code for challenging the government of Athens. Ironically, by law his execution had to be delayed while they commemorated the abolition of human sacrifice.
Lord Byron could not have hoped for a better omen in his support for the oppressed people of Greece.
George Gordon Byron, one of the greatest of all English romantic poets, died in 1824, aged just 36, in Missolonghi, Greece. Yet he played a key part in liberating Greece from almost four hundred years of oppression by the Ottoman Empire.
The cruelty of the Ottoman Turks so shocked Europe that the tide of opinion turned against them.
In 1823, early in the Greeks’ desperate fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire, English poet Lord Byron brought welcome public attention to the town of Missolonghi near Corinth just after it had endured two draining sieges. Two years later, however, the Turks came a third time.
Once a year, regular as clockwork, the little snakes slither into the convent for a Feast of the Virgin Mary.
Every August, on a great feast of the Virgin Mary, small snakes slither into the chapel of a tiny village on the Greek island of Kefalonia. There is a curious story behind it, going back to the days when Greece was under the Ottoman Empire, and pirates roamed unchecked among the islands.
As the Persian Empire’s grip tightened by land and sea, it fell to one man to unite Greece in a last desperate bid to break it.
The Battle of Salamis in September 480 BC was the turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars. By comparison with the small city-states of Greece, Xerxes’s highly centralised Persian empire was clumsy and backward, and the Greeks were ready to defend their superior civilisation to the death.