Ancient Greece

The history of Ancient Greece is one of the oldest fields of academic research in the modern university, and reflects centuries of traditional humanist scholarship before that.

With the revival of interest in the study of the Greek language and Greek literature in Italy during the 15th century the literary remains of Greek civilization from Homer to the Greek Church Fathers of early Christianity were well-known to scholars. However, in the 18th and early 19th century the sceptical attitudes applied to the Bible in scholarly biblical criticism came to be applied to Greek literature, so much so that scholars dismissed everything before the first Olympic games in 776 B.C.E. as legend. The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, who began excavating Troy in 1870, changed all that. Archaeology revealed civilizations covered in mythology has forced a re-evaluation of every surviving text from the ancient world.

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