HIGHLIGHTS OF ANCIENT GREECE

With Leonie Hayne

21 September - 08 October 2009

Greece can be called the cradle of western civilisation, its culture and thinking permeating Europe via the Roman Empire, which, in the words of the Roman poet Horace, was taken captive by the land it had conquered. When the western empire was transformed into a number of barbarian kingdoms, it was the eastern empire, its capital Constantinople (formerly Byzantium) which continued to preserve Greco-Roman culture, and which then returned it to the west in the Renaissance.

We start, of course, in Athens, which epitomises for most people the glory that was Greece, and then head south to the Peloponnese and the area dominated for much of the classical period by Athen's great rival Sparta. Here there is a wealth of different historical periods and sites to be explored: Bronze Age Tiryns, Mycenae and Pylos, all reminding us of Homer and the Trojan War. Roman Corinth (the Greek city was destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C.), Sparta itself, whose glory days ended in the fourth century B.C., and late Byzantine Mistra. There are theatres to see (especially at Epidauros), temples, and the world famous religious and athletic centre of Olympia, where the games continued until 393 A.D., when they were abolished by the Christian emperor Theodosius I. To the north of the Gulf of Corinth is Delphi, whose oracle of Apollo, renowned throughout the Mediterranean, influenced every aspect of Greek life, including politics, until the mid-fourth century A.D., its final prediction being its future silence.

An optional extension covers the north of modern Greece, which is very different in many ways. Here the city-state ideal prevalent further south never caught on. Epirus and Macedon were in fact independent kingdoms. In Thessaly we visit the hill-top Byzantine monasteries of Meteora. In Macedon the emphasis is on Philip II, who conquered southern Greece in the fourth century, and his even more famous son Alexander the Great, who went on to conquer the Persian Empire and spread Greek civilisation from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Nile. Based in Thessalonika, we visit Vergina, the ancient capital, and Pella, Philip's capital (both sites have been comparatively recently excavated, with exciting finds) and the sacred city of Dion. We return to the south, like the Persians in the fifth century, via the pass of Thermopylae, stopping on the way at Volos.

And so back to Athens. On our travels we have covered over 3,000 years of Greek history, from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine and mediaeval world, from classical Greek religion with its temples and oracular shrines to Christian monasteries and churches, from art depicting the human body and human life to the church frescoes of what we now call Orthodox Christianity. If you feel rather overwhelmed by it all, then thats probably the right reaction!

Your Tour Leader: Leonie Hayne, tutored and lectured at Sydney University for over thirty years, at pass and Honours levels and for undergraduate and post-graduate courses, retiring in 1996. She has travelled extensively over Europe, Middle East and Africa; visiting Roman sites in many countries.

Tour Price:

Land only, per person twin share: $6,700.00

Single Supplement: $1,315.00

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