Pythagoras And Ancient Athenian Culture

Pericles’ Funeral Oration by Thucydides, and Sophocles’ play, Antigone, both illustrate cultural values that are crucial in understanding the dynamic of Ancient Athens. In these two pieces of literature, the cultural values are explained and understood through death. Pericles delivered the Funeral Oration as part of a public funeral for some of the Athenian fatalities in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. In Antigone, Sophocles is able to encompass values and conflicts through the death of Antigone’s brother. Pericles connects the death of soldiers to the importance of community, trust, personal freedoms, and social order that was essential in the success of Ancient Athenian Culture. Sophocles addresses the values of family, religion, and loyalty in his play, Antigone. The values highlighted in each of these works are very similar as they institute the importance of the patrioi nomoi (Athenian constitution) to the success of the Athenian state.

Greek culture was thriving with progressive thought and hungry for knowledge during the time of Homer and they believed themselves to be superior. They did, in fact, make significant contributions to the world in the areas of math, science, philosophy, medicine, and literature. Pythagoras, Euclid, and Archimedes, all Ancient Greek mathematicians, are credited for our

The Athenian society was known as the most powerful society and well-developed city in the ancient Greek world. The Athenian Society was also known for their brilliant innovations in a lot of fields of life that are still being used in today’s life. Those fields of life include literature, poetry, drama, theatre, schools, buildings, and government. The fact that Athenian society being the strongest and brilliant society in the Ancient Greek time makes it become the most interesting society to study about. This society has a lot to offer in terms of its history and culture. To really see what the Athenian Society look like, we have to look at some important factors. Those

Plato is one of the greatest mathematicians and teachers of geometry to ever live. To some, he is known as the “maker of math.” He himself made an academy that stressed mathematics as a way of understanding reality. He founded this academy in 387 BCE. According to one website, “... he was convinced that geometry was the key to unlocking the secrets to the universe.” Plato had many contributions in mathematics and geometry that helped in the past and still help in the present.

Even though it’s called Ancient Greece, doesn’t mean that all their ideas and lifestyles are ancient. Greeks have influenced lives today in many ways. They are the base of many different creations. Greeks have influenced the world today through education, architecture, government, and many more things. Many people's ideas are still used today and really affect society and how people live.

The astonishing cultural legacy of ancient Athens can leave the impression that ordinary Athenians during the Golden Age spent their leisure-filled lives contemplating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This refreshing look at Greeks at play corrects that idea. By examining the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex, Davidson is able to draw broader conclusions about the distinctiveness of Athenian culture as a whole. For instance, the author makes much of the Athenians’ obsessive predilection for fish: unlike beef or mutton, fish was not a sacrificial or religious food and could be enjoyed for its own qualities, and fish consumption became a hallmark of urban sophistication, if not decadence. Wine, he shows, was central to Athenian merry-making,

Thucydides regarded the rule under Pericles as “democracy in name but the rule of the first citizen in fact”.

The world of chaos and disorder has become the world of order and harmony. Ever since the ancient Greek times, chaos has been in existence. This led people to start thinking outside of the box. Many people started questioning why somethings were the way they were. As a result many philosophers emerged in the pre-Socratic times.

Hipparchus of Nicaea changed the world of Math and Science for years after his final breath. Hipparchus is considered to be the father of Trigonometry, a branch of math, and to have study the orbit of the Moon and Sun determining their size and distance from Earth. Hipparchus of Nicaea is said to be one of the greatest scientist of all times. Despite his brilliancy barely anything is known about Hipparchus or his works. The information that we have on Hipparchus is second hand accounts from him many students, the work his students produced especially Almagest by Ptolemy, and the only surviving work that is still left today, Τῶν Ἀράτου καὶ Εὐδόξου φαινομένων ἐξήγησις (Commentary on the Phaenomena of Eudoxus and Aratus).

Souls that were forgotten were believed to wander eternally in the bleakness of Hades. Hades was used to refer to both the god of the underworld and the afterlife itself. Hades was believed to have different planes of existence and the souls were scattered according to the lives they led on earth. Therefore, the belief in Hades was also important as it stressed the significance of leading a good life on earth as this determined where one’s soul was sent in the

Pythagoras, the person who created the Pythagorean Theorem, theorized that vision came from light rays that came from an eye that then hit an object. A Greek

An innovative playwright devoted his life to the people of Athens. Sophocles, an influential writer, captured the hearts of many Athenians during the Golden Age of Greece. He expressed realism and tried to make memorable messages.

For example, exact calculation of the Earth boundary “the distance around a circle or sphere”. He calculated this hard mathematic by using his normal and simple trigonometry and geometry knowledge by finding Earth as globe in space. During his time most Greek researcher Aristotle about (384-22 BCB) believed that the Earth is a globe, but none of was not sure that how big the Earth was. The entire Greek researcher observed that liners gone over the horizon while their poles were still noticeable. By this process Greek researcher know that the Earth is sphere. Also they had seen some changing movement position of all the stars in the big sky. He wrote few books that become very popular during that time, one of was named Catasterisms that about the constellation. This book was very helpful to find the story and description about each of the constellation, also it helps to count all the starts was included in it. But there were some confusion about his work which found by some scholars. From the Greek geographer’s books, he was showing his geographical skill and his all mathematical work was from the writing of the Pappus of Alexandria who was Greek geometer. He also wrote some books on geometry and arithmetic. However, he reported that his works was duplicating those were the cube and Sieve of Eratosthenes. It was a method for finding all the prime numbers. He not only wrote some books but also some literary critic, one of most common was “On the Old Comedy” that still available and it

As all the states, the city-state of Athens grew, flourished, entered its golden age and then fall. There were three main circumstances, which led to the end of the Greek culture in common and the Athenian Golden Age particularly. They are represented in the chronic warfare, the spread of Greek culture outside of Greece, and the farmers are drawn to the cities. The arrogance of Athens and its way in treating its allies in the Delian League could be reasons for the end of the Athenian Golden Age. (Butler, 2007). I will choose the chronic warfare to discuss since I believe that wars are the major reason, which led to the collapse of many if not all, nations and states through the history.

The plague of Athens led to the death and destruction of not only a mass of people, but the entire civilization. This cataclysmic event that ended the great civilization of Athens has inspired countless authors to write about it. Starting at the beginning of 431 BCE, historian Thucydides wrote his take on it. In his work, “The History of the Peloponnesian War,” Thucydides discussed the social and political consequences of the plague; a personal account on the experiences he lived through. Anywhere during 99-55 BCE, poet Lucretius had his work, “On the Nature of the Universe,” end with an account of the Athenian plague. Lucretius’s account was nearly an exact translation of Thucydides’ account, but whereas Thucydides wrote historically and genuinely on his experiences on the plague, Lucretius left certain things out and elaborated on others as he wrote it as part of natural phenomenon and laid out his writing to tell, in a didactic poem, the mental experience of the Athenian people.