Western history has traditionally be divided into three periods: classical antiquity (750 BCE - 500 CE), the medieval period (500 - 1500), and the modern period (1500 - present).

Classical antiquity began with the poetry of Homer (8th — 7th century BC) and continued through the fall of Western Roman Empire in 476 AD.

Classical Greece was a period of around 200 years in the 5th and 4th centuries BC (from roughly the defeat of the Persians in 479 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC).

Roman Republic 509 BC - 27 BC (Roman monarchy overthrown - Caesar crowned Rome’s first emperor, Augustus)

Roman Empire 27 BC - 476 AD (Caesar crowned - Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus)

The Middle Ages started around 476 AD and continued through the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453 (or the arrival of Columbus in the New World in 1492).

Renaissance 1400-1600 (Gutenberg invents movable type, 1447; Turks conquer Constantinople, 1453)

Reformation 1517-1555 (Martin Luther posts theses, 1517 - Peace of Augsburg, 1555)

Scientific Revolution 1543-1687 (Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543 - Isaac Newton’s Principia, 1687)

Baroque era (music) 1600-1750


Enlightenment 1715-1789 (Death of Louis XIV 1715 - French Revolution, 1789)

Classical era (music) 1750-1820

Industrial Revolution 1760-1840 (Arnold Toynbee)

Romantic era (music) 1820-1900

Modernism (Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863; Joyce, Ulysses, 1922; The Waste Land, 1922)