Course is Western Art: choose 2 short questions to answer and write 2-3 pages(provide picture examples)
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AncientGreece.ppsxAncient Greece
The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the time three centuries before the classical age, between 800 B.C. and 500 B.C.—a relatively sophisticated period in world history.
Archaic Greece saw advances in art, poetry and technology, but most of all it was the age in which the poleis, or city-state, was invented. The polis became the defining feature of Greek political life for hundreds of years.
THE BIRTH OF THE CITY-STATE
During the so-called “Greek Dark Ages” before the Archaic period, people lived scattered throughout Greece in small farming villages. As they grew larger, these villages began to evolve. Some built walls. Most built a marketplace (an agora) and a community meeting place.
They developed governments and organized their citizens according to some sort of constitution or set of laws. They raised armies and collected taxes. And every one of these city-states (poleis) was said to be protected by a particular god or goddess, to whom the citizens of the polis owed a great deal of reverence, respect and sacrifice.
For example, Athens’s deity was Athena
Though their citizens had in common what Herodotus called “the same stock and the same speech, our shared temples of the gods and religious rituals, our similar customs,” every Greek city-state was different.
The largest, Sparta, controlled about 300 square miles of territory; the smallest had just a few hundred people.
However, by the dawn of the Archaic period in the seventh century B.C., the city-states had developed a number of common characteristics. They all had economies that were based on agriculture, not trade: For this reason, land was every city-state’s most valuable resource. Also, most had overthrown their hereditary kings, or basileus, and were ruled by a small number of wealthy aristocrats.
These people monopolized political power. (For example, they refused to let ordinary people serve on councils or assemblies.) They also monopolized the best farmland, and some even claimed to be descended from the gods.
Because “the poor with their wives and children were enslaved to the rich and had no political rights,” Aristotle said, “there was conflict between the nobles and the people for a long time.”
COLONIZATION
Emigration was one way to relieve some of this tension. Land was the most important source of wealth in the city-states; it was also, obviously, in finite supply.
The pressure of population growth pushed many men away from their home poleis and into sparsely populated areas around Greece and the Aegean. Between 750 B.C. and 600 B.C., Greek colonies sprang up from the Mediterranean to Asia Minor, from North Africa to the coast of the Black Sea. By the end of the seventh century B.C., there were more than 1,500 colonial poleis.
Each of these poleis was an independent city-state. In this way, the colonies of the Archaic period were different from other colonies we are familiar with: The people who lived there were not ruled by or bound to the city-states from which they came. The new poleis were self-governing and self-sufficient.
THE RISE OF THE TYRANTS
As time passed and their populations grew, many of these agricultural city-states began to produce consumer goods such as pottery, cloth, wine and metalwork.
Trade in these goods made some people—usually not members of the old aristocracy—very wealthy. The tyrants resented the unchecked power of the oligarchs and banded together, sometimes with the aid of heavily-armed soldiers called hoplites, to put new leaders in charge.
These leaders were known as tyrants. Some tyrants turned out to be just as autocratic as the oligarchs they replaced, while others proved to be enlightened leaders.
Enlightened leaders: Pheidon of Argos established an orderly system of weights and measures, for instance, while Theagenes of Megara brought running water to his city.
However, their rule did not last: The classical period brought with it a series of political reforms that created the system known as demokratia, or “rule by the people.”
PELOPONNESIAN WAR
Athens and Sparta, both powerful Greek city-states, had fought as allies in the Greco-Persian Wars between 499 and 449 B.C. In the wake of the Persian retreat, however, Athens grew more powerful and tensions rose, escalating into nearly three decades of war. Sparta emerged victorious, while the constant fighting left Athens bankrupt, exhausted and demoralized. Neither city-state regained the military strength they once had.
Thucydides, a contemporary historian, believed that the war broke out because of Spartan fear of the rising power of Athens, whose empire and capital increasingly isolated less imaginative and less adventurous rivals.
ARCHAIC RENAISSANCE?
The colonial migrations of the Archaic period had an important effect on its art and literature: They spread Greek styles far and wide and encouraged people from all over to participate in the era’s creative revolutions.
The epic poet Homer, from Ionia, produced his Iliad and Odyssey during the Archaic period.
Sculptors created kouroi and korai, carefully proportioned human figures that served as memorials to the dead.
Scientists and mathematicians made progress too: Anaximandros devised a theory of gravity; Xenophanes wrote about his discovery of fossils; and Pythagoras of Kroton discovered his famous theorem.
The economic, political, technological and artistic developments of the Archaic period readied the Greek city-states for the monumental changes of the next few centuries.
GREEK MYTHS
In ancient Greece, stories about gods and goddesses and heroes and monsters were an important part of everyday life. They explained everything from religious rituals to the weather, and they gave meaning to the world people saw around them.
In Greek mythology, there is no single original text like the Christian Bible or the Hindu Vedas that introduces all of the myths’ characters and stories. Instead, the earliest Greek myths were part of an oral tradition that began in the Bronze Age, and their plots and themes unfolded gradually in the written literature of the archaic and classical periods.
The poet Homer’s 8th-century BC epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, tell the story of the (mythical) Trojan War as a divine conflict as well as a human one. They do not, however, bother to introduce the gods and goddesses who are their main characters, since readers and listeners would already have been familiar with them.
Around 700 BC, the poet Hesiod’s Theogony offered the first written cosmogony, or origin story, of Greek mythology. The Theogony tells the story of the universe’s journey from nothingness (Chaos, a primeval void) to being, and details an elaborate family tree of elements, gods and goddesses who evolved from Chaos and descended from Gaia (Earth), Ouranos (Sky), Pontos (Sea) and Tartaros (the Underworld). People over the years build upon the Greek myth works.
GREEK MYTHOLOGY: THE OLYMPIANS
At the center of Greek mythology is the pantheon of deities who were said to live on Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece. From their perch, they ruled every aspect of human life.
Olympian gods and goddesses looked like men and women (though they could change themselves into animals and other things) and were–as many myths recounted–vulnerable to human foibles and passions.
Zeus (Jupiter, in Roman mythology): the king of all the gods (and father to many) and god of weather, law and fate
Hera (Juno): the queen of the gods and goddess of women and marriage
Aphrodite (Venus): goddess of beauty and love
Apollo (Apollo): god of prophesy, music and poetry and knowledge
Ares (Mars): god of war
Artemis (Diana): goddess of hunting, animals and childbirth
Athena (Minerva): goddess of wisdom and defense
Demeter (Ceres): goddess of agriculture and grain
Dionysos (Bacchus): god of wine, pleasure and festivity
Hephaistos (Vulcan): god of fire, metalworking and sculpture
Hermes (Mercury): god of travel, hospitality and trade and Zeus’s personal messenger
Poseidon (Neptune): god of the sea
Hades (Pluto): god of the underworld
Hestia(Vesta): goddess of home and family
Eros (Cupid): god of sex and minion to Aphrodite
Heroes & Monsters
Human heroes–such as Heracles, the adventurer who performed 12 impossible labors for King Eurystheus (and was subsequently worshipped as a god for his accomplishment); Pandora, the first woman, whose curiosity brought evil to mankind
“hybrids”: the winged horse Pegasus, the horse-man Centaur, the lion-woman Sphinx and the bird-woman Harpies, the one-eyed giant Cyclops
The characters, stories, themes and lessons of Greek mythology have shaped art and literature for thousands of years. They appear in Renaissance paintings such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea and writings like Dante’s Inferno; Romantic poetry and libretti; and scores of more recent novels, plays and films.
