Sometimes it is not easy to understand how the different units of the Key Stage 2 National Curriculum were selected, but this is not true for the Ancient Greek unit. Since the renaissance period, knowledge of ‘the classics’ has been a central element for an educated man or woman. Ancient Greece is the crucible in which ideas were developed in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, medicine and democracy – rule by the people (albeit only certain people). Where Rome was engineering and building, Greece was thinking and ideas. These, of course, owed recognition to earlier civilisations of Egypt and Sumer and would in turn be developed by the later Abbasid Empire. They have nevertheless shaped the western world.