Singapore, a country that on ocassions, finds itself compared to SPARTA. But if you do a comparison, you will find it hard to find compelling similarities. But if you dig deep into the psyche of its people, many Singaporeans do feel that the comparison does hold some inner truth. Surrounded by “Persian Enemies,” trained relentelessly with the best weapons that Singapore can afford — singing threats that “though we are small, we will make you pay a deathly price!” — The poisonous shrimp doctrine is a delibrately well publicised message. Fact is Singapore has one of the biggest army in SEA, though it is a conscript army. It is armed with Top of the line systems (bought and manufactured) and even self developed secret weapons hinted (huh ?)

The movie 300 thus rings a chord with many male Singaporeans, a shrinking population (by birth) conscripted to the army.

All this in support of the elite class of people. Now this is where, Singaporeans will find it hard to die for.

A Summary from history for Kids :

Ancient Greek philosophy is dominated by three very famous men: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. All three of these lived in Athens for most of their lives, and they knew each other. Socrates came first, and Plato was his student, around 400 BC. Socrates was killed in 399 BC, and Plato began his work by writing down what Socrates had taught, and then continued by writing down his own ideas and opening a school. Aristotle, who was younger, came to study at Plato’s school, and ended up starting his own school as well.

In the years after Plato and Aristotle died, in the 200’s BC, three famous kinds of philosophy started up in the schools that Plato and Aristotle had started. These are the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans. Each of these continued to be important ways of thinking about the world all the way through the Roman Empire, until people converted to Christianity in the 300’s AD, and even after that.

More detail here with an emphasis on Aristotle

http://www.hol.gr/greece/philoso.htm

I find this a useful source for a quick understanding. So great for Kids and why not for adults too ! 

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/greeks/index.htm

It is trade that makes Athens rich, and provides . . . the sinews of her cultural development. The merchants who accompany their goods to all quarters of the Mediterranean come back with changed perspective, and alert and open minds; they bring new ideas and ways, break down ancient taboos and sloth, and replace the familial conservatism of a rural aristocracy with the individualistic and progressive spirit of a mercantile civilization. . . . In the end it created a commercial empire whose thriving interchange of goods, arts, ways, and thoughts made possible the complex culture of Greece.

The economist understands part of the reason why this is so. Trade promotes specialization, which promotes wealth, which makes possible leisure as well as philosophical, scientific, and artistic endeavors. But the historian grasps another vital part of the explanation of why trade promotes cultural advancement. The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another and reason begins.

And reason begins! Reason itself is the product of trade. If this proposition is true and the evidence supporting it is gargantuan it follows that to oppose trade is not only to oppose people’s freedom to spend their money as they see fit. It is also to do nothing less than to oppose reason. And to oppose reason is truly to advocate barbarism. In Durant’s words, for citizens of ancient Greece a barbarian was a man content to believe without reason and to live without liberty.

It’s easy to know what the ancient Greeks would think of today’s self‑described progressive opponents of trade. These anti‑traders do not understand the enormous debt that they owe to trade. They do not understand just how many of the very sensibilities that spark them to oppose trade exist only because of trade.

This fact holds for that most patent modern sensibility: affection for nature. Our appreciation today for beautiful vistas, wildlife, and time spent with nature is almost exclusively the result of trade.

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/boudreaux/articles/2001/history.html

Why Greek Thought Dominates ?

The greek cities begin to trade as their land was good for gowing olives and wine, with surplus it made sense to trade. To trade, it became one of the earliest to use coinage. In time, however, trouble began as there was an imbalance in wealth distribution. Democracy was born out of potential political and civil unrest — as the underclass citizens were heavy in debt and in bondage. See : http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GREECE/ATHENS.HTM. So the Greeks had commerce and democracy. A potent combination for spreading their influence.
Read this :

http://www.friesian.com/greek.htm#why

The history of money will be important to discover how influence and ideas were transmitted

check this :

http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/amser/chrono1.html

Materials and Methods of Writing

Stone was the first writing surface and sharper, harder stones the first marking instruments. People gradually discovered natural dyes and inks to stain the stone cave walls and roofs they wrote on (see the cave painting of bison above from Altamira in Spain). The Egyptians incised plaster on walls with their sophisticated hieroglyphs. For everyday purposes, the Egyptians developed the first pre-cursor of paper. They glued together many layers of a reed called papyrus (which gives us the base of the word paper) to get a delicate sheet of material which would take ink. Other cultures learned to use leather or the broad leaves of plants. Eventually Europeans discovered that the treated skin of calves or sheep would yield a precious, smooth, white surface for writing called, respectively, vellum and parchment. Both vellum and parchment took about three weeks of intense hand labor to make, and both were very expensive.

In about 1400, the Italians discovered a way to break down old cloth into its individual fibers. Using a fine screen, they caught the fibers and pressed the water out. When the fiber was dry, they had a sheet of paper. Paper turned out to be quick and inexpensive to make, and the secret of paper-making spread north throughout Europe very quickly. (The Chinese had invented paper independently centuries earlier.) Suddenly it became cost-effective to write things down instead of laboriously memorizing them.

Later this same century, Johannes Gutenberg expanded on the idea of printing and made it feasible to print mass quantities of ordinary things. Before him, people hand-carved wooden figures and inked them in order to stamp them onto paper. Such plates were used mostly for pictures which were then hand-colored. The trouble with using wooden blocks for printing was that they took a long time and great skill to carve but only lasted for about a hundred impressions before the wood fibers broke down from pressure and ink. Gutenberg's contribution was making moveable type out of relatively inexpensive and long-lasting metal. Within fifty years, the intellectual face of Europe changed because of the sudden availability of books and other publications. It is not too much to say that democracy would never have developed without the printing press and cheap paper.

Disadvantages of Writing

Plato and his teacher Socrates were alive when writing first swept through Greece. Using Socrates as a character in one of his Dialogues, Plato expressed his reservations about the changes in society that he believed writing would bring. His opposition was two-fold:

He believed that writing would destroy the memory of the people. About this he was quite correct. People in his day could memorize, on only a few hearings, tens of thousands of lines of poetry word perfect. Writing destroyed that ability in only a few generations.

He believed that it was dangerous to write because the ideas of the writer could be misunderstood by the reader. If people misunderstand a speaker, the speaker is present to correct the misunderstanding. He can also control who his listeners will be. Writing has always carried the danger that the wrong person might get hold of the wrong information or form the wrong impression.

From the perspective of thirty centuries later, most of us are willing to live with these disadvantages. Because we have writing:

We notice differences over time. There was no history before people wrote things.

We do not waste much brain power merely remembering details; we can use those details in higher order reasoning.

We are not limited to our own experiences in order to gain knowledge. We don't have to rediscover knowledge in every generation, nor do we have to have personal contact with people who have specialized knowledge that we need.

We are capable of ruling ourselves in democracies now that knowledge is not entirely dependent on social class.

We can build on the knowledge of others to create new technology which revolutionizes our lifestyles in much less than a generation. The poorest among us, even those living in the most squalid conditions, have comforts better, in many respects, than the richest king of the Middle Ages.

From :

http://www.delmar.edu/engl/instruct/stomlin/1301int/lessons/language/history.htm

Chronological summaries of the history of Britain and its nations. Plus interactive timelines on key subjects:

- History of the English Language
- British Prime Ministers
- Kings and Queens
- Genocide Under the Nazis
from 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/

History of Timelines 

http://timelines.ws/

Chinese Timelines 

http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/time_line.html 

The recording of our thoughts …The evolution of the book from papyrus in Egypt and paper in China, through vellum and the codex to the manuscripts transcribed by medieval monks.

Chronological Timetable of Book History. Clay tablets, papyrus, bamboo, parchment, wax tablets, and paper were all used between 3500 and 100 BC. Timetable extends to 16th C.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~knops/timetab.html

Today, the world "book" brings to mind a rectangular object. Upon opening the book's cover we can flip through many thin sheets of paper perfectly aligned and secured into a sturdy spine. We use books for entertainment, information, and other reasons. We rarely stop the think about the origin of this common object. To judge from the surviving written materials, it appears that man has attempted to record his thoughts and experiences since, at least, the sixteenth century before Christ. The earliest written materials found in the world date back to this time. Many materials were used to construct these written materials in ancient times. Leaves, bark, wood, pot-sherds and clay were all materials used for shorter texts. Books and long literary or poetic collections were not recorded on these materials. The most popular materials used in ancient Greece and Rome for making books, not merely documents, were papyrus, leather, and vellum. Papyrus rolls existed for many centuries and they were followed by vellum codices.

Most likely, the Greeks did not use leather as often as they used papyrus or vellum as writing materials. Herodotus stated that leather was probably used when papyrus was not readily available (Kenyon 1951, p. 44). Greek literature may have been recorded on leather, but if so, no trace of such leather books survives. If leather was ever used regularly, it was probably earlier than the times of the Greeks and Romans.

http://www.unc.edu/courses/rometech/public/content/arts_and_crafts/Meredith_Drye/Ancient_Bookmaking.htm