Download The Ancient World

The Greeks
of the Ancient World
The Minoan Culture
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2nd millennium BCE
The mythical king Minos
The larger land of Crete
The citadel—Mycenae
The palace—Pylos
With centers of wealth and power
Its language the early form of Greek
The Dark Age of Greece
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Palaces destroyed by fire in the last century
of the millennium BCE
Written language lost and the Greeks were
illiterate for the next few hundred of years
Only a body of oral epic poetry left that was
the raw material of Homer
Homer and His Epics
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8 century BCE—Greeks learned how to
write again
Shaping the oral epic poetry into
written form
The Iliad and The Odyssey
The basis of an education and a whole
culture
A Completely Different
World View
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Pantheism
The arbitrary tendencies of gods
The disorder of the world
A ruler of heaven that can be feared,
laughed at, cheated, blamed and
admired at the same time
Gods’ sublime disregard of humans
The limited power of Zeus
A Completely Different
World View
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the blind forces of universe which are
not necessarily connected with
morality
Death is a human fear, just as the
courage to face it is a human quality
Our real admiration are not toward
gods but toward mortals [vs. The Old
Testament]
City-States of Greece
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Geographical features: mountain barriers
and scattered islands
Differing from each other in custom, political
constitution, and even dialect
Rivals and fierce competitors
8th-7th centuries BCE: age of great
expansion—all over the Mediterranean coast
Adapting the Phoenician system of writing
Athens & Sparta: 5th BCE
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Leading the combined Greek
resistance to the Persian invasion
(490-479 BCE)
Athens vs. Sparta
Athens
---Direct democracy
---Leader of a naval alliance: fleet
(Aegean Sea & coast of Asia Minor)
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Sparta
---rigidly conservative in government
---individuals reared & trained for the state’s
business
---superior in land army
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The Peloponnesian War
431-404 BCE
 With Athens’s surrendering to Sparta
 The exhaustion of Greek city states
 Subjugated by Macedon:
---King Philip  Alexander: (Ptolemy)
---Hellenistic age (323-31 BCE)
---the expansion of the Greek culture under
Alexander: language, buildings, gymnasium,
theater  (the writing of the Gospels)
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The rise & decline of
Athenian values
The delicate balance between the
individual freedom and the demands
of the state
---the individual versatility and grace
---the spirit of reverence
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A patriarchal class society
3 groups excluded from participation
in democracy:
---women (could not own property, hold
office or vote)
---resident aliens
---slaves
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Intellectual revolution
caused by the war
Critical reevaluation of traditional
values
 Innovations in education
 The appearance of the Sophists,
teachers for the art of public speaking
and related subjects
---the appearance of liberal education
 The deterioration of the Sophists
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The Sophists’ Influence:
both positive & negative
The appeal to human intelligence (the
canon of probability)
---attack on myth and concepts of gods
---undermining traditional moral convictions:
appeal to the self-interest of the audience
---men as the measure of all things: new
forms of creativity in art (poetry, painting
sculpture) and thoughts
---the Athenian rhetoric: contribution to Rome
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The Socratic philosophy
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Taking no fees, unlike the Sophists
Issues such as justice, truth of peity
The dialectic method: a search for truth
through questions & answers
To expose the illogicality of his opponent’s
position but did not often provide a
substitute for the belief he had destroyed
Distrust of public life
The influence of Socrates
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the Athenians’ exasperation
Socrates sentenced to death for the
insistence of his doctrine
Plato and Aristotle revolutionized
philosophy and laid the foundations for
later ancient and European
philosophical thought.