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High Classical Lecture

Terms in this set (23)

new focus of high classical
people who had become comfortable focusing their energies on the present life tried to refine what it meant to find order and stability in their everyday world. We might say today that the issue became 'how do I do me' so that I don't just become a cog in an impersonal world outside of me?
who became ruler of athens after the defeat of the persians?
Pericles became the de facto ruler of Athens—that is, Athens remained a democracy, but Pericles pulled the strings behind the scenes.
Pericles plan to be ready for the Persians
: since Athens had led the coalition of independent city states that had turned aside the invasion, each of the other city states would send to Athens an annual cash payment that would be stored to finance a military force to repel another invasion if that were ever necessary. Pericles, however, diverted much of this money into an urban renewal fund to beautify the city of Athens.
what was the result when a corinthian or spartan came to athens?
they saw how their money had been spent, and they got more and more angry. This resentment exploded in 431 BC, when the other city states under the leadership of Sparta invaded Attica and marched on Athens. This war is called the Peloponnesian War.
speech by Pericles

-what was the coherent philosophy behind the speech?
This speech, which was recorded by the historian Thucydides, summed up the ideals for which they had fought and died: in Athens, justice and opportunity were there for all, rich and poor alike; the law provides an orderly structure; decision making is transparent; and people can create a just society and shape the world to their own vision.

-sophism
sophism
Sophism stresses the importance of the human perception of reality over its objective existence
example of sophism
when a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it really happen? I guess the answer has to be yes, but the sophist would say that it doesn't matter; what does matter is whether or not someone was there to perceive it.
most famous expression of sophism
The most famous expression of this idea was by the philosopher Protagoras, who wrote that "man is the measure of all things".


In his play Antigone, Sophocles' famous Ode to Man celebrates everything that people can do
what structures both the art and the literature of the high classical period?
the philosophy of sophism
most famous example of how sophism influenced art is
the temple to Athena on the Acropolis hill in Athens, the Parthenon
the Parthenon
-It was designed by Iktinos, who built it on the basis of a mathematical formula: y = 2x + 1

-But there's something curious about this building: everything is a little off. The basic proportion is recoverable, but the numbers are off by a tiny fraction, and there are other oddities: right angles are 89 degrees plus a bit, not 90, and so forth.
Scholars have proposed three explanations for this, assuming that Iktinos intended the oddities and not that he was an incompetent architect
First, he deliberately designed the temple so that it would look right from a distance—an optical illusion of sorts.

Second, the opposite: he wanted the viewer to perceive the temple as unproportional

Third, Iktinos deliberately created a tension between the expected (y = 2x + 1, which is easy to grasp, for example, from the number of columns) and the unexpected (everything is off a bit).
-(This makes the building live by drawing the viewer in to experience it: a space is created for the subjective, in that the viewer is needed to perceive the tension between the abstract formula and its embodiment in the temple. Man is the measure of all things.)
sculptures on the parthenon (below pediments)
Below the pediments and above the columns are 'metopes', squares lined up next to one another in which every other square contains part of a mythological story. Each side of the temple has metopes that tell a different story: the Lapiths triumph over the centaurs, the triumph of the Greeks over the Trojans in the Trojan War, the Greeks fighting the Amazons (women warriors), and the gods defeating the giants who were attacking Mt. Olympus.
metopes
In each pair, the first group mentioned represents the ordering principle and the second, the challenge posed to it (Greek society was dominated by men, who considered women to be intellectually inferior, hence the problem with the Amazons—sorry, ladies ...).

There's the search for an underlying order
the sculptures of the west pediment
return us to sophism.

-These sculptures depict the Panathenaic procession, an annual event in which the people of Athens paraded up the hill to the Parthenon and brought sacrifices to Athena, the protectress of their city
up until now, temple structures depicted what??
-Up until this time temple sculpture depicted gods, or at least heroes who were part god and part human, but this procession contained ordinary people, whose inclusion in a way elevated them to a new importance. Man is the measure ....
the sculptures on the west pediment, which depict the birth of Athena
It is hard to see this in slides, where the sculptures are bathed in direct lighting, but when they were in place in the temple, the interplay of light and shadow would have drawn the viewer in, in a way that was parallel to the deviations in the y = 2x + 1 formula.
how can we interpret the play Oedipus the King?
Even though it was written later, we can use Aristotle's Poetics as an interpretive guide, since Oedipus the King was Aristotle's favorite play and his treatise provides a framework for analyzing it.
What does Aristotle say about tragic plays?
Aristotle says that tragic plays imitate people who are "better than or greater than we are"; this means that they are of a high social class and have the capacity to choose the good consistently, but sometimes miss the mark
missing the mark

what is it in Greek?
Missing the mark (hamartia in Greek) is an archery metaphor and happens to be the word for 'sin' that appears in the New Testament, but here it means more of an error in judgment.
action in tragedy
The action in tragedy had a discernible beginning, middle, and end; its plot can be simple, but it is better if it is complicated, either through a reversal from good to bad fortune (or vice versa) or a recognition, a coming to understand something that was not understood previously.
what should a tragedy arouse?
A tragedy should arouse pity, where someone seems to suffer unfairly, and fear, where we are afraid that something similar will happen to us, and once these emotions are aroused, the play provides a vehicle for releasing them, which Aristotle calls a 'catharsis'.
what does Oedipus the King exemplify?
Oedipus the King, then, exemplifies the High Classical moment. There is an order within the universe: oracles come true and actions have consequences, despite any human efforts to chart a different path
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