1. Greece Notes

2. How did geography affect the Ancient Greeks? Mountains made land travel hard. Travel by sea was easiest since it is on three sides. Greeks became excellent sailors.

4. How did the Greeks govern themselves? In city-states. A city-state is a town that is its own country. Imagine Goshen & some farms around it as its own country. Each city-state was independent and citizens were very loyal to their own town. The Greek word for city is “polis”.

6. What sorts of government did the Greeks have? At first, kings. This is called monarchy. Over time, a smaller group of people took over. This is called aristocracy. In some places, tyrants took over. These are dictators…but not always bad ones. In one place, Athens, they invented democracy.

7. What is democracy? A form of government where the people rule themselves. The word comes from combining the Greek words for “people” and “government”.

8. Democracy in Athens Athens had a direct democracy, which means all people voted on all things. Only 40,000 out of 300,000 Athenians were considered full citizens. Slaves and women didn’t count. We have a representative democracy in the US today. Why wouldn’t direct democracy work today?