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The Arts
Architecture: The most famous surviving classical temple is the Parthenon in Athens,
which mixes the Doric and the new Ionic styles. The Parthenon, a temple to Athena Parthenos, or
Athena the Pure, was built in Athens in the 440s BC, using money from the Delian League's
treasury. It was meant to be the best temple ever built, and so it was made entirely out of marble
(even the roof-tiles!), and with eight columns across the front instead of six, and with carved
sculptures on the metopes. To make the Parthenon look even more like it was reaching for the
sky, the architects curved many of its lines upwards in the middle.
Similar architecture is seen in many government buildings today including the Capitol in Washington.
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The Arts
Sculpture: In about 460 BC, the Classical style became popular in Greek sculptures. Greek
sculptors began to experiment with honoring the gods by showing the beauty and grace of the human
body, especially the bodies of young, athletic men (women's bodies were still not shown without their
clothes).
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The Arts
Pottery: In Athens, in the Archaic period, potters continued to make the clay pots with
mythological scenes on them. Gradually the scenes grew and took over more of the pot, and the
geometric decoration took up less and less. At the same time, a new painting technique
developed. Instead of painting figures of people in outline, the Athenian potters began to paint
people in silhouette: this is called black-figure, because the people are all black.
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The Arts
Music: The Greeks had pipes, and lyres, and drums, and cymbals. Their pipes were made
from wood or reeds, with holes cut in them for your fingers to play the tune.
The Greeks also had lyres, which are like small harps, and might have sounded something like a
guitar. According to the Greek story, the first lyre was made from a turtle shell by the god
Hermes when he was a baby, and then Hermes gave it to Apollo. Apollo was the god of reason
and logic, and the Greeks thought of music as a great expression of order and patterns. Lyre
music was played calmer, and more soothingly, than the pipes and drums.
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Greek theater at Epidaurus (200 BC)
Literature
Plays are divided into tragedies and comedies. Tragedies are generally sad, while comedies
are funny. The oldest tragedies that we still have were written by Aeschylus around 500 BC. We
also have tragedies written by Sophocles (around 450 BC) and Euripides (around 425 BC). The
oldest comedies that we still have are by Aristophanes, and were also written around 425 BC.
Plays are also written in verse, like poems.
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Odysseus and his men put out the eye of the Cyclops, Polyphemos.
Literature
Epics are long poems which tell the story of a hero. Around 700 BC, Homer wrote two epics,
the Iliad and the Odyssey. The stories themselves are probably much older. Most likely Homer
didn't make up these stories, or even the words, himself. Poets or bards had been going around
Greece telling these stories for hundreds of years already. But Homer wrote them down. When
Homer was born, the Greeks had just recently learned how to use the alphabet from the
Phoenicians. Homer used the alphabet to write down the two long epic poems The Odessey is the
story of King Odysseus' return from the Trojan War to his kingdom of Ithaca, a small island on
the far side of Greece from Troy.
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Socrates
Philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy is dominated by three very famous men: Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle. All three of these lived in Athens for most of their lives, and they knew each other.
Socrates came first, and Plato was his student, around 400 BC. Socrates was killed in 399 BC,
and Plato began his work by writing down what Socrates had taught, and then continued by
writing down his own ideas and opening a school. Aristotle, who was younger, came to study at
Plato's school, and ended up starting his own school as well.
Socrates began to think about the world around him, and try to answer some difficult
questions. He asked, "What is wisdom?" and "What is beauty?" and "What is the right thing to
do?" He knew that these questions were hard to answer, and he thought it would be better to have
a lot of people discuss the answers together, so that they might come up with more ideas. So he
began to go around Athens asking people he met these questions. Then Socrates would try to
teach them to think better by asking them more questions which showed them the problems in
their logic. Often this made people angry. Sometimes they even tried to beat him up. He was
eventually condemned to death.
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Papyrus with words by Plato
Philosophy
Plato is known today as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. One of his earlier works is
the Republic, which describes what Plato thought would be a better form of government than the
government of Athens. When Plato was a young man, he went to listen to Socrates, and learned a
lot from Socrates about how to think, and what sort of questions to think about. When Socrates
was killed in 399 BC, Plato was very upset and he wrote down some of the conversations he had
heard Socrates have. Practically everything we know about Socrates comes from what Plato
wrote down.
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Government
Democracy means the rule of the people (in Greek). That is where each individual person
has a vote about what to do. Whatever the most people vote for wins. There is no king or tyrant,
and anybody can propose a new law.
The earliest democracy in the world began in Athens, in 510 BC. A man named Cleisthenes
(KLICE-then-eez), who was an aristocrat (a rich, powerful man) in Athens, invented this new
type of government, the democracy. Cleisthenes, like other aristocrats, wanted to get more
power. But tyrants had gotten unpopular in Athens. Cleisthenes decided to give even more power
to poor people. He organized a new way of making political decisions. Every Athenian man
would have one vote, and they would all meet and vote on what to do. The big meeting was
called the Assembly.
When democracy proved to be successful in Athens, many other city-states chose it for their
government too. But most of them allowed even fewer people to vote than Athens did: most of
the other city-states only allowed free adult male citizens to vote if they owned land or owned
their own houses (that is, the richer people).
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A Greek doctor letting blood out of a patient
Medicine
Disease was a very serious problem for the Greeks. Half of all children died before they were
ten. Most people who grew up died in their forties and fifties.
The main collection of writings about Greek medicine is the Hippocratic Writings, named after
the first and most famous of these doctors, Hippocrates (hih-POH-krat-ees). The Greeks were
very interested in using scientific observation and logic to figure out what caused diseases and
what you could do about them. In the 300s BC and afterward, in the Hellenistic period, Greek
doctors worked out a logical system for understanding disease.
The idea that you could learn to understand and treat diseases by using careful observation and
logical thought, is very important to modern medicine.
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Religion
People in ancient Greece believed that there were invisible, powerful gods and spirits that could
control what happened to you. The most famous of them, and the ones which the most people
sacrificed to, were Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Athena, Demeter, Hermes,
Ares, and Hades.
Most people also thought that you could control those gods and spirits through sacrifice, prayer,
and living a good life. For most people in ancient Greece, the gods were always around them,
paying attention to everything they did, and an important part of success in life was keeping on
the right side of the gods.
Most people thought it mattered how you behaved, too - good people had good things happen to
them, and bad things happened to bad people. People told stories about the gods to teach children
how to behave. Many stories warned against hubris - thinking you were better than the gods and against greed and cheating.
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Mathematics
Pythagoras lived in the 500s BC, and was one of the first Greek mathematical thinkers. He spent
most of his life in the Greek colonies in Sicily and southern Italy. He had a group of followers
(like the later disciples of Jesus) who followed him around and taught other
people what he had taught them. The Pythagoreans were known for their
pure lives (they didn't eat beans, for example, because they thought beans
were not pure enough). They wore their hair long, and wore only simple
clothing, and went barefoot. Both men and women were Pythagoreans.
Pythagoreans were interested in philosophy, but especially in music and
mathematics, two ways of making order out of chaos. Music is noise that
makes sense, and mathematics is rules for how the world works.
Pythagoras himself is best known for proving that the Pythagorean Theorem was true. The
Pythagorean Theorem says that in a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two right-angle
sides will always be the same as the square of the hypotenuse (the long side).
A2 + B2 = C2
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Astronomy and Mathematics
Thales was the first Greek scientist that we know of who did not try to explain the weather and
the stars and planets as things controlled by the gods. Instead, Thales thought there were
scientific explanations for these kinds of things. He was an astronomer. Thales figured out that
the earth was round.
Thales was also an important mathematician. He was able to prove several interesting
mathematical ideas. Thales proved that
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

a circle is bisected by its diameter,
the angles at the bases of any isosceles triangle are equal
if two straight lines cut one another, the opposite angles are
equal.
 if two triangles have two angles and a side in common, the
triangles are identical.
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Olympics
Once every four years, men from all over Greece came to compete in a great athletic festival in
Elis, in western Greece (The men wouldn't let women compete). This was called the Olympic
Games because the place was called Olympia. The Olympic Games were a religious festival to
honor the Greek gods Zeus and Hera.
Each city-state paid for a few athletes from their city to travel to Elis. But if you had ever been a
slave, or if you had ever done anything against the gods, then you couldn't be in the Olympics.
And, the men had to swear that they had already trained for at least ten months. This meant that
only men who were pretty rich could be in the Games, so they could afford to take so long off
work, and also pay a trainer.
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Contributions of Ancient Greece
Directions:
1. Look closely at each picture.
2. Take turns reading the captions under each picture.
3. Write down the type of contribution (words are in red).
For example: philosophy.
4. Write 3 specific facts you learned about each contribution.
5. Why is that contribution important?
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