Ancient Greece

Classical Athens (5th-4th century BC) produced democracy, philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), drama (Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes), history (Thucydides, Herodotus), and the mathematical and scientific tradition that — transmitted through Rome and the Islamic world — eventually produced the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Western civilisation is, in substantial part, an extended footnote to ancient Greece.