AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENAAAAAA!!! (John visited class today)

`               Today in Western Civilization we continued our PowerPoint on Ancient Greece. Our moment of Zen today was provided by Robin Williams. Afterwards we started the PowerPoint, and we had left off on the slide about farming. Although one-fourth of Greece was covered in fertile land, only twenty percent is arable (I didn’t really understand this, but I guess land can have high amounts of minerals but still be unfarmable). Greeks may have not done many things, but what they did they were good at. A Grecian daily diet consisted of grapes, grains, and olives. The Greeks were quite innovative and figured out how to make these basic materials produce many different items. For instance, olive oil or wine (No, they didn’t blend it into a smoothie). However, due to lack of resources, the Greeks economy was built on a large amount trading. The Greeks farming capability was greatly boosted by the climate, which ranged in the low eighty’s and the mid-forty’s. We then switched over to a section of Greece, the Mycenaeans. Their influence was around 2000 BCE. Mycenae was located on a rocky ledge of Peloponnesus, and their town was surrounded by a twenty-foot wall. They dominated Greece from 1600-1100 BCE, and controlled most trade in their area. In 1400 BCE they invaded Crete and absorbed the Minoan culture instead of destroying it. In 1200 BCE, a mysterious group of people invaded and ravaged Mycenae, only known as the ‘sea people’ who burned palaces and other buildings. Another group, called the Dorians, moved in and took over Mycenae, and they ruled from about 1150-750 BCE. The Dorians were less advanced, and this time is considered the Dark Ages of Greece. In this time, culture declined, writing totally disappeared for four-hundred years, and the trade based economy totally collapsed. Meanwhile, the mythical man known as Homer emerged. Using oral tradition, Homer spread stories of the Trojan War, known as the Iliad and The Odyssey. These stories are very long and hard to memorize, but Homer told them in dactylic hexameter, which made them sort of like a song and easier to memorize. Homer was legendary in his days, gaining the immediate and total respect of any Grecian who met him, and his legend lives on today through his works, which have been remade in different formats (Looking at you Rick Riordan). However, some doubt Homer’s existence as he may have been a myth himself, as were parts of his stories, and he may have been a combination of years of storytelling.