This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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