Ancient Greece

Paper instructions:
Ok, there is 5 questions that need to be answered in approximately 300 words each question.Just type the question number and then start writing answer in essay form. No need to cite. questions are 1.What are the names and dates of the 4 historical periods of Hellenic/classical civilization? What are the major events/people that pertain to each? 2.EXPLAIN the general characteristics of the two greek bronze age civilizations. Include (and explain) references to the art/architecture of each to support your answer. 3.Describe the golden age in Athens. When was it and what events conspired to create it? Who is Pericles and what was his contribution to Athens? #4.Discuss the differences between the naturalists and the humanists philosophers. What does each study, and who is associated with each group? Final question #5. What were the major elements of the classical style Greece? In what works of art can we see the application of these elements? Include (and EXPLAIN) an example from painting, sculpture, and architecture.
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The second course essay is on the Greeks: their innovations in intellectual thought and development of democratic government. The Greek rational approach to life is also clear in their history writing, especially in Thucydides. I think that in the very early stage of history, 3000 bc to maybe 500 bc, history writing was a self-absorbed narcisism of self-boasting written by court elites for the ruling elites, heroic warriors, creators of powerful states, crushers of enemies, god-like kings, meant to inculcate obedience to the god-sent ruler: history served the ruler and the state. This is seen in the epic of Gilgamesh and Mesopotamian creation myths and the wall inscriptions in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Later, by the time of the Greeks, history becomes critical, objective, searching for sources in order to write an accurate and balanced account of events, finding causes for events, detecting social flaws and political weaknesses. Thucydides will write the Peloponnesian war as a lesson on how a virtuous state can go bad with power and greed by having acquired an empire through the conquest of other lands and peoples.

Your second writing assignment is in two parts:

One has to do with the historical political development of the city states in Greece.

The other has to do with the birth of rational thought in Greece: what is today called science and philosophy.

The momentous importance of the ideas conveyed by democracy, science and philosophy cannot be overemphasized. Realism and naturalism were those same ideas expressed in art and sculpture; harmony, balance, proportion expressed in architecture; and from that same mind-set, Tragedy as expressed in human frailty in its unremitting battle between reason and humility on the one side, and power, arrogance and self-love on the other side.

The democratic system evolved in the city states of Greek civilization. During the late Bronze age, the city states of Mycenean civilization described by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey, were ruled by kings. A thousand years later, the Greek city states were ruled by leaders the people elected. One of the great achievements in early civilization was this birth of the democratic idea, which occurred in no other civilization.

So for the first part of your course essay, compose an essay on what you think the factors were (natural, geographic, cultural, intellectual, military) that enabled the Greek city states to achieve democracy. In your essay be sure to include a brief account of the principal stages of political development the city states went through in going from being ruled by the rich and few (oligarchy) to being ruled by elected officials. (Comment on who voted: how universal was greek democracy; what were its limitations with respect to what true democracy is considered today). Take Athens as a model for this.

For the second part of this assignment, start with the pre-Socratic thinkers. With these, science and philosophy were born. They were the first to try to comprehend nature, the heavens and its motions, and nature with its cyclical operations, in a rational way, divorced from myths of gods and nature.

How do you explain this amazing breakthrough of these pre-Socratic thinkers seeing the world as it is after thousands of years and hundreds of generations of people who had seen it as a product of mythic gods with all the fanciful stories of myth and the supernatural?

400 word minimum for each of the 2 parts of your essay.

Who were some of these pre-Socratics and how did they explain the world they saw? (Thales, Heracleitus, Democrates, Pythagoras, among others). What part of Greece were they in and how might that help explain how they arose?

Why are they called pre-Socratics? What is it about Socrates that differentiates him from these rational thinkers who came before him?

Each part should be a minimum of 500 words