Ancient Greek Ideas Today
QCA unit 15

What's the big idea?

The ancient Greeks lived more than two thousand years ago, but their ideas still influence us today.

The very word history comes from the Greek word historia, which means inquiry. They gave us the alphabet and a whole range of art forms and disciplines – drama, biography, science, mathematics and philosophy all started with the Greeks. Many of our words relating to ideas and classification come from the Greek.

Greek architecture has been admired and copied by all kinds of people from the Romans to the Georgians and Victorians. Even today we design public buildings in the classical manner which look back to the aesthetic idea from the ancient Greeks.