Opinions of Ancient Greek leaders.

Caught that did you! 😆

Pericles, to me, was the ideal statesman. He personified the law and the essence that was Ancient Greek Civilization. Pisisstratus was nothing but the first Greek tyrant....a usurper, but still mild by our standards of tyrants. Themistocles was the great leader in battle--perhaps the real Agamemnon of Greek history, as was Leonidas for the Spartans. The rest were lawgivers of various degree. Lycurgus was perhaps the wisest, and Draco the harshest.....with Damocles, Cylon, and Solon somewhere in between. Alexander is in a whole new category. His conquests speak for themselves, but do winning wars make him greater than the others?


The question to be considered is, why do historians perceive these Greek leaders to be so great? What were their contributions to Western Civilization beyond the legends that surround their names?

The Romans revered Greek culture above their own. Vergil wrote the Aeneid trying to show that Rome was founded from the remnants of Trojans who fought against the Achaian Greeks. The Trojans were offshoots of Hellene civilization, therefore, Vergil wished to link the glory of Rome to the glory of Greece. The Romans adopted the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses and Latinized their names…..Hera became Juno, Zeus became Jupiter, Ares became Mars, Aphrodite became Venus, Hephaistos became Vulcan, Cronos became Saturn, Dionysius became Bacchus etc…..The Romans were masters at assimilating other cultures and adding their distinctiveness to their own kind of like the Borg do in Star Trek. Think of the Romans as the Borg of the Ancient World and the Greeks as the Federation. 😀 Don’t use that analogy on a test or paper…..I don’t think you would score too many points with it. 😕

Trojans were really Greeks….Dardanaian Greeks. The Romans, even though they revered Greek culture, they wished to foster the view that they had triumphed over it and had been competing against it for hundreds of years. There was no better way to illustrate this than by linking themselves to the greatest of the Greeks’ enemies–the Trojans. If you remember your Greek mythology, Aeneas the son of Anchises was also the son of Aphrodite. Achilles was the son of the goddess Thetis (daughter of Nereus a cousin of Zeus) and mortal Peleus. Sarpedon, who fought for the Trojans and was killed by Ajax was a son of Zeus. So what we have is a fratricidal war between the children of the Greek gods and this is how Homer depicted the war.

Some say the Trojans were Hittites and the Dardanians were allies of the Greeks during the Trojan War.

Not quite.  The Hittites allegedly allied themselves with Priam, but the Trojans were definitely not Hittites.

Homer considered the Trojans of Greek stock plain and simple.

I agree and don't mean to imply that Homer's epics were meant as lessons in history.  Rather they were stories about Greek heroics and 'arete.'  I just don't see how one can say with certainty that 1) Homer states they were Greeks or 2) They actually were Greeks.   There's far too many unknowns to make that conclusion.  All I'm saying is if there's something Homer said that makes it as plain and simple as previously stated, then I'd like to see the proof.  

There are only two kinds of people in Homer's world: Hellenes and Barbarians.  Never does Homer call the Trojans barbarians, which means he considered them Hellenes.  As I said up thread, the Trojans shared lineage (according to Homer) with the Greeks per the gods.  But to muddy the waters even more for you, Homer wasn't the original teller of the Trojan War.  He is just the most famous and cited storyteller of the war.  It was already a legend by his time (800 B.C.) some 400 years after the war took place.  So the war was "ancient" even to Homer.  Finally, the Trojans had many allies who aided them in the war who were non-Hellenic.  So perhaps this is where some of the confusion is occurring.  Troy bordered the Phrygian kingdom that was later overrun by the Hittites.  Phrygians took part in the war against the Achaen forces.