Top 10 ancient Greece facts

Alexander the Great. Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander in 343 BC. Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon and encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest.

The treasury of Athens. Although the Parthenon is architecturally a temple and is usually called so, it is not really one in the conventional sense of the word. It never hosted the cult of Athena Polias, patron of Athens. The Parthenon was actually used primarily as a treasury. For a time, it served as the treasury of the Delian League, which later became the Athenian Empire.

None. As Socrates did not write philosophical texts, the knowledge of the man, his life, and his philosophy is entirely based on writings by his students and contemporaries.

In Turkey. The river modern name is Karamenderes. It flows entirely within the Turkish province of Çanakkale, in the Marmara region.

Aristotle. Throughout his conquests of Asia, Alexander the Great collected many plant and animal specimens for Aristotle’s research. This allowed Aristotle to develop in Athens the first zoo and botanical garden in existence.

Lyceum. The Lyceum was a gymnasium and public meeting place in Classical Athens named after the Apollo Lyceus, "wolf-god" of the grove that housed the Lyceum.

In 3rd century B.C. Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. He is best known for being the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth. He did it by measuring Sun's angle of elevation at noon on the solstice in Alexandria, knowing, that at the same time the Sun is at Zenith in the Ancient Egyptian city of Swenet, 5000 stades from Alexandria. Seventeen hundred years after Christopher Columbus studied Eratosthenes writings and decided that the calculations were wrong, and the Earth must be smaller - which led him to seek India in the west.

There was no such theatre. All Greek theatres were built on the slopes of a hill. It was not until the Romans invented concrete, when the construction of tall theatres on flat surfaces (such as the Colosseum) became possible.

Weapon that protected Syracuse. Archimedes devised defensive devices to counter the Roman efforts including a huge crane operated hook – the Claw of Archimedes – that was used to lift the enemy ships out of the sea before dropping them to their doom.

Macedonians. The sarissa is a type of long spear (about 4–7 metres or 13–23 ft in length) first introduced by Phillip II of Macedonia in Macedonian phalanx formations. It was usually composed of two lengths and was joined by a central bronze tube only before a battle. The tight formation of the phalanx created a "wall of pikes", and the pike was so long that there were fully five rows of them projecting in front of the front rank of men.