Art History Everybody Should Know: Introduction to the Classical World

 
  Classic, Golden Age of Perikles, 480-350 BCE (450 BCE)
Late Hellenism 350-100 BCE (350-100 BCE)
Roman Empire 100BCE-315 CE
Roman Empire- 200 B.C.- 315 C.E.
Early Christian/Byzantine 315-750 C.E  (some sources say the Byzantine style survived all the way to 1450)
Romanesque 800-1150 C.E.
Gothic 1150-1350 C.E.
6) In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

Anonymous 6th grader's answer to a history test.

 
Show me your money!
 

 
 
 
 
 

Main Entry: Py·thag·o·ras
 Pronunciation: p&-'tha-g&-r&s, pI-
circa 580-circa 500 B.C. Greek philosopher & mathematician; generally credited with theory of functional significance of numbers in the objective world and in music
 - Py·thag·o·re·an /p&-"tha-g&-'rE-&n/ adjective symmetria ". . .derived from Pythagoreans, a belief that numbers underlie both physical and abstract phenomena served to anchor human experience and action in a stable and comprehensible universe.  Numbers reveal divine prescence in the human sphere."

Art History's History by Vernon Hyde Minor

Iktinos and Kallikrates The Parthenon c450 BCE Athens, Greece  17:8 ratio kalos symmetria Pythagorean ratios 6:8, 9:12

 
 
 

Classic, Golden Age of Perikles, 480-350 BCE (450 BCE)
Late Hellenism 350-100 BCE (350-100 BCE)
Roman Empire 100BCE-315 CE
Roman Empire- 200 B.C.- 315 C.E.
Early Christian/Byzantine 315-750 C.E  (some sources say the Byzantine style survived all the way to 1450)
Romanesque 800-1150 C.E.
Gothic 1150-1350 C.E.

 
 

Ancient Greece in 6th and 5th Centuries

 
 

The Athenian Age 490–479 B.C. In the middle of the sixth century B. C., Cyrus the Great of Persia seized Lydia and Ionia. The advance of his son-in-law, Darius the Great, into Thrace led to the Persian Wars. 490 First invasion of Greece, the Persians were defeated by the Athenians under Miltiades at Marathon Athenian leader Themistocles started construction of a great navy.  480 A second Persian invasion in led by Darius' son Xerxes. At the mountain pass of Thermopylae a vastly outnumbered force from Sparta, Thespiae, and Thebes made a heroic but futile stand against the Persians, who captured and burned Athens. 480 B.C. The remaining Persians were defeated by forces under the Spartan commander Pausanias and the Athenians Xanthippus and Aristides. The historian Herodotus devoted his major work to an account of the Persian Wars. 460 B.C. The statesman and orator Pericles became head of the Athenian democratic party  was virtual ruler of Athens for the next 30 years. Sparta, firmly under aristocratic rule, saw this democracy as a threat to its own system. It dominated the Delian League, an alliance of Aegean cities formed for mutual protection, and forced the members to pay tribute. Athens began expanding—to the east by sea, bringing it into conflict with Persia; and to the west on land, where it clashed with the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta. Members of the Delian League revolted. Athens became involved in almost ceaseless war, but was able to win most of the battles.  448 B.C., a peace treaty was signed with Persia and in 445 a truce was made with Sparta. The warfare ended in 443, when Pericles reorganized the defeated Delian League and turned it into the Athenian Empire.

 
 

Greece 450 BCE:  The Golden Age of Perikles The "Classic Era" Perikles b. c. 495 BCE - 429 BCE Athenian statesman largely responsible for the full development, in the later 5th century BC, of both the Athenian democracy and the Athenian empire, making Athens the political and cultural focus of Greece. His achievements included the construction of the Acropolis, begun in 447.

•  Pericles_Funeral_Oration
• http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/terroristattack/bush_speech.html
• Bush's Speech 9/11/01
• Bush's Speech 9/14/01

Jacques Louis David. The Death of Socrates. 1787

5) Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him.  Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline. Anonymous 6th grader's  answer to a history test.

Socrates
b. c. 470 BC, Athens [Greece]
d. 399, Athens
ancient Athenian philosopher. He was the first of the great trio of ancient Greeks--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--who laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture. As Cicero said, Socrates "brought down philosophy from heaven to earth"--i.e., from the nature speculation of the Ionian and Italian cosmologists to analyses of the character and conduct of human life, which he assessed in terms of an original theory of the soul. Living during the chaos of the Peloponnesian War, with its erosion of moral values, Socrates felt called to shore up the ethical dimensions of life by the admonition to "know thyself" and by the effort to explore the connotations of moral and humanistic terms. Plato
b. 428/427 BC, Athens, or Aegina, Greece
d. 348/347, Athens
ancient Greek philosopher, the second of the great trio of ancient Greeks--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--who between them laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture. Building on the life and thought of Socrates, Plato developed a profound and wide-ranging system of philosophy. His thought has logical, epistemological, and metaphysical aspects; but its underlying motivation is ethical. It sometimes relies upon conjectures and myth, and it is occasionally mystical in tone; but fundamentally Plato is a rationalist, devoted to the proposition that reason must be followed wherever it leads. Thus the core of Plato's philosophy, resting upon a foundation of eternal Ideas, or Forms, is a rationalistic ethics.
Aristotle
b. 384 BC, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece
d. 322, Chalcis, Euboea
Greek ARISTOTELES, ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the two greatest intellectual figures produced by the Greeks (the other being Plato). He surveyed the whole of human knowledge as it was known in the Mediterranean world in his day.
More than any other thinker, Aristotle determined the orientation and the content of Western intellectual history. He was the author of a philosophical and scientific system that through the centuries became the support and vehicle for both medieval Christian and Islamic scholastic thought: until the end of the 17th century, Western culture was Aristotelian. Even after the intellectual revolutions of centuries to follow, Aristotelian concepts and ideas remained embedded in Western thinking.