Vomiting, also called puking, is emptying the contents of stomach through mouth. It can be either food or liquid in the stomach. It can be from infection, contaminated food or drink (food poisoning), foul smells or foul-tasting food, the brain being injured, a block in the small intestines so food and liquid cannot go through, too much alcohol or other drugs. Also, people can make themselves vomit (self-induced) which is called purging. Usually people who have eaten or drunk poison are made to vomit any residual (leftover) poison off. Excessive vomiting may lead to dehydration, which can be dangerous, if not fatal as it will shut down a person's organs and twist the intestines.
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece was a large area in the northeast of the Mediterranean Sea, where people spoke the Greek language. It was much bigger than the nation of Greece we know today. It was the civilization of Greece, from the archaic period of the 8th/6th centuries BC to 146 BC. The period ended with the Roman conquest of Greece in the Battle of Corinth.
For most of this time, the Greeks did not have a single government or ruler. They did, however, have a common language and culture. The Greek language is an Indo-European language.
There were a number of city states, each with its own constitution. Athens, Sparta and Corinth are examples of city-states. Some had kings, and some, like Athens, had a form of democracy. As time went on, the most-powerful cities collected other cities into groups known as "leagues". This applied to many of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, most of which had close ties to one or another of the three big cities.
In the middle of this period, there was Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Athenian leadership successfully repelled the threat of Persian invasion in the Greco-Persian Wars. The Athenian golden age ends with the defeat of Athens at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War in 345Bc
In the last, Hellenistic, period, Greece was unified by the conquests of Alexander the Great. The city-states continued, under the overall influence of Macedonia.
Greek culture had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean region and Europe. In this way, classical Greece was part of the foundation of Western civilization. Greek was also the language, and partly the culture, of the Byzantine Empire.
The history of Greece went through these stages:
In the 8th century B.C., the Greeks learned how to read and write a second time. They had lost literacy at the end of the Mycenaean culture, as the Mediterranean world fell into the Dark Ages. The Greek Dark Ages (~1100 BC–750 BC), or Bronze Age collapse, is a period in the history of Ancient Greece and Anatolia from which there are no written records, and few archaeological remains.
The Greeks learned about the alphabet from another ancient people, the Phoenicians. They made some adjustments to it. In particular, the Greeks introduced regular letters for vowels, which was necessary for their language. Their alphabet was, in turn, copied by the Romans, and much of the world now uses the Roman alphabet.
Ancient Greece had one language and culture, but was not unified until 337 BC, when Macedonia defeated Athens and Thebes. That marked the end of the Classic period, and the start of the Hellenistic period. Even then, the conquered cities were merely joined to Philip II of Macedon's Corinthian League; they were not occupied, and ruled themselves.
Ancient Greece consisted of several hundred more-or-less independent city states. This was different from other societies, which were tribal, or kingdoms ruling over relatively large territories.
Undoubtedly the geography of Greece—divided and sub-divided by hills, mountains and rivers—contributed to the nature of ancient Greece. On the one hand, the ancient Greeks had no doubt that they were 'one people'; they had the same religion, same basic culture, and same language. Yet each city-state or "polis" was independent; unification was something rarely discussed by the ancient Greeks. Even when, during the second Persian invasion of Greece, a group of city-states allied themselves to defend Greece, most "poleis" remained neutral, and after the Persian defeat, the allies quickly returned to infighting.
The major features of the Ancient Greek political system were:
Later, in the Classical period, the leagues were fewer and larger, and dominated by one city (particularly Athens, Sparta and Thebes). Often cities would be compelled to join under threat of war (or as part of a peace treaty). After Philip II of Macedon 'conquered' the heartlands of ancient Greece, he did not attempt to annex the territory, or unify it into a new province. However, he did force most of the cities to join his own Corinthian League.
Some cities were democratic, some were aristocratic, and some were monarchies. Some had many revolutions in which one kind of government replaced another. One famous Greek kingdom is Macedon, which became briefly the largest empire the world had seen at the time by conquering the Persian empire (including ancient Egypt) and reaching into modern-day India. Other famous kingdoms are Epirus and Thessaly.
Monarchies in ancient Greece were not absolute because there was usually a council of older citizens ("the senate", or in Macedonia "the congress") who gave advice to the King. These men were not elected or chosen in a lottery like they were in the democratic city-states.
Citizens that could participate in government in Ancient Greece were usually men who were free-born in that city. Women, slaves and (usually) residents born elsewhere, did not have the right to vote. Details differed between cities. Athens is an example: The residents of Athens were of three groups: citizens, metics (resident aliens) and slaves. Citizens were residents whose forebears had been Athenians for three generations. Male citizens had the rights of free men and could be chosen to fulfill any official state position. "Of the estimated 150,000 residents of the city state of Attica, only about one fifth held the privilege of citizenship". Women who were citizens in Athens could not participate in political offices, but in Sparta they could.
The number of Greeks grew and soon they could not grow enough food for all the people. When this happened, a city would send people off to start a new city, known as a colony.
Because the terrain was rough, most travel was by sea. For this reason, many new cities were established along the coastline. First new cities were started in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and later along the Black Sea, in Cyprus, in southern Italy, in Sicily, and around what today is Benghazi in Libya. They even started a city, Naucratis, on the river Nile in Egypt. The cities of today, Syracuse, Naples, Marseille and Istanbul started as the Greek cities Syracusa, Neapolis, Massilia and Byzantium.
By the 6th century BC some cities became much more important than the others. They were Corinth, Thebes, Sparta, and Athens.
The Spartans were very well disciplined soldiers. They defeated the people who lived near them and those people had to farm the land for the Spartans. These "helots" had to give the Spartans part of the food they grew and so the Spartans did not have to work. Instead, they learned how to be better soldiers. There were not many Spartans but there were many helots. Spartan military strength controlled the helots. The Spartans had two hereditary kings who led them in war. At home they were also ruled by a group of old men called the Gerousia (the senate).