Ancient Greece’s Most Important Islands: The History of Crete, Rhodes, and Sicily in Antiquity

Summary

Nearly 2,500 years after the Golden Age of Athens, people across the world today continue to be fascinated by the ancient Greeks, but who did the Ancient Greeks look up to? The answer to that question can be found in Homer’s The Odyssey, in which Odysseus makes note of “a great town there, Cnossus, where Minos reigned.” It was perhaps the earliest reference to the Minoan civilization, a mysterious ancient civilization that historians and archaeologists still puzzle over, but a civilization that renowned historian Will Durant described as "the first link in the European chain.” Nearly 2,000 years before Homer wrote his epic poems, the Minoan civilization was centered on the island of Crete, a location that required the Minoans to be a regional sea power. And indeed they were, stretching across the Aegean Sea from about 2700-1500 BCE with trade routes extending all the way to Egypt.

In the Archaic and Classical periods, Rhodes often stood as a prime exemplar of the highs and lows of its fellow Greek cities, and as the largest island of the Dodecanese, Rhodes’ history is largely in line with that of the rest of those islands. Rhodes would reach the zenith of its power in the Hellenistic period following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Even as the rest of the city-states waned compared to the much larger kingdoms of Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Asia, Rhodes would come to the forefront as a main power in the Greek world, standing toe-to-toe with these Hellenistic kingdoms. 

It was during the Classical era that, especially under the tyrants (dictators) of the Greek city of Syracuse, Sicily came the closest to being governed as a single, unified, and independent state. In time, it came to challenge the powerful trade empire of Carthage, a former Phoenician colony in North Africa, and it vied with the cities and kingdoms of mainland Greece for primacy in the Greek world.