Pericles
- great Athenian statesmen and General
- led Athens to be the richest and most powerful Greek city-state and capital of intellectual artistic activity
- had imperialistic foreign policy
- his ambition most likely led to Peloponnesian War because of pursuit of power and control
Solon (the counter-cultural)
- 640 to 560
- was an archon (chief executive officer)
- spared the wealthy from land redistribution, canceled debts, forbade debt bondage, recalled citizens sold into slavery outside Attica
- broke the aristocratic monopoly of government authority
Cleisthenes (reformer)
- ensure more equitable representation of citizens through creation of ten large political divisions composed of wards
Themistocles (the sea man)
- 528 to 462 BCE
- realized that sea power was critical
- persuaded an assembly to use state owned mines of Laurium to increase naval fleet to 200 triremes
- engaged Persian fleet in narrow strait between Salamis and Attica
Socrates
- 469 to 399 BCE
- believed that absolute values did in fact exist and that one could strive to know them through dialectic
- developed the Socratic method (cross questioning)
- tried in 399 for capital charges of atheism and corruption of the young, defense recorded in Plato’s Apology
Plato
- pupil of Socrates
- 429 to 347 BCE
- his dialogues present brilliantly dramatic conversations between Socrates and pupil friends
- distinguishes the reality of the five sense from the world of ideas
- author of the Republic
- Founded the Academy
Aristotle (the brain)
- 384 to 322 BCE
- tutor of Alexander the Great
- founded own school called Lyceum
- rejected Plato’s emphasis on separate existing unchanging reality and based his own concepts on logical argumentation and observation of natural phenomena
- systematized logic, ethics, political science, metaphysics, natural sciences and literary theory