Ancient Greece: Golden Age, Myths, and Culture

• Under Pericles, Athens was known for beauty and culture
• During the Golden Age, Greek thinkers, writers, and artists contributed ideas to the world

Main Ideas:

• Greeks believed that gods and goddesses controlled nature and shaped their lives
• Greek poetry and fables taught Greek values
• Greek drama shapes entertainment today
• Greek art and architecture expressed Greek ideas of beauty and harmony

Vocabulary:

• Myth is a traditional story about gods and heroes
• An oracle is a person or place believed to reveal the will of a god
• An epic is a long poem that tells about legendary or heroic deeds
• A fable is a short tale that teaches a lesson
• Drama is a story told by actors who pretend to be characters
• Tragedy relates the downfall of the main character
• Comedy is a funny play or show

Timeline:

• 700s B.C.: Homer writes the Iliad and Odyssey
• About 550 B.C.: Aesop wrote fables
• About 500s B.C.: Greek architects began using marble columns

Greek Philosophers

• Greek philosophers developed ideas still used today
• Philosophy means "love of wisdom”
• Philosophy led to the study of history, political science, science, and mathematics
• Philosophers believed the human mind could understand everything
• Pythagoras taught that the universe followed laws that governed music and numbers
• Pythagoras believed all relationships could be expressed in numbers
• The Pythagorean theorem is used in geometry
• The Sophists were professional teachers in Ancient Greece

Plato and Aristotle:

• Plato was from a noble Greek family
• He abandoned politics after Socrates' death
• Plato founded an academy in Athens in 387 B.C.
• Plato taught with Socrates' method of questioning
• He believed the human soul connects appearances of things and ideas
• Aristotle was Plato’s student at the academy in Athens
• Aristotle’s father was a physician to the king of Macedonia
• Aristotle sought truth through a systematic, scientific approach
• He took notes about topics and arranged them in categories
• Aristotle did not trust the senses to understand the universe
• After Plato’s death, Aristotle traveled for about 12 years
• Later he tutored Alexander the Great
• He returned to Athens and opened the Lyceum, his own school
• He made his school a research center for knowledge

Greek Architecture

• The Greeks were skilled architects
• Architecture is the art of designing and building structures
• The most important architecture was the temple dedicated to a god or goddess
• The Parthenon is the best-known example
• Temples had walled rooms where statues and gifts were kept
• Large columns supported Greek buildings
• In 500 B.C., the Greeks began to use marble
• Marble columns were built in sections
• Large blocks of marble were brought from stone quarries
• Marble sections were stacked and joined with wooden pegs
• Greek temples were decorated with sculpture
• Greek sculpture expressed Greek ideas
• Greek artists favored the human body

Greek Mythology:

• Greeks believed gods and goddesses controlled nature and shaped their lives
• Myths are traditional stories about gods and heroes
• Greek mythology expressed the people’s religious beliefs
• The gods and goddesses affected people's lives and shaped events
• Important buildings were religious temples
• According to myths, Zeus ruled the sky and threw lighting bolts
• Demeter made the crops grow
• Poseidon caused earthquakes
• The 12 most important gods and goddesses lived on Mount Olympus
• Zeus was the chief god
• Athena was the goddess of wisdom and crafts
• Apollo was the god of the sun and poetry
• Ares was the god of war
• Aphrodite was the goddess of love
• Poseidon was the god of the seas and earthquakes
• Greeks believed each person had a fate or destiny
• They believed in prophecy and the gods gave prophecies
• Greeks consulted an oracle (AWR⚫uh kuhl)
• The most famous oracle was at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (DEHLFY)
• Greeks honored their gods with rituals and festivals

Homer:

• Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are famous
• Historians believed that Homer never existed
• Homer was a real person
• His poems may have been written with other poets
• Homer used the term aoidos for poet
• Homer created long epics with complex characters, dramatic action, and interesting events

Greek Poetry and Fables:

• Greek poetry and fables taught Greek values
• Greek poems and stories are the oldest in the Western world
• They have been models for later works for hundreds of years
• The earliest Greek stories were epics that told of heroic deeds
• Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 700s B.C.
• They are based on stories between Greece and Troy – The Iliad is about a prince of Troy who kidnaps the wife of the king of Sparta – The kidnapping outrages the Greeks – The king of Mycenae and the brother of the king of Sparta attack Troy – The battle for Troy drags on for 10 years – The Greeks build a hollow, wooden horse – The best Mycenaean warriors hide in the horse
• Aesop was a Greek slave who made up fables around 550 B.C.
• A fable teaches a lesson
• In most fables, animals talk and act like people
• Fables point out human flaws
• Each fable has a message, or moral
• One fable is The Tortoise and the Hare
• The moral of the story is "slow and steady wins the race"
• Aesop’s fables were part of Greece’s oral tradition
• They were passed down by word of mouth
• Since then, writers have retold the stories

Greek Historians:

• Greeks wrote the first real histories in Western civilization
• Herodotus wrote the history of the Persian Wars in 435 B.C.
• Herodotus tried to separate fact from legend
• Herodotus asked questions, recorded answers, and checked the truthful sources
• He included some errors and used gods and goddesses
• Western historians consider him the "father of history"
• Thucydides is the greatest historian in the ancient world
• Thucydides fought in the Peloponnesian War
• He wrote History of the Peloponnesian War
• Thucydides saw war and politics as human activities, stressing accurate facts

Greek Drama:

• Drama is a story told by actors who pretend to be characters
• Actors speak, show emotion, and imitate the characters' actions
• Greeks performed plays in outdoor theaters as part of religious festivals – They developed tragedies and comedies
• A tragedy has a person struggles to overcome difficulties but fails, leading to an unhappy ending – Early tragedies showed people struggling against fate – Later tragedies showed a person failing because of character flaws
• A comedy’s story ends happily
• Deals with great questions like: – What is the nature of good and evil? – What rights should people have? – What role do gods play in our lives?
• The three best-known writers of Greek tragedies were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides
• The best-known writer of Greek comedies was Aristophanes
• Early Greek tragedies had only one actor and a chorus
• Aeschylus first introduced two actors – This showed conflict between two people
• He also introduced costumes, props, and stage decorations
• Euripides tried to take Greek drama beyond heroes and gods with more down-to-earth characters
• Aristophanes wrote comedies that made fun of leaders and encourage the audience to think and laugh

The Ideas of Plato:

• One of Socrates' students was Plato
• One work Plato wrote is called the Republic, which explains his ideas about government
• Based on life in Athens, Plato believed democracy was not good because it did not produce fair policies
• He believed people could not live good lives without good government.
• In the Republic, Plato divided people into three groups:
• Philosopher-kings ruled with logic and wisdom
• Warriors defended the state
• The rest of the people were driven by desire that produced the state's food, clothing, and shelter
• Plato believed that men and women should have the same education and chance to have jobs.
• Aristotle was Plato’s student
• Aristotle wrote more than 200 books on government to the planets and stars
• Aristotle opened the Lyceum in 335 B.C.
• Aristotle taught his pupils the "golden mean" – This means a person should do nothing in excess.
• Aristotle helped to advance science and thought people should use their senses to observe
• Aristotle was first person to group observations according to how similar they are
• Aristotle studied governments of 158 places and mentioned three types – one person, such as a monarch or a tyrant – a few people – many people
• Aristotle saw that governments run by a few people were usually run by the rich and those that many people, they were run by the poor
• Aristotle thought best government was a mixture of the two
• Aristotle's ideas shaped how people thought about government