Assignment Task:
Your Own Greek Museum
Search the references in this module and find at least 10 examples of Greek classical art. Put them together in a PowerPoint presentation with at least one good image. Make sure you credit each image in the slide where it is placed. Put together a video presentation inviting us to learn about Greece's art and culture. Make sure your presentation includes images from different works of art, including sculpture, architecture, philosophy, poetry, and theater.
Classical Greece:
Persian Wars and Delian League:
After the Persian Wars, the different "demes" that formed the land of Hellas or Greece united in the Delian League. The League was formed to ensure that all of Greece would be protected from attacks if any foreign invader would dare try what the Persians had done. Although some of the demes were reluctant to do this, Athens found ways to enforce every deme to participate and contribute whatever they could. It was called the Delian League because the treasure collected from the different demes was put on the island of Delos in the middle of the Aegean Sea to symbolize neutrality.
Athens:
All demes had their system of government. Some were monarchies, oligarchies, and some were forms of democracy. The word democracy comes from the combination of two Greek words, "demos," meaning "the people," and "cracy," meaning "power." The idea was that the power was in the people's hands. Athens was the center of commerce and developed a "direct" democracy. Scholars now debate how democratic this system was given that only Greek males over a certain age and landowners could participate in it. After their victory against the Persians, Athenians felt that it was thanks to them mostly that the war was won. They considered their democracy strong because their soldiers were not hired to fight, but every citizen took arms to defend their city and freedom. They observed that the Persians, for example, had a king who ruled over them. The Greeks had leaders, but the Greeks themselves elected them.
Sparta:
Sparta was another very powerful city-state. Their government was based on two kings that kept a check on each other, and their power was absolute. Ironically, women in Sparta had more rights than women in Athens, although this city was a democracy and Sparta a monarchy. Sparta depended on conquering their neighbors and enslaving them. They were reluctant to participate in the Delian league but decided to do it.
Athens Flourishes:
After a while, Athens took the money put together by all the city-states and started using it for its benefit. Suddenly, the city of Athens was filled with huge theaters, the Parthenon, drama, poetry, and philosophy.
In sculpture, we see the development of the classical Greek period (480-323 B.C.E.) that reflected Greeks experimenting with form and taking the human body further. Examples of this could be the Doryphorus (Spear-bearer), the statue of Zeus, and the Aphrodite of Knidos.
The Parthenon, the temple dedicated to Athena and built on the highest point in the Acropolis, is an example of outstanding Greek architecture.
The Greeks also excelled in drama. Forty-four Greek plays by four playwrights survive. One of these was Antigone by Sophocles. Reading Antigone now would reflect how universal the Greeks' themes were in their writing. Antigone's brother fought against the current king and died in battle. The king orders his body to be left on the battlefield to rot and be eaten by animals. Antigone refuses to obey the king, rescues her brother's body, and buries him. The greatness of this play might be that a woman around 2,500 years ago was shown to speak truth to power, to man, because she was convinced that there are higher laws than those established by men.
There is also the poetry of Sappho. This poet was a celebrated writer in her historical moment. Sappho's poetry is intimate, intense, and romantic. In ancient Greece, a woman becomes famous in letters. Although the Greeks might not have a perfect democracy, there was already a seed of the value of freedom that was beyond culture and custom.
Maybe the most influential contribution Greeks left us was philosophy. The Greeks wanted to know the world for what it was. Although they had their gods, they realized that the gods did not explain all of nature. They set out to understand the world through rational thought, liberating themselves from tradition and culture. Today this might not sound like much, but at that historical moment when all of the worlds were explained through the beliefs of different cultures, daring to doubt tradition and the norm was a huge challenge.
The first philosophers might be called the naturalist philosophers, also known as the pre-Socratics, just because they came before Socrates. These philosophers were impressed by the world around them and the universe. They were so impressed with the universe that they called it "beauty." they are called cosmologists because they observe the cosmos. The word cosmos in the original Greek means beauty.
These philosophers lived in Miletus, separating the natural from the supernatural. From here on, they wanted to explain the world through reason without depending on supernatural explanations. From Miletus, we get Thales, who is considered the first philosopher, and he thought that water was the fundamental substance of everything. For Heraclitus of Ephesus, the universe was in constant flux, and its underlying Form of Guiding Force was the Logos. On the other hand, Pythagoras thought that all universal relationships were expressed in numbers (Fiero, 2016). Hippocrates was an important turn in medicine, considered the "father of medicine." He decided to start treating patients by understanding the body. This was different from thinking that spirits caused illnesses and treating them through incantations.
Then came the Sophists. The sophists were interested in truth and justice. They wanted to teach men to be successful and win arguments. Athens was a democracy, and the art of public speaking was highly praised. For a fee, the Sophists would teach men to win arguments whether they were true. For them, all knowledge was relative. One of them, Protagoras, is known for saying that "man is the measure of all things." If a man is the measure of all things, then all things are subjectively defined.
A great turn in philosophy came with Socrates. Socrates was not happy with what the Sophists were doing in his city. For Socrates, it was important to search for the universal truth of everything. Knowledge cannot be relative, so he opposed the views of the Sophists and believed that truth and justice were absolute. "Ethical life belonged to a larger set of universal truths and unchanging moral order" (Fiero, 2016). In Greek, he developed the maieutic method of the Socratic method, also called dialectic. He would walk around in the plaza and ask questions to whoever he saw passing by. Through inductive reasoning, he would reach a certain level of knowledge together with his interlocutor. He was put to death for subversive behavior.
His best student, Plato, is the one that tells us most of what we know about Socrates. The master did not write anything. If he did, we have not found it. Plato developed his theory of ideas. For Plato, reality was reached through the intellectual exercise of reason. The Forms were eternal truths that helped us understand the world we lived in. But the world we live in is just a copy of the eternal truths. For example, love is a form for Plato. Love is manifested in many different ways, and we define certain acts as acts of love. We love people, and then they or we die. But love has always been there, even if we pass. For Plato, this meant that love was one of those forms.
In Book VII of his work Republic, Plato gives an allegory that is one of the most famous stories in world literature, the Allegory of the Cave. For Plato, we are in a cave representing ignorance or our lack of knowledge. We spend all our lives in this cave chained, thinking what we see is the truth. Eventually, if we can escape, we will know the truth by developing our capacity for intellectual reason. But humans are always trying to come out of the cave, and many of us prefer to stay ignorant. Thus, if someone tries to help us come out of the cave because they went out and saw truth (which is another universal form for Plato), we would ignore them or kill them. Ignorance feels comfortable. We do not want to liberate ourselves.
The last of the great ancient Greek philosophers is Aristotle. Aristotle was a student of Plato. But he differed from his master. From this thinker, we get the study of how we organize our thinking, called logic, a systematic study of human action called ethics, among the most important of his contributions to philosophy. The Golden Mean, according to Aristotle, basically expressed that as we develop good habits of behavior, we develop virtue. Virtue helps us make the right choices. If we make the right choices even in difficult situations, we have found the Golden Mean. For Aristotle, the Golden Mean manifests a balanced character that does not go to extremes to act but finds the just and right action in the Golden Mean.
Peloponnesian Wars:
Although Athens flourished in all these different ways, its democratic system suffered from corruption, and Athens was trying to become an empire ruling almost over the whole of Greece. Sparta realized that Athens had used the funds destined to protect the entire country against threats to build the city. We could say that Athens' flourishing happened thanks to the money they took from the Delian League. Sparta declared war on Athens, and eventually, Sparta defeated the city of Athens. Although Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, there wasn't much to celebrate. This ended the period we call the classical period of Greek culture.