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The Ancient Greeks made pottery for everyday use, not for display; the trophies won at games, such as the Panathenaic Amphorae (wine decanters), are the exception.

Most surviving pottery consists of drinking vessels such as amphorae, kraters (bowls for mixing wine and water), hydria (water jars), libation bowls, jugs and cups. Painted funeral urns have also been found.

Miniatures were also produced in large numbers, mainly for use as offerings at temples. In the Hellenistic period a

wider range of pottery was produced, but most of it is of little artistic importance.

At the end of the Geometric phased, the Orientalizing phase of vase painting, saw the abstract geometric designs replaced by the more rounded, realistic forms of Eastern motifs, such as the lotus, palmette, lion, and sphinx. Ornament increased in amount and intricacy.

In earlier periods even quite small Greek cities produced pottery for their own locale. These varied widely in style and standards. Distinctive pottery that ranks as art was produced on some of the Aegean islands, in Crete, and in the wealthy Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily.

By the later Archaic and early Classical period, however, the two great commercial powers, Corinth and Athens, came to dominate. Their pottery was exported all over the Greek world, driving out the local varieties.

Pots from Corinth and Athens are found as far afield as Spain and Ukraine, and are so common in Italy that they were first collected in the 18th century as "Etruscan vases". Many of these pots are mass-produced products of low quality. In fact, by the 5th century BC, pottery had become an industry and pottery painting ceased to be an important art form.

The history of Ancient Greek pottery is divided stylistically into periods:

the Protogeometric from about 1050 BC;

the Geometric from about 900 BC;

the Late Geometric or Archaic from about 750 BC;

the Black Figure from the early 7th century BC;

and the Red Figure from about 530 BC.

The range of colours which could be used on pots was restricted by the technology of firing: black, white, red, and yellow were the most common. In the three earlier periods, the pots were left their natural light colour, and were decorated with slip that turned black in the kiln.

The fully mature black-figure technique, with added red and white details and incising for outlines and details, originated in Corinth during the early 7th century BC and was introduced into Attica about a generation later; it flourished until the end of the 6th century BC.

The red-figure technique, invented in about 530 BC, reversed this tradition, with the pots being painted black and the figures painted in red. Red-figure vases slowly replaced the black-figure style. Sometimes larger vessels were engraved as well as painted. .

During the Protogeometric and Geometric periods, Greek pottery was decorated with abstract designs. In later periods, as the aesthetic shifted and the technical proficiency of potters improved, decorations took the form of human figures, usually representing the gods or the heroes of Greek history and mythology.

Battle and hunting scenes were also popular, since they allowed the depiction of the horse, which the Greeks held in high esteem. In later periods erotic themes, both heterosexual and male homosexual, became common.

Greek pottery is frequently signed, sometimes by the potter or the master of the pottery, but only occasionally by the painter.

Hundreds of painters are, however, identifiable by their artistic personalities: where their signatures haven't survived they are named for their subject choices, as "the Achilles Painter", by the potter they worked for, such as the Late Archaic "Kleophrades Painter", or even by their modern locations, such as the Late Archaic "Berlin Painter".

Thanks to its hardy nature, pottery bulks large in the archaeological record of ancient Greece, and because we have so much of it (some 100,000 vases are recorded in the Corpus vasorum antiquorum) it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of Greek society.

Little survives, for example, of ancient Greek painting except for what is found on the earthenware in everyday use, so we must trace the development of Greek art through its vestiges on a derivative art form.

Nevertheless the shards of pots discarded or buried in the first millennium BCE are still the best guide we have to the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks.

Development of Vase Painting

Protogeometric Style

Vases of protogeometrical period (c. 1050-900 BCE.) represent the return of craft production after the collapse of the Mycenaean Palace culture and the ensuing Greek dark ages. Indeed, it is one of the few modes of artistic expression besides jewellery in this period since the sculpture, monumental architecture and mural painting of this era are unknown to us.

Yet by 1050 BCE life in the Greek peninsula seems to have become sufficiently settled to allow a marked improvement in the production of earthenware. The style is confined to the rendering of circles, triangle, wavy lines and arcs, but placed with evident consideration and notable dexterity, probably aided by compass and multiple brush.

The site of Lefkandi is our chief source of ceramics from this period where a cache of grave goods has been found giving evidence of a distinctive Euboian protogeometric. Attic production was the first to resume and influence the rest of Greece, especially Boeotia, Corinth, the Cyclades (in particular Naxos) and the Ionian colonies in the east Aegean.

Geometric Style

Geometrical art flowered in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE. It was characterized by new motifs, breaking with the iconography of the Minoan and Mycennean periods: meanders, triangles and other geometrical decoration (from whence the name of the style) as distinct from the predominantly circular figures of the previous style.

The best examples we have were grave goods, which often allows us to differentiate Attic, other mainland and island styles since we may assume they were produced in a batch for the sole purpose of burial. However our chronology comes from exported wares found in datable contexts overseas.

With the Early geometrical style (approximately 900-850 BCE) one finds only abstract motifs, in what is called the “Black Dipylon” style, which is characterized by an extensive use of black varnish, with the Middle Geometrical (approx. 850-770 BCE), figurative decoration makes its appearance: they are initially identical bands of animals (horses, stags, goats, geese, etc) which alternate with the geometrical bands.

In parallel, the decoration becomes complicated and becomes increasingly ornate; the painter feels reluctant to leave empty spaces and fills them with meanders or swatiskas. This phase is named horror vacui and will not cease until the end of geometrical period.

In the middle of the century there begin to appear human figures. The best known representations of which are those of the vases found in Dipylon, one of the cemeteries of Athens. The fragments of these large funerary vases show mainly processions of chariots or warriors or of the funerary scenes: p???es?? / prothesis (exposure and lamentation of dead) or ??f??? / ekphora (transport of the coffin to the cemetery).

The bodies are represented in a geometrical way except for the calves, which are rather protuberant. In the case of soldiers, a shield in form of a Diabolo, called “Dipylon shield” because of its characteristic drawing, covers the central part of the body. The legs and the necks of the horses, the wheels of the chariots are represented one beside the other without perspective.

The hand of this painter, so called in the absence of signature, is the Dipylon Master, could be identified on several pieces, in particular monumental amphorae.

At the end of the period there appear representationsof mythology, probably at the moment when Homer codifies the traditions of Trojan cycle in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here however, the interpretation constitutes a risk for the modern observer: a confrontation between two warriors can be as well a Homeric duel as a simple combat; a failed boat can represent the shipwreck of Odysseus or any hapless sailor.

Lastly, we have the local schools that appear in Greece. Production of vases was largely the prerogative of Athens - it is well attested that as in the proto-geometrical period, in Corinth, Boeotia, Argos, Crete and Cyclades, the painters and potters were satisfied to follow the Attic style. From about the 8th century on, they created their own styles, Argos specializing in the figurative scenes, Crete remaining attached to a more strict abstraction.

Orientalizing Style

The orientalizing style was the product of cultural ferment in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean of the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Fostered by trade links with the city-states of Asian Minor the artifacts of the East influenced a highly stylized yet recognizable representational art.

Ivories, pottery and metalwork from the Neo-Hittite principalities of northern Syria and Phoenicia found their way to Greece, as did goods from Anatolian Urartu and Phrygia, yet there was little contact with the cultural centers of Egypt or Assyria. The new idiom developed initially in Corinth and later in Athens between circa 725 to 625 BCE.

It was characterized by an expanded vocabulary of motifs: sphinx, griffin, lions, etc, as well as a repertory of non-mythological animals arranged in friezes across the belly of the vase. In these friezes the painter also from now on applies lotuses or palmettes. Depictions of humans were relatively rare; of these we most commonly find figures in silhouette with some incised detail, this was perhaps the origin of the incised silhouette figures of the black-figure period.

There is sufficient detail on these figures to allow us to discern a number of different artist’s hands. Geometrical features remained in the style called proto-Corinthian that embraced these orientalizing experiments, yet which co-existed with a conservative sub-geometric style.

The ceramics of Corinth were exported all over Greece, and their technique arrived in Athens, prompting the development of a less markedly eastern idiom there. During this time described as protoattic, the orientalizing motifs appear but the features remain not very realistic.

The painters show a preference for the typical scenes of the Geometrical Period, like the procession of chariots. However, they adopt the principle of line drawing to replace the silhouette. In the middle of 7th century there appears the black and white style: black figures on a white zone, accompanied by polychromy to render the color of the flesh or clothing. Clay used in Athens was much more orange than that of Corinth, and so did not lend itself as easily to the representation of flesh.

Crete, and especially the islands of the Cyclades, are characterized by their attraction to the vases known as “plastic”, i.e. whose paunch or collar is moulded in the shape of head of an animal or a man. At Aegina, the most popular form of the plastic vase is the head of the griffin.

The Melanesian amphoras, manufactured at Paros, exhibit little knowledge of Corinthian developments. They present a marked taste for the epic composition and a horror vacui, which is expressed in an abundance of swastikas and meanders.

Finally one can identify the last major style of the period, that of Wild Goat Style, allotted traditionally to Rhodes because of an important discovery within the necropolis of Camiros. In fact, it is widespread over all of Asia Minor, with centers of production at Miletos and Chios.

Two forms prevail: oenochoes, which copied bronze models, and dishes, with or without feet. The decoration is organized in superimposed registers in which stylized animals, in particular of feral goats (from whence the name) pursue each other in friezes. Many decorative motifs (floral triangles, swastikas, etc.) fill the empty spaces.

Black Figure

The black-figure period coincides approximately with the era designated by Winkelmann as the middle to late Archaic, from c. 620 to 480 BCE. The technique of incising silhouetted figures with enlivening detail which we now call the black-figure method was, as we saw, a Corinthian invention of the 7th century and spread from there to other city states and regions including Sparta, Boeotia, Euboea, the east Greek islands and most importantly Athens.

The Corinthian fabric, extensively studied by HGG Payne and Darrell Amyx, can be traced though the parallel treatment of animal and human figures. The Animal motifs have greater prominence on the vase and show the greatest experimentation in the early phase of Corinthian black-figure.

As Corinthian artists gained in confidence in their rendering of the human figure the animal frieze declined in size relative to the human scene during the middle to late phase. By the mid 6th century the quality of Corinthian ware had fallen away significantly to the extent that some Corinthian potters would disguise their pots with a red slip in imitation of superior Athenian ware.

It was to be at Athens that black-figure would reach its full potential. It is at Athens we first find the phenomenon of vase painters signing their work, the first known being a Dinos by Sophilos (illus. below, BM c. 580), this perhaps indicitive of their increasing ambition as artists in producing the monumental work demanded as grave markers, as for example with Kleitias’s François Vase.

The finest work in the style belongs to Exekias and the Amasis Painter whose feeling for composition and narrative mark them out from the jobbing artisans of their contemporaries.

Circa 520 BCE the red-figure technique was developed and was gradually introduced in the form of the bilingual vase by those trailblazers the Andokides Painter, Oltos and Psiax. Red-figure quickly eclipsed black-figure yet in the unique form of the Panathanaic Amphora black-figure continued to be utilised well into the 4th century BCE.

Red Figure

The innovation of the red-figure technique was an Athenian invention of the late 6th century, the ability to render detail by direct painting rather than incision offered new expressive possibilities to artists such as three-quarter profiles, greater anatomical detail and the representation of perspective.

The first generation of red-figure painters worked in both red and black-figure as well as other methods including Six's technique and white ground; the latter was developed at the same time as red-figure. However within 20 years experimentation had given way to specialization as seen in the vases of the Pioneer Group whose figural work was exclusively in red-figure, though they retained the use of black-figure for some early floral ornamentation.

The Pioneers deserve particular note not just because they are significant artists in their own right (Euphronios and Euthymides especially) but because their shared values and goals signal that they were something approaching a self-conscious movement though they left behind no testament other than their own work. John Boardman said of them “the reconstruction of their careers, common purpose, even rivalries, can be taken as an archaeological triumph”

The next generation of late Archaic vase painters (ca. 500 to 480 BCE.) brought an increasing naturalism to the style as seen in the gradual change of the profile eye. This phase also sees the specialization of painters into pot and cup painters, with the Berlin and Kleophrades Painters notable in the former category and Douris and Onesimos in the latter.

By the early to high classical era of red-figure painting (c. 480 to 425 BCE) a number of distinct schools had evolved. The mannerists associated with the workshop of Myson and exemplified by the Pan Painter hold to the archaic features of stiff drapery and awkward poses and combine that with exaggerated gestures.

By contrast the school of the Berlin Painter in the form of the Achilles Painter and his peers (who may have been the Berlin Painter’s pupils) favoured a naturalistic pose usually of a single figure against a solid black background or of restrained white-ground lekythoi.

With the school of the Niobid Painter we can include Polygnotos and the Kleophon Painter whose work indicates something of the influence of the Parthenon sculptures both in theme (i.e Polygnotos’s centauromachy, Brussels, Musées Royaux A. & Hist., A 134) and in feeling for composition.

Towards the end of the century the so-called Rich style of Attic sculpture as seen in the Nike Balustrade is reflected in contemporary vase painting with an ever greater attention to incidental detail (hair, jewelery, etc). The Meidias Painter is usually most closely identified with this style.

Vase production in Athens stopped around 330-320 BCE possibly due to Alexander’s control of the city, and had been in slow decline over the 4th century along with the political fortunes of Athens herself. However vase production continued in the 4th and 3rd centuries in the Greek colonies of southern Italy where five regional styles may be distinguished.

These are the Apulian, Lucanian, Sicilian, Campanian and Paestan. Red-figure work flourished there with the distinctive addition of polychromatic painting and in the case of the Black Sea colony of Panticapeum the gilded work of the Kerch Style.

Hellenistic Period

The Hellenistic period (which we take to be roughly the late 4th century to the 1st century BCE) is one of cultural decline in the traditional centres of Greek pottery production. Red-figure painting had died out in Athens by the end of the 4th century BCE to be replaced by what is known as West Slope ware, so named after the finds on the west slope of the Athenian Acropolis.

This latter style consisted of painting in a tan coloured slip and white paint on a black glaze background with some incised detailing, representations of people diminished with this idiom to be replaced with simpler motifs such as wreaths, dolphins, rosettes, etc.

Variations of this style spread throughout the Greek world with notable centres in Crete and Apulia, where figural scenes continued to be in demand, indeed leadership in vase production of this time passed to the Greek colonies of southern Italy as witnessed by both the quantity and quality of the work done there.

Several noteworthy artists’ work comes down to us including the Darius Painter and the Underworld Painter, both active in the late 4th century, whose crowded polychromatic scenes often essay a complexity of emotion not attempted by earlier painters. Their work represents a late mannerist phase to the achievement of Greek vase painting.

Red-figure pottery is a style of archaic Greek pottery, later adopted in southern Italy.

In the red-figure technique, the background is filled in with black paint and only the figures' details are painted, allowing the unpainted portions of the figures to take on the reddish tone of the Athenian clay after it is burned in the presence of oxygen.

Red-figure pottery, developed around 530 BC by the Andokides Painter, superseded the earlier black-figure pottery, except in the case of Panathenaic Amphorae,

because the new process allowed more intricate detail on the ornaments, humans, animals etc. depicted. When developed, it was one of several techniques with which artists experimented.

The techniques and conventions of red-figure painting were developed by a group of artists known as the Pioneer Group (among them Euphronios and Euthymides). It became the predominant technique and remained popular until the late 4th century BC.

Red-figure pottery is considered to mark the apex of Greek pottery, and most vases or cups famous today for their skillful painting are in the red-figure style.

The red-figure technique

Creating a finished piece of red-figure pottery required close collaboration between the potter and the painter. The potter would shape the piece out of clay and deliver it to the painter while the clay was still damp. The painter would paint the vase using an instrument like a pastry bag with a syringe action nozzle of bone or wood to lay out the fine detail lines and background colors.

Since the paint only developed its color once the piece was fired in a kiln, the painter had to paint almost entirely from memory, unable to see his previous work. Additionally, the colors could only be applied while the clay was still wet, so the painter had to work very quickly.

In the large kraters painted with the red-figure technique, this meant that tens of thousands of invisible lines had to be applied, each ending precisely at the right point to prevent overlapping in the intricate detail work, in an extremely short period of time. Despite these constraints, red-figure painters developed an intricate and detailed style.

Painters working in the earlier black-figure technique had been forced to keep their figures well-separated from each other and limit the complexity of their illustration; since all foreground elements were filled with the same black shade, two figures overlapping each other might become indistinguishable.

Anatomical detail beyond simple outlining was nearly impossible in the black-figure style, as only a limited number of colors (chiefly, a stark white) would stand out against the black figures.

By contrast, the red-figure technique allowed far greater latitude. Each figure was silhouetted naturally against the black ground, as if illuminated by theatrical lighting, and the more natural red-on-black color scheme, in conjunction with the greater variety of colors that the artist could employ, allowed red-figure painters to depict anatomical details with more accuracy and variety.

The Pioneer Group of painters in particular used the red-figure technique to achieve a naturalism not previously seen in earlier styles. Humans and animals were depicted in naturalistic poses with schematic but accurate anatomy, and techniques of foreshortening and illusionistic perspective were developed to exploit the relative freedom of the red-figure method.

This can be seen in Euthymides vase "Three revelers", where three figures twist and turn in a way that black-figure amorpha could have never achieved. Later artists, exploring the limits of the red-figure technique, would reintroduce white as a detail color (all but abandoned with the end of the black-figure style) and even extensive gilding became integrated into the red-figure style.

Red-figure pottery painters

The Achilles Painter

The Andokides Painter

The Berlin Painter

Douris (vase painter)

Euphronios

Euthymides

The Kleophon Painter

The Kleophrades Painter

Oltos

Phintias

Polygnotos

Inscriptions on Greek pottery are of two kinds; the incised (graffito) the earliest of which are contemporary with the beginnings of the Greek alphabet in the 8th century BCE, and the painted (dipinto), which only begin to appear a century later.

Both forms are relatively common on painted vases until the Hellenistic period when the practice of inscribing pots

seems to die out. They are by far most frequently found on Attic pottery where approximately one in ten (some 8,000 to 10,000) bears a legend.

A number of sub-classes of inscription can be distinguished. Potters and painters occasionally signed their works with epoiesen and egraphsen respectively. Trademarks are found from the start of the 6th century on Corinthian pieces; these may have belonged to an exporting merchant rather than the pottery workshop (as with much of the rest of the study in this field this remains a matter of conjecture.) Patron’s names are also sometimes recorded, as are the names of characters and objects depicted.

At times we may find a snatch of dialogue to accompany a scene, as in ‘Dysniketos’s horse has won’, announces a herald on a Panathenaic amphora (BM, B 144). More puzzling, however, are the kalos and kalee inscriptions, which might have formed part of courtship ritual in Athenian high society, yet are found on a wide variety of vases not necessarily associated with a social setting. Finally there are abecedaria and nonsense inscriptions, though these are largely confined to black-figure pots.

Some of the leading vase painters of Athens, such as the Pioneer Group, seem to have revelled in adding text to their vases and it is a testament to their literacy and cultural daring that they did so. Undoubtedly it places them in a class apart from other ancient Greek artisans.

Rediscovery and Scholarship

Interest in Greek art lagged behind the revival of classical scholarship during the Renaissance and revived in the academic circle round Nicholas Poussin in Rome in the 1630s. Though modest collections of vases recovered from ancient tombs in Italy were made in the 15th and 16th centuries these were regarded as Etruscan.

It is possible that Lorenzo de Medici bought several Attic vases directly from Greece; however the connection between them and the examples excavated in central Italy was not made until much later.

Winckelmann's 'Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums of 1764 first refuted the Etruscan origin of what we now know to be Greek pottery, yet Sir William Hamilton's two collections, one lost at sea the other now in the British Museum, were still published as "Etruscan vases"; it would take until 1837 with Stackelberg's Gräber der Hellenen to conclusively end the controversy.

Much of the early study of Greek vases took the form of production of albums of the images they depict, however neither D'Hancarville's nor Tischbein's folios record the shapes or attempt to supply a date and are therefore unreliable as an archaeological record.

Serious attempts at scholary study made steady progress over the 19th century starting with the founding of the Instituto di Corrispondenza in Rome in 1828 (later the German Archaeological Institute), followed by Eduard Gerhard's pioneering study Auserlesene Griechische Vasenbilder (1840 to 1858), the establishment of the journal Archaeologische Zeitung in 1843 and the Ecole d'Athens 1846. It was Gerhard who first outlined the chronology we now use, namely: Orientalizing (Geometric, Archaic), Black Figure, Red Figure, Polychromatic (Hellenistic).

Finally it was Otto Jahn's 1854 catalogue Vasensammlung of the Pinakothek, Munich, that set the standard for the scientific description of Greek pottery, recording the shapes and inscriptions with a previously unseen fastidousness. Jahn's study was the standard textbook on the history and chronology of Greek pottery for many years, yet in common with Gerhard he dated the introduction of the red figure technique to a century later than was in fact the case.

This error was corrected when the A??a???????? '?ta??e?a undertook the excavation of the Acropolis in 1885 and discovered the so-called "Persian debris" of red figure pots destroyed by Persian invaders in 480 BC. With a more soundly established chronology it was possible for Adolf Furtwängler and his students in the 1880s and 90s to date the strata of his archaeological digs by the nature of the pottery found within them, a method of seriation Flinders Petrie was later to apply to unpainted Egyptian pottery.

Where the 19th century was a period of discovery and the laying out of first principles the 20th century has been one of consolidation and intellectual industry. Efforts to record and publish the totality of public collections of vases began with the creation of the Corpus vasorum antiquorum under Edmond Pottier and the Beazley archive.

It is to John Beazley's comprehensive studies Attic Red-Figure Vase Painters 1942 and Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters 1956 we owe the naming of dozens of previously forgotten artists by Morellian stylistic analysis. Similarly Arthur Dale Trendall and Humfrey Payne along with Darrell A. Amyx supplied the chronology to the otherwise neglected Apulian and Corinthian schools.

Greece enjoys ample deposits of fine clay, in particular large quantities of good quality secondary clay. The clay around Athens is distinctive for its infusion with iron oxide (Fe2O3) which when fired gives a reddish-orange colour.

This marks it out from the clays of other regions such as Corinth where the pottery has a lighter, creamy-white appearance. Indeed spectroscopy and other methods has

revealed unexpected connections amongst vases distributed around the Mediterranean basin, as in the case of the hydriai from Hadra near Alexandria. Previously thought to be Egyptian in origin analysis of their chemical composition has shown them to have been imported from a workshop in Rhodes.

Primary clay was rarer and used sparingly mostly as an accessory colour in decoration, for example on white ground vases where it was applied in a thin uniform layer while the pot was on the wheel. All clay was purified through sedimentation in order to remove such impurities as quartz and limestone as would cause spalling or cracking during firing, and to increase the malleablity of the clay in the potter's hands.

Construction

Wheelmade pottery dates back to roughly 2500 BCE where before the coil method of building the walls of the pot was employed. Most Greek vases were wheelmade, though as with the Rhyton mould-made pieces (so-called "plastic" pieces) are also found and decorative elements either hand formed or by mould were added to thrown pots (the handles on a volute crater for instance).

More complex pieces were made in parts then assembled when it was leather hard by means of joining with a slip, whereupon the potter returned to the wheel for the final shaping, or turning. It was then glazed and incised ready for the kiln.

Firing

The striking black metallic glaze (strictly speaking it is a gloss not a glaze) so characteristic of Greek pottery was a fine suspension of the same clay that was used for the rest of the vase with no added colouration, only levigated in alkaline water. The effect was achieved by of means changing the amount of oxygen present during firing.

This was done in a single cycle, first the kiln was heated to around 800° C when a vent is opened bringing oxygen into the firing chamber and turning pot and glaze a reddish-brown. Then as the temperature increased to about 950° C the vent was closed and green wood introduced creating carbon monoxide which formed black ferrous oxide or magnetic oxide of iron with the ferric oxide in the clay.

In the final reoxidizing phase the kiln was gradually cooled to around 900° C and a little oxygen reintroduced causing the unglazed reserved clay to go back to orange-red, the glazed surface was sintered and could no longer be oxidized and remained black.

Not all ancient Greek vases were purely utilitarian; large Geometric amphorae were used as grave markers, kraters in Apulia served as tomb offerings and Panathenaic Amphorae seem to have been looked on partly as objets d’art .

Most other surviving pottery, however, had a practical purpose which determined its shape. The names we use for Greek vase shapes are often a matter of convention rather than historical fact, a few do illustrate their own use or are

labeled with their original names, others are the result of early archaeologists attempt to reconcile the physical object with a known name from Greek literature – not always successfully. To understand the relationship between form and function Greek pottery may be divided in four broad categories: i) storage and transport vessels, ii) mixing vessels, iii) jugs and cups and iv) vases for oils, perfumes and cosmetics.

Within each category the forms are roughly the same in scale and whether open or closed, where there is uncertainty we can make good proximate guesses of what use a piece would have served.

Some have a purely ritual function, for example white ground lekythoi contained the oil used as funerary offerings and appear to have been made solely with that object in mind. Many example have a concealed second cup inside them to give the impression of being full of oil, as such they would have served no other useful gain.

?There was an international market for Greek pottery since the 8th century BCE, which Athens and Corinth dominated down to the end of the 4th century. An idea of the extent of this trade can be gleaned from plotting the find maps of these vases outside of Greece, though this could not account for gifts or immigration.

Only the existence of a second hand market could account for the number of panathenaics found in Etruscan tombs. South Italian wares came to dominate the export trade in the western Mediterranean as Athens declined in political importance during the Hellenistic period.

The Greeks started using gold and gems in jewellery in 1,400 BC, although beads shaped as shells and animals were produced widely in earlier times.

By 300 BC, the Greeks had mastered making coloured jewellery and using amethysts, pearl and emeralds. Also, the first signs of cameos appeared, with the Greeks creating them from Indian Sardonyx, a striped brown pink

and cream agate stone. Greek jewellery was often simpler than in other cultures, with simple designs and workmanship. However, as time progressed the designs grew in complexity different materials were soon utilized.

Jewellery in Greece was hardly worn and was mostly used for public appearances or on special occasions. It was frequently given as a gift and was predominantly worn by woman to show their wealth, social status and beauty. The jewellery was often supposed to give the wearer protection from the “Evil Eye” or endowed the owner with supernatural powers, while others had a religious symbolism.

Older pieces of jewellery that have been found were dedicated to the Gods. The largest production of jewellery in these times came from Northern Greece and Macedon. However, although much of the jewellery in Greece was made of gold and silver with ivory and gems, bronze and clay copies were made also.

Jewellery makers in Ancient Greece were largely anonymous. They worked the types of jewellery into two different styles of pieces; cast pieces and pieces hammered out of sheet metal. Fewer pieces of cast jewellery have been recovered; it was made by casting the metal onto two stone or clay moulds. Then the two halves were joined together and wax and then molten metal, was placed in the centre. This technique had been in practised since the late Bronze Age.

The more common form of jewellery was the hammered sheet type. Sheets of metal would be hammered to the right thickness & then soldered together. The inside of the two sheets would be filled with wax or another liquid to preserve the metal work. Different techniques, such as using a stamp or engraving, were then used to create motifs on the jewellery. Jewels may then be added to hollows or glass poured into special cavities on the surface.

The Greeks took much of their designs from outer origins, such as Asia when Alexander the Great conquered part of it. In earlier designs, other European influences can also be detected. When Roman rule came to Greece, no change in jewellery designs was detected.

However, by 27 BC, Greek designs were heavily influenced by the Roman culture. That is not to say that indigenous design did not thrive; numerous polychrome butterfly pendants on silver foxtail chains, dating from the 1st century, have been found near Olbia, with only one example ever found anywhere else.

The difference between music and philosophy

It is common to hear the term "music of the spheres" and read of Pythagoras and his school, who laid the foundations of our knowledge of the study of harmonics—how strings and columns of air vibrate, how they produce overtones, how the overtones are related arithmetically to one another, etc.

It is important to note that the entire study of such things by the Greeks was less a formula for the production of playable music than it was a mathematical and philosophical description of how the universe, in general, was perceived to be constructed—the stars, the sun, the planets, all vibrating in harmony. People sang and played musical instruments long before Pythagoras and continued to do so long after Pythagoras with little perception that their music was conforming to Pythagorean "rules" of consonance according to arithmetic ratios.

It is certainly the case that at least some music already conformed to such principles, with or without formal knowledge of the principles of consonance laid down by Pythagoras. People, almost universally, seem disposed to recognize as consonant, for example, intervals of octaves, fifths and fourths. They don't know--and don't care--that the arithmetic ratios that describe those intervals are 2:1, 3:2 and 3:4, respectively. Thus, Pythagoras might have simply been codifying some of what, today, are termed "music universals."

Yet, it is equally true that once formal descriptions of consonant intervals were in place, there followed, rather naturally, descriptions of what notes should be played in succession to be "correct" scales from which "correct" melodies might be formed. These scales were called modes, and they were crucial to the further development of western music.

What the music sounded like

At a certain point, Plato complained about the new music:

"Our music was once divided into its proper forms...It was not permitted to exchange the melodic styles of these established forms and others. Knowledge and informed judgment penalized disobedience. There were no whistles, unmusical mob-noises, or clapping for applause.

The rule was to listen silently and learn; boys, teachers, and the crowd were kept in order by threat of the stick. . . . But later, an unmusical anarchy was led by poets who had natural talent, but were ignorant of the laws of music...Through foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that there was no right or wrong way in music, that it was to be judged good or bad by the pleasure it gave.

By their works and their theories they infected the masses with the presumption to think themselves adequate judges. So our theatres, once silent, grew vocal, and aristocracy of music gave way to a pernicious theatrocracy...the criterion was not music, but a reputation for promiscuous cleverness and a spirit of law-breaking."

From his references to "established forms" and "laws of music" we can assume that at least some of the formality of the Pythagorean system of harmonics and consonance had taken hold of Greek music, at least as it was performed by professional musicians in public, and that Plato was complaining about the falling away from such principles into a "spirit of law-breaking".

Among the lawbreakers would certainly be Aristoxenus, who held that the notes of the scale are to be judged, not as the Pythagoreans held, by mathematical ratio, but by the ear. Aristoxenus said, essentially, that since you can't hear the "music of the spheres", anyway, why not just sing and play what sounds good and reasonable to us? That simple philosophy underlay the entire later movement to tempered scales and even bears comparison to the divide in 20th-century music between tonal music and atonal music.

Playing what "sounded good" violated the proper use of the established ethos of modes that had developed by the time of Plato. That is, the Greeks had developed a complex system of relating particular emotional and spiritual characteristics to certain modes (scales). The names for the various modes derived from the names of Greek tribes and peoples, the temperament and emotions of which were said to be characterized by the unique sound of each mode.

Thus, Dorian modes were "harsh", Phrygian modes "sensual", and so forth. Elsewhere,[5]Plato, indeed, talks about the proper use of various modes, the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, etc. It is difficult for the modern listener to relate to that concept of ethos in music except by comparing our own perceptions that a minor scale is used for melancholy and a major scale for virtually everything else, from happy to heroic music.

(Today, one must look at the system of scales known as ragas in India for a better comparison, a system that prescribes certain scales for the morning, others for the evening, and so on.)

The sounds of scales vary depending on the placement of whole-tones (C to D on a modern piano keyboard) and half-tones (C to C-sharp). Where modern Western music distinguishes between relatively few kinds of scales, the Greeks used this placement of whole-tones, half-tones, and even quarter-tones ("in the cracks" on a modern keyboard) to develop a large repertoire of scales, each with a presumed "ethos".

It bears noting that even if some things such as the perception of octave and fifth consonance may be universal – or at least common among widely disparate cultures – there is no strong evidence that the sequence of notes in any given scale "naturally" corresponds to a particular emotion or characteristic of personality.

Yet, the Greek idea of the scale (including the names) found its way into later Roman music and then the European Middle Ages to the extent that one can find references to, for example, a "Lydian church mode", etc. in which the name is simply an historical reference with no relationship to the original Greek sound or, especially, the original Greek ethos.

From the descriptions that have come down to us through the writings of those such as Plato, Aristoxenus and, later, Boethius, we can say with some caution that the ancient Greeks, at least before Plato, heard music that was primarily monophonic; that is, music built on single melodies based on a system of modes/scales, themselves built on the concept that notes should be placed between consonant intervals.

It is a commonplace of musicology to say that harmony, in the sense of a developed system of composition, in which many tones at once contribute to the listener's expectation of resolution, was invented in the European Middle Ages and that ancient cultures had no developed system of harmony--that is, for example, playing the third and seventh above the dominant, in order to create the expectation for the listener that the tritone will resolve to the third.

Yet, it is obvious from the following excerpt from Plato's Republic that Greek musicians sometimes played more than one note at a time, although this was apparently considered an advanced technique. The Orestes fragment clearly calls for more than one note to be sounded at once.

There is also intriguing research in the field of music from the ancient Mediterranean-- decipherings of cuneiform music script--that argue for the sounding of different pitches simultaneously and for the theoretical recognition of a "scale" many centuries before the Greeks learned to write, which of course would have been before they developed their system for notating music and recorded the written evidence for simultaneous tones.

All we can say from the available evidence is that, while Greek musicians clearly employed the technique of sounding more than one note at the same time, the most basic, common texture of Greek music was monophonic.

That much seems evident from another passage from Plato :

“ ...The lyre should be used together with the voices...the player and the pupil producing note for note in unison, Heterophony and embroidery by the lyre--the strings throwing out melodic lines different to the melodia which the poet composed; crowded notes where his are sparse, quick time to his slow...and similarly all sorts of rhythmic complications against the voices--none of this should be imposed upon pupils...

Music in society

The function of music in ancient Greek society was bound up in their mythology: Amphion learned music from Hermes and then with a golden lyre built Thebes by moving the stones into place with the sound of his playing; Orpheus, the master-musician and lyre-player, played so magically that he could soothe wild beasts; the Orphic creation myths have Rhea "playing on a brazen drum, and compelling man's

attention to the oracles of the goddess"; or Hermes [showing to Apollo] "...his newly-invented tortoise-shell lyre and [playing] such a ravishing tune on it with the plectrum he had also invented, at the same time singing to praise Apollo's nobility that he was forgiven at once..."; or Apollo's musical victories over Marsyas and Pan.

There are many such references that indicate that music was an integral part of the Greek perception of how their race had even come into existence and how their destinies continued to be watched over and controlled by the Gods. It is no wonder, then, that music was omnipresent at the Pythian Games, the Olympic Games, religious ceremonies, leisure activities, and even the beginnings of drama as an outgrowth of the dithyrambs performed in honor of Dionysus.

It may be that the actual sounds of the music heard at rituals, games, dramas, etc. underwent a change after the traumatic fall of Athens in 404 b.c. at the end of the first Peloponnesian War. Indeed, one reads of the "revolution" in Greek culture, and Plato's lament that the new music "...used high musical talent, showmanship and virtuosity...consciosiously rejecting educated standards of judgement."

Although instrumental virtuosity was prized, this complaint included excessive attention to instrumental music such as to interfere with accompanying the human voice, and the falling away from the traditional ethos in music.

Instruments in all music can be divided into three categories, based on how sound is produced: string, wind, and percussion . (For purposes of this description, we exclude electronic instruments. For alternate systems of classification, see Musical instruments and Hornbostel-Sachs.) Within this system, strings may be struck (ex:

piano), bowed (violin) or plucked (guitar). Wind instruments may be single mechanical reed (clarinet) or double mechanical reed (oboe); also, wind instruments may be lip reed (trumpet), air reed (flute), vocal-cord reed (voice) and tuned, free reed (accordion).

Percussion instruments may produce either a definite pitch (bell) or an indefinite pitch (bass drum). The following were among the instruments used in the music of ancient Greece:

the lyre: a strummed and occasionally plucked string instrument, essentially a hand-held zither built on a tortoise-shell frame, generally with seven or more strings tuned to the notes of one of the modes. The lyre was used to accompany others or even oneself for recitation and song.

the kithara, also a strummed string instrument, more complicated than the lyre. It had a box-type frame with strings stretched from the cross-bar at the top to the sounding box at the bottom; it was held upright and played with a plectrum. The strings were tunable by adjusting wooden wedges along the cross-bar.

the aulos, usually double, consisting of two double-reed (like an oboe) pipes, not joined but generally played with a mouth-band to hold both pipes steadily between the player's lips. Modern reconstructions indicate that they produced a low, clarinet-like sound. There is some confusion about the exact nature of the instrument; alternate descriptions indicate single-reeds instead of double reeds.

the Pan pipes, also known as panflute and syrinx (Greek s?????), (so-called for the nymph who was changed into a reed in order to hide from Pan) is an ancient musical instrument based on the principle of the stopped pipe, consisting of a series of such pipes of gradually increasing length, tuned (by cutting) to a desired scale. Sound is produced by blowing across the top of the open pipe (like blowing across a bottle top).

the hydraulis, a keyboard instrument, the forerunner of the modern organ. As the name indicates, the instrument used water to supply a constant flow of pressure to the pipes. Two detailed descriptions have survived: that of Vitruvius and Heron of Alexandria. These descriptions deal primarily with the keyboard mechanism and with the device by which the instrument was supplied with air.

A well-preserved model in pottery was found at Carthage in 1885. Essentially, the air to the pipes that produce the sound comes from a wind-chest connected by a pipe to a dome; air is pumped in to compress water, and the water rises in the dome, compressing the air, and causing a steady supply of air to the pipes.

“ ...Son of the God of Winds: none so renown'd

The warrior trumpet in the field to sound;

With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms,

And rouse to dare their fate in honorable arms.

He served great Hector, and was ever near,

Not with his trumpet only, but his spear... ”

In the Aeneid, Virgil makes numerous references to the trumpet, most notably having to do with Aeneas' comrade, Misenus: We can assume that the Greeks and Trojans of whom Virgil speaks made use not only of the conch — a sea shell with a cut opening as a mouthpiece — but even of the brass trumpet ("...With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms...") or salpinx.

A number of sources mention this metal instrument (with a bone mouthpiece) and they appear in vase paintings.

The lyre, kithara, aulos, hydraulis and trumpet all found their way into the music of ancient Rome.

A classical order is one of the ancient styles of building design in the Classical tradition, distinguished by their proportions and their characteristic profiles and details, but most quickly recognizable by the type of column and capital employed.

Each style also has its proper entablature, consisting of architrave, frieze and cornice. From the sixteenth century onwards, theorists recognized five orders.

Ranged in the engraving (illustration, right), from the stockiest and most primitive to the richest and most

slender, they are: Tuscan (Roman) and Doric (Greek and Roman, illustrated here in its Roman version); Ionic (Greek version) and Ionic (Roman version); Corinthian (Greek and Roman) and composite (Roman).

The ancient and original orders of architecture are no more than three, the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, which were invented by the Greeks. To these the Romans added two, the Tuscan, which they made plainer than the Doric, and the Composite, which was more ornamental, if not more beautiful, than the Corinthian.

The first three orders alone, however, show invention and particular character, and essentially differ from each other; the two others have nothing but that which is borrowed, and differing only accidentally. The Tuscan is the Doric in its earliest state, and the Composite is the Corinthian, enriched with the Ionic. We are therefore indebted to the Greeks for what is great, judicious, and distinct in classical architecture.

The order of a classical building is like the mode or key of classical music. It is established by certain modules like the intervals of music, and it raises certain expectations in an audience attuned to its language. The orders are like the grammar or rhetoric of a written composition.

Parts of a column

A column is divided into a shaft, its base and its capital. In classical buildings the horizontal structure that is supported on the columns like a beam is called an entablature. The entablature is commonly divided into the architrave, the frieze and the cornice. To distinguish between the different Classical orders, the capital is used, having the most distinct characteristics.

A complete column and entablature consist of a number of distinct parts. The stylobate is the flat pavement on which the columns are placed. Standing upon the stylobate is the plinth, a square block – sometimes circular – which forms the lowest part of the base. The remainder of the base may be given one or many moldings with profiles. Common examples are the convex torus and the concave scotia, separated by fillets or bands.

On top of the base, the shaft is placed vertically. The shaft is cylindrical in shape and both long and narrow. The shaft is sometimes articulated with vertical hollow grooves or fluting. The shaft is wider at the bottom than at the top, because its entasis, beginning a third of the way up, imperceptibly makes the column slightly more slender at the top.

The capital rests on the shaft. It has a load-bearing function, which concentrates the weight of the entablature on the supportive column, but it primarily serves an aesthetic purpose. The simplest form of the capital is the Doric, consisting of three parts. The necking is the continuation of the shaft, but is visually separated by one or many grooves. The echinus lies atop the necking. It is a circular block that bulges outwards towards the top in order to support the abacus, which is a square or shaped block that in turn supports the entablature.

The entablature consists of three horizontal layers, all of which are visually separated from each other using moldings or bands. The three layers of the entablature have distinct names: the architrave comes at the bottom, the frieze is in the middle and the molded cornice lies on the top.

In Roman and post-Renaissance work, the entablature may be carried from column to column in the form of an arch that springs from the column that bears its weight, retaining its divisions and sculptural enrichment, if any.

Measurement

The height of a column is measured in terms of a ratio between the diameter of the shaft at its base compared to the height of the column. A Doric column can be described as seven diameters high, an Ionic column as eight diameters high and a Corinthian column nine diameters high. Sometimes this is given as seven lower diameters high, in order to make sure which part of the shaft has been measured.

Greek orders

There are two distinct orders in ancient Greek architecture: Doric and Ionic. These two were adopted by the Romans, as was the Corinthian order. The Corinthian capital, however, was modified by the Romans. The adaptation of the Greek orders took place in the first century BC. The three ancient Greek orders have since been consistently used in neo-classical Western architecture.

Sometimes the Doric order is considered the earlier order, but there is no evidence to support this. Rather, the orders seem to have appeared at around the same time, the Ionic order in eastern Greece and the Doric order in the west and mainland.

Both the Doric and the Ionic order appear to have originated in wood. The Temple of Hera in Olympia is the oldest well-preserved temple of Doric architecture. It was built just after 600 BC. The Doric order later spread across Greece and into Sicily where it was the chief order for monumental architecture for 800 years.

Doric order

The Doric order originated on the mainland and western Greece. It is the simplest of the orders, characterized by short, faceted, heavy columns with plain, round capitals (tops) and no base. With only four to eight diameters in height, the columns are the most squat of all orders. The shaft of the Doric order is channeled with 20 flutes. The capital consists of a necking which is of a simple form. The echinus is convex and the abacus is square.

Above the capital is a square abacus connecting the capital to the entablature. The Entablature is divided into two horizontal registers, the lower part of which is either smooth or divided by horizontal lines. The upper half is distinctive for the Doric order. The frieze of the Doric entablature is divided into triglyphs and metopes. A triglyph is a unit consisting of three vertical bands which are separated by grooves. Metopes are plain or carved reliefs.

The Greek forms of the Doric order come without an individual base. They instead are placed directly on the stylobate. Later forms, however, came with the conventional base consisting of a plinth and a torus. The Roman versions of the Doric order have smaller proportions. As a result they appear lighter than the Greek orders.

Ionic order

The Ionic order came from eastern Greece, where its origins are entwined with the similar but little known Aeolic order. It is distinguished by slender, fluted pillars with a large base and two opposed volutes (also called scrolls) in the echinus of the capital. The echinus itself is decorated with an egg-and-dart motif. The Ionic shaft comes with four more flutes than the Doric counterpart (totalling 24). The Ionic base has two convex moldings called tori which are separated by a scotia.

The Ionic order is also marked by an entasis, a curved tapering in the column shaft. A column of the ionic order is nine or lower diameters. The shaft itself is eight diameters high. The architrave of the entablature commonly consists of three stepped bands (fasciae). The frieze comes without the Doric triglyph and metope.

The frieze sometimes comes with a continuous ornament such as carved figures. It is also noteworthy to contemplate the use of the compass in the design of this order.

Corinthian order

The Corinthian order is the most ornate of the Greek orders, characterized by a slender fluted column having an ornate capital decorated with two rows of acanthus leaves and four scrolls. It is commonly regarded as the most elegant of the five orders.

The shaft of the Corinthian order has 24 flutes. The column is commonly ten diameters high.

Designed by Callimachus, a Greek sculptor of the 5th century BC. The oldest known building to be built according to the Corinthian order is the monument of Lysicrates in Athens. It was built in 335 to 334 BC. The Corinthian order was raised to rank by the writings of the Roman writer Vitruvius in the 1st century BC.

[edit] Roman orders

The Romans adapted all the Greek orders and also developed two orders of their own, basically modification of Greek orders. The Romans also invented the superimposed order. A superimposed order is when successive stories of a building have different orders. The heaviest orders were at the bottom, whilst the lightest came at the top. This means that the Doric order was the order of the ground floor, the Ionic order was used for the middle storey, while the Corinthian or the Composite order was used for the top storey.

The Colossal order was invented by architects in the Renaissance. The Colossal order is characterized by columns that extend the height of two or more stories.

Tuscan order

The Tuscan order has a very plain design, with a plain shaft, and a simple capital, base, and frieze. It is a simplified adaptation of the Doric order by the Romans. The Tuscan order is characterized by an unfluted shaft and a capital that only consist of an echinus and an abacus. In proportions it is similar to the Doric order, but overall it is significantly plainer. The column is normally seven diameters high. Compared to the other orders, the Tuscan order looks the most solid.

Composite order

The Composite order is a mixed order, combining the volutes of the Ionic with the leaves of the Corinthian order. Until the Renaissance it was not ranked as a separate order. Instead it was considered as a late Roman form of the Corinthian order. The column of the Composite order is ten diameters high.

Nonce orders

Several orders, usually based upon the Composite order and only varying in the design of the capitals, have been invented under the inspiration of specific occasions, but have not been used again. Thus they may be termed "nonce orders" on the analogy of nonce words. Robert Adam's brother James was in Rome in 1762, drawing antiquities under the direction of Clérisseau; he invented a British Order, of which his ink-and-wash rendering with red highlighting, is at the Avery Library, Columbia University.

Adam published an engraving of it. In its capital the heraldic lion and unicorn take the place of the Composite's volutes, a Byzantine/Romanesque conception, but expressed in terms of neoclassical realism. In 1789 George Dance invented an Ammonite Order, a variant of Ionic substituting volutes in the form of fossil ammonites for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, London.

In the United States Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the Capitol building in Washington DC, designed a series of botanically American orders. Most famous is the order substituting corncobs and their husks, which was executed by Giuseppe Franzoni and employed in the small domed Vestibule of the Supreme Court. Only the Supreme Court survived the fire of August 24, 1814, nearly intact. With peace restored, Latrobe designed an American order that substituted for the acanthus tobacco leaves, of which he sent a sketch to Thomas Jefferson in a letter, November 5, 1816.

He was encouraged to send a model of it, which remains at Monticello. In the 1830s Alexander Jackson Davis admired it enough to make a drawing of it. In 1809 Latrobe invented a second American order, employing magnolia flowers contrained within the profile of classical mouldings, as his drawing demonstrates. It was intended for "the Upper Columns in the Gallery of the Entrance of the Chamber of the Senate" (United States Capitol exhibit).

These nonce orders all express the "speaking architecture" (architecture parlante) that was taught in the Paris courses, most explicitly by Étienne-Louis Boullée, in which sculptural details of classical architecture could be enlisted to speak symbolically, the better to express the purpose of the structure and enrich its visual meaning with specific appropriateness. This idea was taken up strongly in the training of Beaux-Arts architecture, ca 1875-1915: see architecture parlante.

Original writings

The handbook De Architectura of Vitruvius is the only architectural writing that survived from Antiquity. After it was rediscovered in the 15th century, Vitruvius was instantly hailed as the authority on classical orders and architecture in general.

Architects of the Renaissance and the Baroque period in Italy based their rules on Vitruvius' writings. What was added was rules for superimposing the classical orders and the exact proportions of the orders down to the most minute detail.

The common materials of Greek architecture were wood, used for supports and roof beams; unbaked brick used for walls, especially for private homes; limestone and marble, used for columns, walls, and upper portions of temples and public buildings; terracotta, used for roof tiles and ornaments; and metals, especially bronze, used for decorative details. Architects of the Archaic and Classical periods used these building materials to construct five simple types of buildings: religious, civic, domestic, funerary, or recreational.

History

Around 600 BC, the wooden columns of the old Temple of Hera at Olympia underwent a material transformation, known as "petrification", in which they were replaced by stone columns. By degrees, other parts of the temple were petrified until the entire temple was made of stone.

With the spread of this process to other sanctuaries, Greek temples and significant buildings from the 6th century BC onwards were built largely from stone, and a few fortunate examples have survived through the ages.

Most of our knowledge of Greek architecture comes from the late archaic period (550 - 500 BC), the Periclean age (450 - 430 BC), and the early to pure classical period (430 - 400 BC). Greek examples are considered alongside Hellenistic and Roman periods (since Roman architecture heavily copied Greek), and late written sources such as Vitruvius (1st century). This results in a strong bias towards temples, the only buildings which survive in numbers.

Like Greek painting and sculpture, Greek Architecture in the first half of classical antiquity was not "art for art's sake" in the modern sense. The architect was a craftsman employed by the state or a wealthy private client. No distinction was made between the architect and the building contractor.

The architect designed the building, hired the labourers and craftsmen who built it, and was responsible for both its budget and its timely completion. He did not enjoy any of the lofty status accorded to modern architects of public buildings. Even the names of architects are not known before the 5th century. An architect like Iktinos, who designed the Parthenon, who would today be seen as a genius, was treated in his lifetime as no more than a very valuable master tradesman.

Structure and style of Greek temples

The standard format of Greek public buildings is known from surviving examples such as the Parthenon and the Hephaesteum at Athens, the group at Pasteum, the temple complex at Selinunte (Selinus) and the sanctuaries at Agrigentum. Most buildings were rectangular and made from limestone or tufa, of which Greece has an abundance, and which was cut into large blocks and dressed.

Marble was an expensive building material in Greece: high quality marble came only from Mt. Pentelicus in Attica and from a few islands such as Paros, and its transportation in large blocks was difficult. It was used mainly for sculptural decoration, not structurally, except in the very grandest buildings of the Classical period such as the Parthenon.

The basic rectangular plan was surrounded by a colonnaded portico of columns on all four sides (peripteral or peristyle) such as the Parthenon, and occasionally at the front and rear only (amphiprostyle) as seen in the small Temple of Athena Nike. Some buildings had a projecting h of columns forming the entrance (prostyle), while others featured a pronaos facade of columns leading on to the cella.

The Greeks roofed their buildings with timber beams covered with overlapping terra cotta or occasionally marble tiles. They understood the principles of the masonry arch but made little use of it, and did not put domes on their buildings—these elaborations were left to the Romans.

The low pitch of the gable roofs produced a squat triangular shape at each end of the building, the pediment, which was typically filled with sculptural decoration. Between the roof and the tops of the columns a row of lintels formed the entablature, whose outward-facing surfaces also provided a space for sculptures, known as friezes.

The frieze consisted of alternating metopes (holding the sculpture) and triglyphs. No surviving Greek building preserves these sculptures intact, but they can be seen on some modern imitations of Greek

Greek public architecture

The temple was the most common and best-known form of Greek public architecture, and the temple did not serve the same function as a modern church. For one thing, the altar stood under the open sky in the temenos or sacred fane, often directly before the temple.

Temples served as storage places for the treasury associated with the cult of the god in question, as the location of a cult image sometimes of great antiquity, but from the time of Pheidias often a great work of art as well. The temple was a place for devotees of the god to leave their votive offerings, such as statues, helmets and weapons. The inner room of the temple, the cella, thus served mainly as a strongroom and storeroom. It was usually lined by another row of columns.

Other architectural forms used by the Greeks were the tholos or circular temple, of which the best example is the Tholos of Theodorus at Delphi dedicated to the worship of Athena Pronaia; the propylon or porch, forming the entrance to temple sanctuaries (the best-surviving example is the Propylaea on the Acropolis of Athens); the fountain house, a building where women filled their vases with water from a public fountain; and the stoa, a long narrow hall with an open colonnade on one side, which was used to house rows of shops in the agoras (commercial centres) of Greek towns.

A completely restored stoa, the Stoa of Attalus, can be seen in Athens. Greek towns of substantial size also had a palaestra or a gymnasium, the social centre for male citizens. These peripterally enclosed space open to the sky were used for athletic contests and exercise.

Greek towns also needed at least one bouleuterion or council chamber, a large public building which served as a court house and as a meeting place for the town council (boule). Because the Greeks did not use arches or domes, they could not construct buildings with large interior spaces. The bouleuterion thus had rows of internal columns to hold the roof up (hypostyle). No examples of these buildings survive.

Finally, every Greek town had a theatre. These were used for both public meetings as well as dramatic performances. These performances originated as religious ceremonies; they went on to assume their Classical status as the highest form of Greek culture by the 6th century BC (see Greek theatre).

The theatre was usually set in a hillside outside the town, and had rows of tiered seating set in a semi-circle around the central performance area, the orchestra. Behind the orchestra was a low building called the skene, which served as a store-room, a dressing-room, and also as a backdrop to the action taking place in the orchestra. A number of Greek theatres survive almost intact, the best known being at Epidaurus.

City planning and houses

The Greeks had begun to lay out cities in a grid-like pattern before the start of the Classical period in the early 5th century BC, with streets regularly intersecting at right angles. Yet the Greeks credited the invention of the right-angled plan to Ionian architect Hippodamus.

He planned new cities for Piraeus and the Athenian colony of Thuril. The late 5th century Olynthus also showed his influence in the city's uniform streets and blocks. By the 4th century BC, carefully planned cities and civic spaces had become common in the Greek city states.

Greek house designs were various and in the 5th and 4th centuries BC two standard plans became commonplace. Typical houses in Olynthus during this time period and the 2nd century houses on Delos had the small rooms of the home arranged in a rectangle plan around a colonnaded interior courtyard.

A second house plan was found in Priene which also focused on an interior courtyard but it had much different floorplan. Instead of a collection of small rooms, the primary living area consisted of a large rectangular hall that lead to a columed porch. Opening off the sides of the courtyard were small rooms for servants, storage, and cooking. Houses in the Hellenistic period became much more diverse.

For example, houses of wealthy people might have featured marble thresholds, columns and doorways; mosaic floors depicting scenes of humans or animals; and plastered walls modeled to look much like fine stonework.

The Parthenon:

(Greek: ?a??e???) is a temple of the Greek goddess Athena built in the 5th century BC on the Acropolis of Athens. It is the most important surviving building of Classical Greece, generally considered to be the culmination of the development of the Doric order. Its decorative sculptures are considered one of the high points of Greek art.

The Parthenon, one of the most visited archaeological sites in Greece today, is regarded as an enduring symbol of ancient Greece and of Athenian democracy, and is one of the world's greatest cultural monuments. The Greek Ministry of Culture is currently carrying out a program of restoration and reconstruction.

The Parthenon replaced an older temple of Athena, called the Pre-Parthenon or Older Parthenon, that was destroyed in the Persian invasion of 480 BC. Like most Greek temples, the Parthenon was used as a treasury, and for a time served as the treasury of the Delian League, which later became the Athenian Empire.

In the 6th century AD, the Parthenon was converted into a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin. After the Ottoman conquest, it was converted into a mosque in the early 1460s. On September 28, 1687, an Ottoman ammunition dump inside the building was ignited by Venetian bombardment. The resulting explosion severely damaged the Parthenon and its sculptures.

In 1806, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin removed some of the surviving sculptures, with Ottoman permission. These sculptures, now known as the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles, were sold in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they are now displayed. The Greek government is committed to the return of the sculptures to Greece, so far with no success.

Design and construction

The first endeavour to build a sanctuary for Athena Parthenos on the site of the present Parthenon was begun shortly after the battle of Marathon (c. 490-88 BC) upon a massive limestone foundation that extended and leveled the southern part of the Akropolis summit.

This building replaced a hekatompedon (meaning "hundred-footer") and would have stood beside the archaic temple dedicated to Athena Polias. The Older or Pre-Parthenon, as it is frequently referred to, was still under construction when the Persians sacked the city in 480 BC and razed the Acropolis.

In the mid-5th century BC, when the Acropolis became the seat of the Delian League and Athens was the greatest cultural centre of its time, Pericles initiated an ambitious building project which lasted the entire second half of the fifth century BC. The most important buildings visible on the Acropolis today - that is, the Parthenon, the Propylaia, the Erechtheion and the temple of Athena Nike, were erected during this period.

Parthenon was built under the general supervision of the sculptor Phidias, who also had charge of the sculptural decoration. The architects, Iktinos and Kallikrates, began in 447 BC, and the building was substantially completed by 432, but work on the decorations continued until at least 431.

Some of the financial accounts for the Parthenon survive and show that the largest single expense was transporting the stone from Mount Pentelicus, about 16 kilometers from Athens, to the Acropolis. The funds were partly drawn from the treasury of the Delian League, which was moved from the Panhellenic sanctuary at Delos to the Acropolis in 454 BC.

Although the nearby Temple of Hephaestus is the most complete surviving example of a Doric order temple, the Parthenon, in its day, was regarded as the finest. The temple, wrote John Julius Norwich, "Enjoys the reputation of being the most perfect Doric temple ever built.

Even in antiquity, its architectural refinements were legendary, especially the subtle correspondence between the curvature of the stylobate, the taper of the naos walls and the entasis of the columns." The stylobate is the platform on which the columns stand. It curves upwards slightly for optical reasons. Entasis refers to the slight tapering of the columns as they rise, to counter the optical effect of looking up at the temple. The effect of these subtle curves is to make the temple appear more symmetrical than it actually is.

Measured at the top step, the dimensions of the base of the Parthenon are 69.5 meters by 30.9 meters (228.0 x 101.4 ft). The cella was 29.8 metres long by 19.2 metres wide (97.8 x 63.0 ft), with internal Doric colonnades in two tiers, structurally necessary to support the roof. On the exterior, the Doric columns measure 1.9 meters (6.2 ft) in diameter and are 10.4 meters (34.1 ft) high.

The corner columns are slightly larger in diameter. The Parthenon had 46 outer pillars and 19 inner pillars in total. The stylobate has an upward curvature towards its center of 60 millimeters (2.36 in) on the east and west ends, and of 110 millimeters (4.33 in) on the sides. Some of the dimensions form the golden rectangle expressing the golden ratio which is attributed to Pythagoras.

The roof was covered with large overlapping marble tiles known as imbrices and tegulae.

Sculptural decoration

The Parthenon, an octostyle, peripteral Doric temple with Ionic architectural features, housed the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos sculpted by Pheidias and dedicated in 439/438 BC. The temple was dedicated to the Athena at that time, though construction continued until almost the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 432.

By the year 438, the sculptural decoration of the Doric metopes on the frieze above the exterior colonnade, and of the Ionic frieze around the upper portion of the walls of the cella, had been completed. The richness of the Parthenon's frieze and metope decoration is in agreement with the function of the temple as a treasury. In the opisthodomus (the back room of the cella) were stored the monetary contributions of the Delian League of which Athens was the leading member.

Metopes

The ninety-two metopes were carved in high relief, a practice employed until then only in treasuries (buildings used to keep votive gifts to the gods). According to the building records, the metope sculptures date to the years 446-440 BC. Their design is attributed to the sculptor Kalamis. The metopes of the east side of the Parthenon, above the main entrance, depict the Gigantomachy (mythical battles between the Olympian gods and the Giants).

The metopes of the west end show Amazonomachy (mythical battle of the Athenians against the Amazons). The metopes of the south side—with the exception of the somewhat problematic metopes 13–20, now lost—show the Thessalian Centauromachy (battle of the Lapiths aided by Theseus against the half-man, half-horse Centaurs). On the north side of the Parthenon the metopes are poorly preserved, but the subject seems to be the sack of Troy.

Stylistically, the metopes present surviving traces of the Severe Style in the anatomy of the figures' heads, in the limitation of the corporal movements to the contours and not to the muscles, and in the presence of pronounced veins in the figures of the Centauromachy.

Several of the metopes still remain on the building, but with the exception of those on the northern side, they are severely damaged. Some of them are located at the Acropolis Museum, others are in the British Museum and one can be seen at the Louvre Museum.

Frieze

The most characteristic feature in the architecture and decoration of the temple is the Ionic frieze running around the exterior walls of the cella. Carved in bas-relief, the frieze was carved in situ and it is dated in 442-438 BC.

One interpretation is that it depicts an idealized version of the Panathenaic procession from the Dipylon Gate in the Kerameikos to the Acropolis. In this procession held every year, with a special procession taking place every four years, Athenians and foreigners were participating to honour the goddess Athena offering sacrifices and a new peplos (dress woven by selected noble Athenian girls called ergastines).

Another interpretation of the Frieze is based on Greek Mythology. This interpretation postulates that the scenes depict the sacrifice of Pandora, youngest daughter of Erechtheus to Athena. This human sacrifice was demanded by Athena to save the city from Eumolpus, king of Eleusis who had gathered an army to attack Athens.

Pediments

Pausanias, the 2nd century traveller, when he visited the Acropolis and saw the Parthenon, briefly described only the pediments (four entrances to the Parthenon) of the temple.

East pediment

The East pediment narrates the birth of Athena from the head of her father, Zeus. According to Greek mythology Zeus gave birth to Athena after a terrible headache prompted him to summon Hephaestus’ (the god of fire and the forge) assistance. To alleviate the pain he ordered Hephaestus to strike him with his forging hammer, and when he did, Zeus’ head split open and out popped the goddess Athena in full armour. The sculptural arrangement depicts the moment of Athena’s birth.

Unfortunately, the center pieces of the pediment were destroyed before Jacques Carrey created drawings in 1674, so all reconstructions are subject to conjecture and speculation. The main Olympian gods must have stood around Zeus and Athena watching the wondrous event with Hephaestus and Hera probably near them. The Carrey drawings are instrumental in reconstructing the sculptural arrangement beyond the center figures to the north and south.

West pediment

The west pediment faced the Propylaia and depicted the contest between Athena and Poseidon during their competition for the honor of becoming the city’s patron. Athena and Poseidon appear at the center of the composition, diverging from one another in strong diagonal forms with the goddess holding the olive tree and the god of the sea raising his trident to strike the earth. At their flanks they are framed by two active groups of horses pulling chariots, while a crowd of legendary personalities from Athenian mythology fills the space out to the acute corners of the pediment.

The work on the pediments lasted from 438 to 432 BC and the sculptures of the Parthenon pediments are some of the finest examples of classical Greek art. The figures are sculpted in natural movement with bodies full of vital energy that bursts through their flesh, as the flesh in turn bursts through their thin clothing.

The thin chitons allow the body underneath to be revealed as the focus of the composition. The distinction between gods and humans is blurred in the conceptual interplay between the idealism and naturalism bestowed on the stone by the sculptors.

Athena Parthenos

For more details on this topic, see Athena Parthenos.

The only piece of sculpture from the Parthenon known to be from the hand of Pheidias was the cult statue of Athena housed in the naos. This massive chryselephantine sculpture is now lost and known only from copies, vase painting, gems, literary descriptions and coins.

Name

The origin of the Parthenon's name is unclear. According to Jeffrey M. Hurwit, the term "Parthenon" means "of the virgin" or "of the virgins", and seems to have originally referred only to a particular room of the Parthenon; it is debated which room this is, and how the room acquired its name. One theory holds that the "parthenon" was the room in which the peplos presented to Athena at the Panathenaic Festival was woven by the arrephoroi, a group of four young girls chosen to serve Athena each year.

Christopher Pelling asserts that Athena Parthenos may have constituted a discrete cult of Athena, intimately connected with, but not identical to that of Athena Polias. According to this theory, the name of Parthenon means the "temple of the virgin goddess", and refers to the cult of Athena Parthenos that was associated with the temple.

The epithet parthénos (Greek: pa??????), whose the origin is also unclear, meant "virgin, unmarried woman", and was especially used for Artemis, the goddess of wild animals, the hunt, and vegetation, and for Athena, the goddess of war, handicraft, and practical reason. It has also been suggested that the name of the temple alludes to the virgins (parthenoi), whose supreme sacrifice guaranteed the safety of the city.

In any case, the first instance in which Parthenon definitely refers to the entire building is in the 4th century BC orator Demosthenes. In the 5th century building accounts, the structure is simply called ho neos ("the temple").

The architects Mnesikles and Kallikrates are said to have called the building Hekatompedos ("the hundred footer") in their lost treatise on Athenian architecture, and in the 4th century and later the building was referred to as the Hekatompedos or the Hekatompedon as well as the Parthenon; the 1st century AD writer Plutarch refers to the building as the Hekatompedon Parthenon.

Treasury or temple?

Architecturally, the Parthenon is clearly a temple, formerly containing the famous cult image of Athena by Phidias and the treasury of votive offerings. Since actual Greek sacrifices always took place at an altar invariably under an open sky, as was in keeping with their religious practices, the Parthenon does not suit some definitions of "temple," as no evidence of an altar has been discovered.

Thus, some scholars have argued that the Parthenon was only ever used as a treasury. While this opinion was first formed late in the 19th century, it has gained strength in recent years. The majority of scholarly opinion still sees the building in the terms Walter Burkert described for the Greek sanctuary, consisting of temenos, altar and temple with cult image.

Later history

Christian church

The Parthenon survived as a temple to Athena for close to a thousand years. It was certainly still intact in the 4th century AD, by which time it was already as old as Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is now, and far older than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

But by that time Athens had been reduced to a provincial city of the Roman Empire, albeit one with a glorious past. Sometime in the 5th century AD, the great cult image of Athena was looted by one of the Emperors, and taken to Constantinople, where it was later destroyed, possibly during the sack of the city during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 AD.

Shortly after this, the Parthenon was converted to a Christian church. In Byzantine times it became the Church of the Parthenos Maria (Virgin Mary), or the Church of the Theotokos (Mother of God). At the time of the Latin Empire it became for about 250 years a Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady.

The conversion of the temple to a church involved removing the internal columns and some of the walls of the cella, and the creation of an apse at the eastern end. This inevitably led to the removal and dispersal of some of the sculptures. Those depicting gods were either possibly re-interpreted according to a Christian theme, or removed and destroyed.

During Ottoman rule

In 1456, Athens fell to the Ottomans, and the Parthenon was converted again, into a mosque. Contrary to subsequent misconception, the Ottomans were generally respectful of ancient monuments in their territories, and did not wilfully destroy the antiquities of Athens, though they had no actual programme to protect them. However in times of war they were willing to demolish them to provide materials for walls and fortifications.

A minaret was added to the Parthenon and its base and stairway are still functional, leading up as high as the architrave and hence invisible from the outside; but otherwise the building was not damaged further. European visitors in the 17th century, as well as some representations of the Acropolis hill testified that the building was largely intact.

In 1687, the Parthenon suffered its greatest blow when the Venetians under Francesco Morosini attacked Athens, and the Ottomans fortified the Acropolis and used the building as a gunpowder magazine. On September 26, a Venetian mortar, fired from the Hill of Philopappus, exploded the magazine and the building was partly destroyed. Francesco Morosini then proceeded to attempt to loot sculptures from the now ruin.

The internal structures were demolished, whatever was left of the roof collapsed, and some of the pillars, particularly on the southern side, were decapitated. The sculptures suffered heavily. Many fell to the ground and souvenirs were later made from their pieces. Consequently some sections of the sculptural decoration are known only from the drawings made by Flemish artist Jacques Carrey in 1674. After this, much of the building fell into disuse and a smaller mosque was erected.

The eighteenth century was a period of Ottoman stagnation, as a result many more Europeans found access to Athens, and the picturesque ruins of the Parthenon were much drawn and painted, spurring a rise in philhellenism and helping to arouse sympathy in Britain and France for Greek independence.

Amongst those early travellers and archaeologists were James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, who were commissioned by the Society of the Diletanti to survey the ruins of classical Athens.

What they produced was the first measured drawings of the Parthenon published in 1787 in the second volume of Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated. In 1801, the British Ambassador at Constantinople, the Earl of Elgin, obtained a firman (permit) from the Sultan to make casts and drawings of the antiquities on the Acropolis, to demolish recent buildings if this was necessary to view the antiquities, and to remove sculptures from them.

He took this as permission to collect all the sculptures he could find. He employed local people to detach them from the building itself, a few others he collected from the ground, and some smaller pieces he bought from local people. The detachment of the sculptures caused further irreparable damage to what was left of the building as some of the frieze blocks were sawn in half to lessen their weight for shipment to England.

Independent Greece

When independent Greece gained control of Athens in 1832, the visible section of the minaret was removed from the Parthenon and soon all the medieval and Ottoman buildings on the Acropolis were removed. However the image of the small mosque within the Parthenon's cella has been preserved in Joly de Lotbinière's Excursions Daguerriennes, published 1842: the first photograph of the acropolis.

The area became a historical precinct controlled by the Greek government. Today it attracts millions of tourists every year, who travel up the path at the western end of the Acropolis, through the restored Propylaea, and up the Panathenaic Way to the Parthenon, which is surrounded by a low fence to prevent damage.

Dispute over the marbles

Today the Parthenon Marbles that Earl of Elgin removed are in the British Museum. Other sculptures from the Parthenon are now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, in Copenhagen, and elsewhere, but most of the remainder are in Athens, in the Acropolis Museum which still stands below ground level, a few metres to the south-east of the Parthenon, but will be soon transferred to a new building.

A few can still be seen on the building itself. The Greek government has been campaigning since 1983 for the British Museum sculptures to be returned to Greece. The British Museum has steadfastly refused to return the sculptures and successive British governments have been unwilling to force the Museum to do so (which would require legislation).

Nevertheless, talks between senior representatives from Greek and British cultural ministries, and their legal advisors will take place in London on May 4, 2007. These are the first serious negotiations for several years, and there are hopes that the two sides may move a step closer to a resolution.

Reconstruction

In 1975, the Greek government began a concerted effort to restore the Parthenon and other Acropolis structures. The project later attracted funding and technical assistance from the European Union. An archaeological committee thoroughly documented every artefact remaining on the site, and architects assisted with computer models to determine their original locations. In some cases, prior re-construction was found to be incorrect.

Particularly important and fragile sculptures were transferred to the Acropolis Museum. A crane was installed for moving marble blocks; the crane was designed to fold away beneath the roofline when not in use. The incorrect reconstructions were dismantled, and a careful process of restoration began.

The Parthenon will not be restored to a pre-1687 state, but the explosion damage will be mitigated as much as possible, both in the interest of restoring the structural integrity of the edifice (important in this earthquake-prone region) and to restore the æsthetic integrity by filling in chipped sections of column drums and lintels, using precisely sculpted marble cemented in place.

New marble is being used from the original quarry. Ultimately, almost all major pieces of marble will be placed in the structure where they originally would have been, supported as needed by modern materials.

Originally, various blocks were held together by elongated iron H pins that were completely coated in lead, which protected the iron from corrosion. Stabilizing pins added in the 19th century were not so coated and corroded. Since the corrosion product (rust) is expansive, the expansion caused further damage by cracking the marble. All new metalwork uses titanium, a strong, light, and corrosion resistant material.

This temple should have been a thanksgiving to Empedocles who had saved Selinus from malaria. His biographers describe him so penetrated and convinced of his divine nature to ascribe these sentences to him: "I'm

not a mortal anymore, but a god ! I wander about honoured by everybody because I deserve it.

Beautiful, crowned with fillets and wonderful flowers, I wander about the most famous cities".

As there are not certain elements to establish to whom the temple was consecrated, let's examine the technical aspect.

It is a hellenistic "in antis" building, where four Ionic columns and a Doric entablature formed the eastern front.

The temple is 8,45 m. long and 4,60 m. wide, covering an area of 38,87 square metres.

Nike means "Victory" in Greek, and Athena was worshiped in this form, as goddess of victory, on the Acropolis, Athens. Her temple was the earliest Ionic temple on the Acropolis was compensated by its prominent position on a steep bastion at the south east corner of the Acropolis, to the right of the entrance (propylaea).

There the citizens worshipped the goddess in hope of a prosperous outcome in the long war fought on land and sea against the Spartans and their allies. The Temple of Athena Nike was an expression of Athens' ambition to be the leading Greek city state in the Peloponnese.

The Temple sits within the sanctuary of Athena Nike, atop a bastion on the south flank of the great stair to the Athenian Acropolis.

In contrast to the Acropolis proper, a walled sanctuary entered through the Propylaia, the Nike Sanctuary was open, entered from the Propylaia.

The sheer walls of its bastion were protected on the north, west, and south by a parapet, the famed "Nike Parapet", named for its frieze of Nikai celebrating victory and

sacrificing to their patroness, Athena.

Temple architecture and sculpture

The Temple of Athena Nike is a tetrastyle (four column) Ionic structure with a colonnaded portico at both front and rear facades (amphiprostyle), designed by the architect Kallikrates. This building was erected on top of the remains of an earlier sixth century temple to Athena, demolished by the Persians in 480 B.C.

The total height from the stylobate to the acme of the pediment while the temple remained intact was a modest 11 feet. The ratio of height to diameter of the columns is 7:1, the slender proportions creating an elegance and refinement not encountered in the normal 9:1 or 10:1 of Ionic buildings. Constructed from white pentelic marble, it was built in stages as war-starved funding allowed.

A cult statue of Athena Nike stood inside the small 5 m x 5 m naos. The account by ancient writer Pausanias describes the statue as made of wood, holding a helmet in her left hand, and a pomegranate (symbol of fertility) in the right.

Nike was originally the "winged victory" goddess (see the winged Nike of Samothrace) The Athena Nike statue's absence of wings led Athenians in later centuries to call it Nike Apteros (wing-less victory), and the story arose that the statue was deprived of wings so that it could never leave the city.

The friezes of the building's entablature were decorated on all sides with relief sculpture in the idealized classical style of the 5th century B.C. The north frieze depicted a battle between Greeks entailing cavalry.

The south freize showed the decisive victory over the Persians at the battle of Plataea. The east freize showed an assembly of the gods Athena, Zeus and Poseidon, rendering Athenian religious beliefs and reverence for the gods bound up in the social and political climate of 5th Century Athens.

Some time after the temple was completed, around 410 B.C a parapet was added around it to prevent people from falling from the steep bastion. The outside of the parapet was adorned by exquisitely carved relief sculptures showing Nike in a variety of activities, the best-known illustrating Nike adjusting her sandle.

After three separate restorations the small Temple of Athena Nike/Apteros still stands on the Acropolis, together with the Erechtheum and the Parthenon, a survivor of antiquity. The main structure, stylobate and columns are largely intact, minus the roof and most of the typanae. Only fragments of the sculpted frieze remain in the Acropolis museum; copies of these are fixed in their place on the temple.

"The Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, in Arcadia, was begun in the fifth century B.C. but probably not completed till the fourth. Ictinus is named by Pausanius as the architect, but this must be regarded as dubious.

A remarkable feature of this temple is the use of all three

Greek Orders—Doric outside and Ionic and Corinthian within. The plan is hexastyle peripteral, with fifteen columns on the flanks, all built up in drums. Most of the building is of a hard, fine-grained grey limestone, but marble was used for the sculptures and the more decorative parts, including the ceilings over the pronaos, the opisthodomos, and the short sides of the ambulatory.

The temple has other peculiarities. It faces north, instead of east (as did its predecessor) and the statue of Apollo was placed in an adyton, or inner sanctuary, partially screened off from the naos proper and lighted from a large door in the eastern wall. On both sides of the naos are Ionic half-columns, attached to spur walls, the recesses thus formed with the main naos wall having a stone, coffered ceiling.

Between the adyton and the naos was a single, free-standing column, with a Corinthian capital, and there may have been similar capitals over the engaged corner columns. The entablature was Ionic and continuous with that over the four Ionic half-columns on each side. The capitals of the latter were of unique design, with diagonal volutes, and they had high wide-flaring bases.

The celebrated sculptured marble frieze over the half-columns, portions of which are in the British Museum, must have been poorly illuminated: it is 611 mm (24 in) high and 30.5 m (100 ft) long and represents battles of Centaurs and Lapiths, and Greeks and Amazons."

In the archaic and classical periods, there were three main dialects of the Greek language, Aeolic, Ionic, and Doric, corresponding to the three main tribes of the Greeks, the Aeolians (chiefly living in the islands of the Aegean and the west coast of Asia Minor north of Smyrna), the Ionians (mostly settled in the west coast of Asia Minor, including

Smyrna and the area to the south of it), and the Dorians (primarily the Greeks of the coast of the Pelopennesus, for example of Sparta, Crete and the southernmost parts of the west coast of Asia Minor).

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were written in a kind of literary Ionic with some loan words from the other dialects. Ionic, therefore, became the primary literary language of ancient Greece until the ascendancy of Athens in the late fifth century. Doric was standard for Greek lyric poetry, such as Pindar and the choral odes of the Greek tragedians.

Attic Greek - a subdialect of Ionic, was for centuries the language of Athens. Most surviving classical Greek literature appears in Attic Greek, including the extant texts of Plato and Aristotle, which were passed down in written form from classical times.

Hellenistic Greek - Koine - As Greeks colonized from Asia Minor to Egypt to the Middle East, the Greek language began to evolve into multiple dialects. Alexander the Great (356 BC-323 BC) was instrumental in combining these dialects to form the "Koine" dialect (Greek for "common").

Imposing a common Greek dialect allowed Alexander's combined army to communicate with itself. The language was also taught to the inhabitants of the regions that Alexander conquered, turning Greek into a world language. The Greek language continued to thrive after Alexander, during the Hellenistic period (323 BC to 281 BC). During this period the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, appeared.

For many centuries Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire. It was during Roman times that the Greek New Testament appeared, and KoinÈ Greek is also called "New Testament Greek" after its most famous work of literature.

The art of painting was in as high esteem in Greece as the art of sculpture and, if we may believe the testimony of Greek and Roman writers, achieved results as important and admirable.

But the works of the great Greek painters have utterly perished, and imagination, though guided by ancient descriptions and by such painted designs as have come down to us, can restore them but dimly and doubtfully. The subject may therefore here be dismissed with comparative brevity.

In default of pictures by the great Greek masters, an

especial interest attaches to the work of humbler craftsmen of the brush. One class of such work exists in abundance – the painted decorations upon earthenware vases. Tens of thousands of these vases have been brought to light from tombs and sanctuaries on Greek and Italian sites and the number is constantly increasing.

Thanks to the indestructible character of pottery, the designs are often intact. Now the materials and methods employed by the vase- painters and the spaces at their disposal were very different from those of mural or easel paintings. Consequently inferences must not be hastily drawn from designs upon vases as to the composition and coloring of the great masterpieces.

But the best of the vase- painters, especially in the early fifth century, were men of remarkable talent, and all of them were influenced by the general artistic tendencies of their respective periods. Their work, therefore, contributes an important element to our knowledge of Greek art history.

Development of Greek Sculpture

Geometric

The origins of Greek sculpture have been traditionally ascribed to the wooden cult statues described by Pausanias as xoana.

No such statue survives and the descriptions of them are frustratingly vague despite the fact that some were objects of veneration for hundreds of years and in some cases city

pallidon. The first piece of Greek statuary come down to us is probably the Lefkandi Centaur (Eretria Mus.) found on Euboia. This terracotta statue of circa 900 BCE was constructed in parts before being dismembered and buried in two separate graves, it bears an intentional mark on its knee perhaps indicating it represents Cheiron and the wound from Herakles’s arrow, if so it would be the first depiction of myth in Greek art.

Of the forms of art from the geometrical period (ca. 900 to 700 BCE) we have terracotta figurines, bronzes and ivories. The bronzes are chiefly tripod cauldrons and freestanding figures or groups. Such bronzes were made using the lost-wax technique probably introduced from Syria and are almost entirely votive offerings left at the Panhellenic sanctuaries of Olympia, Delos and Delphi.

These were manufactured elsewhere and a number of local styles may be identified by finds from Athens, Argos and Sparta. Typical works of the era include the Karditsa warrior (Athens Br. 12831) and the many examples of the equestrian statuette (for example, NY Met. 21.88.24 online).

The repertory of this bronze work is not confined to standing men and horses however, as with the vase painting of the time we also find stags, birds, beetles, hares, griffins and lions. There are no inscriptions on early to middle geometric sculpture until the appearance of the Mantiklos “Apollo” (Boston 03.997) of the early 7th century found in Thebes.

This is a standing figure of a man with an almost daedalic form with the legend “Mantiklos offers me as a tithe to Apollo of the silver bow; do you, Phoibos, give some pleasing favour in return” across his thighs in hexameter verse.

Apart from the novelty of recording its own purpose this sculpture it adapts the formulae of oriental bronzes as seen in the shorter more triangular face and slightly advancing left leg. This is sometimes seen as anticipating the greater expressive freedom of the 7th century and as such the Mantiklos figure is referred to in some quarters as proto-daedalic.

The Aphrodite of Milos, better known as the Venus de Milo, is an ancient Greek statue and one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture. It is believed to depict Aphrodite (called Venus by the Romans), the Greek goddess of love and beauty.

It is a marble sculpture, slightly larger than life size at 203 cm (80 inches) high. Its arms and original plinth have been lost. From an inscription on its now-lost plinth, it is thought to be the work of Alexandros of Antioch; it was earlier mistakenly attributed to the master sculptor Praxiteles.

It is at present on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Interpretation

The statue dates to about 130–90 BCE. Despite this relatively late date, its composition is a mixture of earlier styles from the Classical period of Greek sculpture. The statue is a variation on an older theme of the half nude

Aphrodite originally shown admiring her reflection inside the reflective inner surface of Ares' shield while it is balanced on her raised left knee (a replica of the older type is located at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale Napoli (Naples National Archaeological Museum), Italy. It is known as the Capuan Venus, after its findspot at the ruins of an ancient theater in nearby Capua, Italy).

It is not known exactly what aspect of Venus the statue originally depicted. It is generally thought to have been a representation of Venus Victrix (Aphrodite Victorious) holding the golden apple presented to her by Paris of Troy (see also the Judgement of Paris). This would also have served as a pun on the name of the island Milos, which means "apple" in the Greek language.

Two fragments of a left arm and a left hand with an apple were found near the statue in the same niche and are thought to be remnants of its arms. After the statue was found, numerous attempts were made to reconstruct its pose, though it was never restored. (A drawing by Adolf Furtwängler suggesting its original form can be found in an article by Kousser.)

Discovery and fame

The statue was discovered in 1820 inside a buried niche within the ancient city ruins of Milos on the Aegean island of the same name, also called Melos or Milo, by a peasant named Yorgos Kentrotas. It was found in two main pieces (the upper torso and the lower draped legs) along with several herms (pillars topped with heads), fragments of the upper left arm and left hand holding an apple, and an inscribed plinth.

At the moment of discovery Oliver Voutier, a French naval officer who was either interested in the then new science of archaeology, or simply bored, decided to take two of his sailors and explore the “dull,remote, harsh” island. With the help of the young farmer,Voutier began to dig around what were clearly ancient ruins.

In only a few hours’ time,Voutier uncovered a piece of art that would become renowned throughout the world, about 10 days later, another French naval officer, Jules Dumont d'Urville, recognized its significance and arranged for a purchase by the French ambassador to Turkey, the Marquis de Riviere.

Twelve days out of Touloun the ship was anchored off the island of Melos. Ashore, d'Urville and Matterer met a Greek peasant, who a few days earlier while ploughing had uncovered blocks of marble and a statue in two pieces, which he offered cheaply to the two young men.

It was of a naked woman with an apple in her raised left hand, the right hand holding a draped sash falling from hips to feet, both hands damaged and separated from the body. Even with a broken nose, the face was beautiful. D'Urville the classicist recognized the Venus of the Judgement of Paris.

It was, of course, the Venus de Milo. He was eager to acquire it, but his practical captain, apparently uninterested in antiquities, said there was nowhere to store it on the ship, so the transaction lapsed.

The tenacious d'Urville on arrival at Constantinople showed the sketches he had made to the French ambassador, the Marquis de Riviére, who sent his secretary in a French Navy vessel to buy it for France.

Before he could take delivery, French sailors had to fight Greek brigands for possession. In the mêlée the statue was roughly dragged across rocks to the ship, breaking off both arms, and the sailors refused to go back to search for them. (Two Voyages to the South Seas,Memoirs of Captain Jules S.-C. Dumont D'Urville,introduction by Helen Rosenmann)

News of the discovery took longer than normal to get to the French ambassador. The peasant grew tired of waiting for payment and was pressured into selling to a local priest, who planned to present the statue as a gift to a translator working for the Sultan in Constantinople (present day Istanbul, Turkey).

The French ambassador's representative arrived just as the statue was being loaded aboard a ship bound for Constantinople and persuaded the island's primates (chief citizens) to annul the sale and honor the first offer.

Upon learning of the reversal of the sale, the translator had the primates whipped and fined, but was eventually reprimanded by the Sultan after the French ambassador complained to him about the mistreatment of the island primates. The primates were reimbursed and ceded all future claims to the statue in gratitude.

Upon arrival at the Louvre, the statue was reassembled but the fragments of the left hand and arm were initially dismissed as being a later restoration due to the rougher workmanship. It is now accepted that the left hand holding the apple and the left arm are in fact original to the statue, but were not as well finished as the rest of the statue since they would have been somewhat above eye level and difficult to see.

This was a standard practice for many sculptors of the era--less visible parts of statues were often not as well finished since they would typically be invisible to the casual observer. Sculptures and statues from this era were normally carved out of several blocks of stone and carefully pieced together.

The Venus de Milo turns out to have been carved from at least six to seven blocks of Parian marble: one block for the nude torso, another block for the draped legs, another block apiece for each arm, another small block for the left foot, another block for the inscribed plinth and finally the separately carved herm that stood beside the goddess.

The controversial plinth was initially found to fit perfectly as part of the statue, but after it was translated and dated, the embarrassed experts who had publicized the statue as a possible original work by the artist Praxiteles dismissed it as another later addition to the statue. The inscription read: "...(Alex)andros son of Menides, citizen of Antioch on the Maeander made this (statue)...".

The inscribed plinth would have moved the dating of the statue from the Classical Age to the Hellenistic Age because of the style of lettering and the mention of the ancient city of Antioch on the Maeander, which did not exist at the time Praxiteles lived. The Hellenistic Age was at that time considered a period of decline for Greek art.

The plinth mysteriously disappeared shortly before the statue was presented to King Louis XVIII in 1821 and only survives in two drawings and an early description. The king eventually presented the statue to the Louvre museum in Paris, where it still stands on public display.

The statue's great fame in the 19th century was not simply the result of its admitted beauty, but also owed much to a major propaganda effort by the French authorities. In 1815 France had returned the Medici Venus to the Italians after it had been looted from Italy by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Medici Venus, regarded as one of the finest Classical sculptures in existence, caused the French to consciously promote the Venus de Milo as a greater treasure than that which they had recently lost. It was duly praised by artists and critics as the epitome of graceful female beauty; however, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was clearly not following the script when he dismissed it as a "big gendarme".

Although the statue is widely renowned for the mystery of its missing arms, enough evidence remains to prove that the right arm was lowered across the torso with the right hand resting on the raised left knee so the sliding drapery wrapped around the hips and legs could be held in place. There is a filled in hole below the right breast that originally contained a metal tenon that would have supported the separately carved right arm.

The left arm was held at just below the eye level of the statue above a herm while holding an apple. The right side of the statue is more carefully worked and finished than the left side or back, indicating that the statue was intended to be seen mainly as a profile from its right.

The left hand would have held the apple up into the air further back inside the niche the statue was set in. When the left hand was still attached, it would have been clear to an observer that the goddess was looking at the apple she held up in her left hand.

The statue would have been painted in a riot of colors as was the custom of the era, decked out in jewelery and positioned inside a niche inside a gymnasium. The painting of the statue along with the bedecking in jewelery was intended to make it appear more lifelike. Today, all traces of the paint have disappeared and the only signs of the armbands, necklace, earrings and crown are the attachment holes.

Euripides (Ancient Greek: ????p?d??) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles). Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety-five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias.

Eighteen of Euripides' plays have survived complete. It is now widely believed that what was thought to be a nineteenth, Rhesus, was probably not by Euripides. Fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays also survive.

More of his plays have survived than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because of the chance

preservation of a manuscript that was probably part of a complete collection of his works in alphabetical order.

Euripides is known primarily for having reshaped the formal structure of traditional Attic tragedy by showing strong women characters and intelligent slaves, and by satirizing many heroes of Greek mythology. His plays seem modern by comparison with those of his contemporaries, focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown to Greek audiences.

Perhaps one of his more famous quotes is "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad".

Life

According to legend, Euripides was born in Salamís on September 23, 480 BC, the day of the Persian War's greatest naval battle. Other sources estimate that he was born as early as 485 BC.

His father's name was either Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides and his mother's name Cleito, and evidence suggests that the family was wealthy and influential. It is recorded that he served as a cup-bearer for Apollo's dancers, but he grew to question the religion he grew up with, exposed as he was to thinkers such as Protagoras, Socrates, and Anaxagoras.

He was married twice, to Choerile and Melito, though sources disagree as to which woman he married first. He had three sons, and it is rumored that he also had a daughter who was killed after a rabid dog attacked her. (Some say this was merely a joke made by Aristophanes, who often poked fun at Euripides.)

The record of Euripides' public life, other than his involvement in dramatic competitions, is almost non-existent. The only reliable story of note is one by Aristotle about Euripides being involved in a dispute over a liturgy - a story which offers strong proof to Euripides being a wealthy man. It has been said that he travelled to Syracuse, Sicily; that he engaged in various public or political activities during his lifetime; and that he left Athens at the invitation of king Archelaus I of Macedon and stayed with him in Macedonia after 408 BC. According to Pausanias, Euripides was buried in Macedonia.

Plays

Euripides first competed in the Dionysia, the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BC, one year after the death of Aeschylus. He came in third, reportedly because he refused to cater to the fancies of the judges. It was not until 441 BC that he won first prize, and over the course of his lifetime, Euripides claimed a mere four victories. He also won one posthumous victory.

He was a frequent target of Aristophanes' humour. He appears as a character in The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and most memorably in The Frogs, where Dionysus travels to Hades to bring Euripides back from the dead. After a competition of poetry, the god opts to bring Aeschylus instead.

Euripides' final competition in Athens was in 408 BC; there is a story that he left Athens embittered over his defeats. He accepted an invitation by the king of Macedon in 408 or 407 BC, and once there he wrote Archelaus in honour of his host.

He is believed to have died there in winter 407/6 BC; ancient biographers have told many stories about his death, but the simple truth was that it was probably his first exposure to the harsh Macedonia winter which killed him. (Rutherford 1996). The Bacchae was performed after his death in 405 BC and won first prize.

When compared with Aeschylus, who won thirteen times, and Sophocles, with eighteen victories, Euripides was the least honoured of the three — at least in his lifetime. Later in the 4th century BC, the dramas of Euripides became the most popular. His works influenced New Comedy and Roman drama, and were later idolized by the French classicists; his influence on drama reaches modern times.

Euripides' greatest works include Alcestis, Medea, Electra, and The Bacchae. Also considered notable is Cyclops, one of the only complete satyr plays currently in existence.

The manuscript, apparently part of a multiple volume, alphabetically-arranged collection of Euripides' works, whose preservation accounts for the comparatively large number of extant plays of Euripides, was rediscovered after lying in a monastic collection for approximately eight hundred years.

In June 2005, classicists at Oxford University employed infrared technology — previously used for satellite imaging — to detect previously unknown material by Euripides in fragments of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, a collection of ancient manuscripts held by the university.

Plato (Greek: ???t??, Pláton, "wide, broad-shouldered") (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), whose original name was Aristocles, was an ancient Greek philosopher, the second of the great trio of ancient Greeks –succeeding Socrates and preceding Aristotle– who between them laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture.

Plato was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world. Plato is widely believed to have been a student of Socrates and to have been deeply influenced by his teacher's unjust death.

Plato's brilliance as a writer and thinker can be witnessed

by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious. Plato is thought to have lectured at the Academy, although the pedagogical function of his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty. They have historically been used to teach philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.

Biography

Early life

Birth and family

The exact birthdate of Plato is unknown. Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars estimate that he was born in Athens or Aegina[b] between 428 and 427 b.c.e.[a] His father was Ariston. According to a disputed tradition, reported by Diogenes Laertius, Ariston traced his descent from the king of Athens, Codrus, and the king of Messenia, Melanthus. Plato's mother was Perictione, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker and lyric poet Solon. Perictione was sister of Charmides and Critias, both prominent figures of the Thirty Tyrants, the brief oligarchic regime, which followed on the collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian war (404-403 b.c.e.). Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children; these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother of Speusippus (the nephew and successor of Plato as head of his philosophical Academy). According to the Republic, Adeimantus and Glaucon were older than Plato. Nevertheless, in his Memorabilia, Xenophon presents Glaucon as younger than Plato.

According to certain fabulous reports of ancient writers, Plato' s mother became pregnant through a virginal conception: Ariston tried to force his attentions on Perictione, but failed of his purpose; then the ancient Greek god Apollo appeared to him in a vision, and, as a result of it, Ariston left Perictione unmolested. Another legend related that, while he was sleeping as an infant, bees had settled on the lips of Plato; an augury of the sweetness of style in which he would discourse philosophy.

Ariston appears to have died in Plato's childhood, although the precise dating of his death is difficult. Perictione then married Pyrilampes, her mother's brother, who had served many times as an ambassador to the Persian court and was a friend of Pericles, the leader of the democratic faction in Athens. Pyrilampes had a son from a previous marriage, Demus, who was famous for his beauty. Perictione gave birth to Pyrilampes' second son, Antiphon, the half-brother of Plato, who appears in Parmenides.

In contrast to his reticence about himself, Plato used to introduce his distinguished relatives into his dialogues, or to mention them with some precision: Charmides has one named after him; Critias speaks in both Charmides and Protagoras; Adeimantus and Glaucon take prominent parts in the Republic. From these and other references one can reconstruct his family tree, and this suggests a considerable amount of family pride. According to Burnet, "the opening scene of the Charmides is a glorification of the whole [family] connection ... Plato's dialogues are not only a memorial to Socrates, but also the happier days of his own family".

Name

According to Diogenes Laertius, the philosopher was named Aristocles after his grandfather, but his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, dubbed him "Platon", meaning "broad" on account of his robust figure. According to the sources mentioned by Diogenes (all dating from the Alexandrian period), Plato derived his name from the breadth (platutês) of his eloquence, or else because he was very wide (platus) across the forehead. In the 21st century some scholars disputed Diogenes, and argued that the legend about his name being Aristocles originated in the Hellenistic age.

Education

Apuleius informs us that Speusippus praised Plato's quickness of mind and modesty as a boy, and the "first fruits of his youth infused with hard work and love of study". Plato must have been instructed in grammar, music, and gymnastics by the most distinguished teachers of his time. Dicaearchus went so far as to say that Plato wrestled at the Isthmian games. Plato had also attended courses of philosophy; before meeting Socrates, he first became acquainted with Cratylus (a disciple of Heraclitus, a prominent pre-Socratic Greek philosopher) and the Heraclitean doctrines.

Later life

Plato may have traveled in Italy, Sicily, Egypt and Cyrene. Said to have returned to Athens at the age of forty, Plato founded one of the earliest known organized schools in Western Civilization on a plot of land in the Grove of Hecademus or Academus. The Academy was "a large enclosure of ground which was once the property of a citizen at Athens named Academus... some, however, say that it received its name from an ancient hero" (Robinson, Arch. Graec. I i 16), and it operated until 529 AD, when it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium, who saw it as a threat to the propagation of Christianity. Many intellectuals were schooled in the Academy, the most prominent one being Aristotle.

Plato and Socrates

Plato made himself seem as though he were part of the Socratic entourage but never says so explicitly. In the Phaedo the title character lists those who were in attendance at the prison on Socrates' last day and says "Plato was ill" (Phaedo 59b). In the Apology, Plato distances himself from the inner circle. Socrates says there that the brothers of several of his former associates are in the audience. He says that Adeimantus, brother to Plato, was present (Apology 34a). Adeimantus appears in the Republic as a disputant.

Narration of the dialogues

Plato never presents himself as a participant in any of the dialogues, and with the exception of the Apology, he does not claim to have heard any of the dialogues firsthand. Some dialogues have no narrator (examples: Meno, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Crito, Euthyphro), some dialogues are narrated by Socrates, wherein he speaks in first person (examples: Lysis, Charmides, Apology, Republic). In one dialogue, Protagoras, Socrates narrates to an unnamed friend a conversation he had previously with the sophist for whom the dialogue is named.

Three dialogues, Phaedo, Symposium, and Theaetetus, are narrated by disciples of Socrates, and all, apparently, from distant memories. Phaedo, an account of Socrates' final conversation and hemlock drinking, is narrated by Phaedo to Echecrates in a foreign city many years after the execution took place. The Symposium is narrated by Apollodorus, a Socratic disciple, apparently to Glaucon. Apollodorus assures his listener that he is recounting the story, which took place when he himself was an infant, not from his own memory, but as remembered by Aristodemus, who told him the story years ago. In the Theaetetus (142c-143b), Euclides says that he compiled the conversation from notes he took based on what Socrates told him of his conversation with the title character. With the exception of the Theaetetus, Plato gives no hint as to how these orally transmitted conversations came to be written down, or how he came by them.

Plato's absence from the dialogues is at odds with the traditional belief that he was a disciple and part of Socrates' inner circle. The question of why Plato explicitly distances himself by time, place, and authorship from three of his greatest dialogues has never been satisfactorily answered.

Tradition tends to see Plato as writing a kind of "pseudo-history" of the life of Socrates, but the chronologies of the characters are inconsistent. For example, in the Protagoras, Alcibiades and Agathon are teenage boys growing beards (and are the respective beloveds of Socrates and Pausanias), and Apollodoros and Glaucon are fathers of teenage sons. When the Symposium allegedly took place, however, Glaucon and Apollodorus were infants and Alcibiades and Agathon were full-grown men (and Alcibiades is said to be older than his beloved Agathon). This chronological discrepancy, which does not appear to be inadvertent, suggests that Plato is not a historical writer.

Plato's dialogues bear at least some similarities to the classical plays, in having no more than three speakers "on stage" (speaking) at one time, and in often having "a chorus" of (silent) listeners.

Trial of Socrates

The trial of Socrates is the central, unifying event of the great Platonic dialogues. Because of this, Plato's Apology is perhaps the most often read of the dialogues. In the Apology, Socrates tries to dismiss rumors that he is a sophist and defends himself against charges of disbelief in the gods and corruption of the young. Socrates insists that long-standing slander will be the real cause of his demise, and says the legal charges are essentially false. Socrates famously denies being wise, and explains how his life as a philosopher was launched by the oracle at Delphi. He says that his quest to resolve the riddle of the oracle put him at odds with his fellow man, and that this is the reason he has been mistaken for a menace to the city-state of Athens.

The trial of Socrates is anomalous: from what is known about Athens in the fifth century BC, it should not have taken place (see Gorgias 461e and Crito 45e). Atheism or similar charges were not a crime in free-speech Athens. It was not even unusual among intellectuals, nor condemned by the masses. The prize-winning plays of Aristophanes were not merely atheist, but made fun of the gods and their prophets and oracles. There is no record that Aristophanes was prosecuted for atheism, and some have speculated that comics enjoyed special immunities. However, there is no evidence of this. It is also puzzling that Socrates exonerated himself in large part by claiming to be sent on his philosophic mission by Apollo, an important figure in the standard Greek pantheon.

Unity and diversity of the dialogues

If Plato's important dialogues do not refer to Socrates' execution explicitly, they allude to it, or use characters or themes that play a part in it. Five dialogues foreshadow the trial: In the Theaetetus (210d) and the Euthyphro (2a–b) Socrates tells people that he is about to face corruption charges. In the Meno (94e–95a), one of the men who brings legal charges against Socrates, Anytus, warns him about the trouble he may get into if he does not stop criticizing important people. In the Gorgias, Socrates says that his trial will be like a doctor prosecuted by a cook who asks a jury of children to choose between the doctor's bitter medicine and the cook's tasty treats (521e–522a). In the Republic (7.517e), Socrates explains why an enlightened man (presumably himself) will stumble in a courtroom situation. The Apology is Socrates' defense speech, and the Crito and Phaedo take place in prison after the conviction. In the Protagoras, Socrates is a guest at the home of Callias, son of Hipponicus, a man whom Socrates disparages in the Apology as having wasted a great amount of money on sophists' fees.

Two other important dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, are linked to the main storyline by characters. In the Apology (19b, c), Socrates says Aristophanes slandered him in a comic play, and blames him for causing his bad reputation, and ultimately, his death. In the Symposium, the two of them are drinking together with other friends. The character Phaedrus is linked to the main story line by character (Phaedrus is also a participant in the Symposium and the Protagoras) and by theme (the philosopher as divine emissary, etc.) The Protagoras is also strongly linked to the Symposium by characters: all of the formal speakers at the Symposium (with the exception of Aristophanes) are present at the home of Callias in that dialogue. Charmides and his guardian Critias are present for the discussion in the Protagoras. Examples of characters crossing between dialogues can be further multiplied. The Protagoras contains the largest gathering of Socratic associates.

In the dialogues for which Plato is most celebrated and admired, Socrates is concerned with human and political virtue, has a distinctive personality, and friends and enemies who "travel" with him from dialogue to dialogue. This is not to say that Socrates is consistent: a man who is his friend in one dialogue may be an adversary or subject of his mockery in another. For example, Socrates praises the wisdom of Euthyphro many times in the Cratylus, but makes him look like a fool in the Euthyphro. He disparages sophists generally, and Prodicus specifically in the Apology, yet tells Theaetetus in his namesake dialogue that he admires Prodicus and has directed many pupils to him. In Cratylus (384b-c), Socrates says that he studied with Cratylus, and took his one-drachma course because he could not afford the full fifty-drachma course. Socrates' ideas are also not consistent within or between or among dialogues.

Works

Structure

Some of Plato's dialogues are framed by human elements. The clearest example of this is Phaedo, wherein Socrates dismisses his wife Xanthippe from the prison at the beginning of the dialogue, and again towards the end. The frame elements suggest that Socrates' relationship with his disciples, who mourn the imminent loss of their spiritual "father" is more important to him than his actual family. In this dialogue, an entire chorus of people is said to be silently listening to a very long conversation, and apparently, saying nothing.

Other dialogues, such as Euthyphro and Crito, involve only two characters who are not said to be overheard by anyone else. The characters are meant to be compared and contrasted. Socrates is more like Euthyphro (whom he mocks) than he thinks. Both are pious men whose knowledge of god's will comes from different sources - Euthyphro reads myths and takes them literally, while Socrates relies on divine voices in his head. Socrates is less compatible with his friend Crito than he thinks, and even says that people who are so morally at odds ought to despise each other. Sometimes characters pop in and out of a dialogue, as a slave and an aristocrat (Anytus) in the Meno.

Two of Plato's dialogues are better described as monologues. The often-read Apology is as brilliant a speech as the little-read Menexenus is tiresome. Gorgias, Protagoras and Lesser Hippias are structurally similar: each depicts Socrates being invited to converse with a well-known wise man who is visiting Athens. Lysis and Charmides are twin dialogues that picture Socrates chatting with boys who require attendants, slaves or older male relations who are appointed to walk them to and from their lessons at school. Phaedrus and the Symposium are a pair of dialogues linked by the theme of man-boy love.

Many other dialogues ascribed to Plato also use the Socratic character, but do not share this pronounced concern for virtue. In these dialogues, Plato uses Socrates as a mere name, a voice-marker who does not have the distinctive, self-deprecating wit of the important dialogues. The metaphysical dialogues attributed to Plato do not contain material of human interest, but are very abstract and read by specialists.

The dialogues have been divided by influential scholarship into the early, middle and late periods. The late Princeton scholar and classicist, Gregory Vlastos argued that the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo were written first and are a more or less historical record of the philosophy of the historical character Socrates. Vlastos' aim was to account for the obvious contradictions among dialogues. He argues that Plato's early dialogues represent Socratic philosophy, and that in the so-called middle and later dialogues, Plato expresses his own, quite different philosophy. Even Vlastos admitted that this division is not well-supported by the dialogues themselves. Nevertheless, his theory continues to be extremely influential.

Important analogies

The analogies in the dialogues are as interesting as the arguments, and just as important. Socrates' most enduring analogy is his comparison of the philosopher to the medical doctor. He says that the philosopher cures the mind ("psyche") of its worst affliction, ignorance, just as the medical doctor ("iatros") cures the body of disease. The ancient philosopher Epicurus took up the analogy, and claimed that any philosopher who did not reduce spiritual suffering was worthless. Socrates never pretended that his cures were pleasant, and never shied from saying that philosophical refutation, which chases false ideas from the brain, was a bitter medicine, and comparable to surgery or cautery. Diogenes of Sinope agreed. He reputedly said that a philosopher who did not hurt anybody's feeling was not doing his job. Even today, doctors of the mind are called "psych-iatrists".

Socrates compares the body to a prison house for the soul, and promoted the distinction that remains today, that a spiritual or wise person has a certain disgust for the body and its functions. In another celebrated analogy, Socrates likens the soul to a charioteer trying to manage a pair of lust ridden horses who ride by a love object, and start sweating and rearing uncontrollably. In still another comical analogy for the mind, Socrates says the brain is like a bird cage with pieces of knowledge fluttering about in it like doves and pigeons, so that a man might reach in for one fact and pull out the wrong one (Theaetetus).

Socrates frequently compares ideas with children, and says that ideas are the produce of the intercourse that men have with their beloved disciples (Symp. 209a–e). In a related analogy, Socrates compares himself to a midwife to men and boys who are "pregnant with thought" (Theaetetus). In the Protagoras, Socrates compares ideas to food, claiming that sophists are more dangerous to the mind than peddlers of spoiled food are to the body.

In several dialogues, Socrates compares intellectual debate to the physical contests so popular in the ancient Greek world. In the Gorgias he says that trainers cannot be blamed for the misbehaviors of their students. He says that you would not exile his trainer if a boxing student started punching out his friends and parents, and just so, a teacher of rhetoric cannot be blamed if his students use their skills for unjust purposes. In the Lesser Hippias, Socrates says that a person who lies deliberately is a better man than the man who lies unwittingly, just as a man who throws an athletic contest is better than the man who loses from lack of skill.

Recurrent themes

Much on Plato's mind is the father-son relationship, and the "question" of whether a father's interest in his sons has much to do with how well his sons turn out. A boy in ancient Athens was socially located by his family identity, and Plato often refers to his characters in terms of their paternal and fraternal relationships. Socrates was not a family man, and saw himself as the son of his mother, who was apparently a midwife. A divine fatalist, Socrates mocks men who spent exorbitant fees on tutors and trainers for their sons, and repeatedly ventures the idea that good character is a gift from the gods. Crito reminds Socrates that orphans are at the mercy of chance, but Socrates is unconcerned. In the Theaetetus, he is found recruiting as a disciple a young man whose inheritance has been squandered. Socrates twice compares the relationship of the older man and his boy lover to the father-son relationship (Lysis 213a, Republic 3.403b), and in the Phaedo, Socrates' disciples, towards whom he displays more concern than his biological sons, say they will feel "fatherless" when he is gone. Many dialogues, like these, suggest that man-boy love (which is "spiritual") is a wise man's substitute for father-son biology (which is "bodily").

In several dialogues, Socrates floats the idea that Knowledge is a matter of recollection, and not of learning, observation, or study. He maintains this view somewhat at his own expense, because in many dialogues, Socrates complains of his forgetfulness. Socrates is often found arguing that knowledge is not empirical, and that it comes from divine insight. He is quite consistent in believing in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. More than one dialogue contrasts knowledge and opinion, perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. The only contrast to this is his Parmenides.

Several dialogues tackle questions about art: Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkeness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus (265a–c), and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer's great poetry, and laughter as well. In Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer's Iliad functioned in the ancient Greek world as the bible does today in the modern Christian world: as divinely inspired literature that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be properly interpreted.

On politics and art, religion and science, justice and medicine, virtue and vice, crime and punishment, pleasure and pain, rhetoric and rhapsody, human nature and sexuality, love and wisdom, Socrates and his company of disputants had something to say.

Metaphysics

"Platonism" is a term coined by scholars to refer to the intellectual consequences of denying, as Socrates often does, the reality of the material world. In several dialogues, most notably the Republic, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.

Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure. (This is exactly the opposite of what Socrates says to Euthyphro in the soothsayer's namesake dialogue. There, Socrates tells Euthyphro that people can agree on matters of logic and science, and are divided on moral matters, which are not so easily verifiable.)

Socrates says in the Republic that people who take sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. Socrates admits that few climb out of the den, or cave of ignorance, and those who do not only have a terrible struggle to attain the heights, but when they go back down for a visit or to help other people up, they find themselves objects of scorn and ridicule.

According to Socrates, physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary, inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it.

The allegory of the cave (often said by scholars to represent Plato's own epistemology and metaphysics) is intimately connected to his political ideology (often said to also be Plato's own), that only people who have climbed out of the cave and cast their eyes on a vision of goodness are fit to rule. Socrates claims that the enlightened men of society must be forced from their divine contemplations and compelled to run the city according to their lofty insights. Thus is born the idea of the "philosopher-king", the wise person who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are wise enough to choose a good master. This is the main thesis of Socrates in the Republic, that the most wisdom the masses can muster is the wise choice of a ruler.

Labelled Plato's "metaphysics" because Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature ("physics"), Socrates division of reality into the warring and irreconciliable domains of the material and the spiritual has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy and religion.

Socrates and the female

In two dialogues, the Menexenus and the Symposium, Socrates claims to have been tutored by a woman. In the Menexenus, Socrates says that he was a student of Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, who taught him the art of rhetoric, and that the earth is the "true mother" of men. Women who give birth, she taught him, only imitate the earth, in whose bosom dead soldiers comfortably rest. The Menexenus is thought to mock the Athenian custom of giving a funeral oration for soldiers who had died in battle. Aspasia's speech pretends that the land of Athens gives life to its citizens/soldiers/sons, and that they "belong" to the land rather than to their human parents.

In the Symposium, Socrates tells a company of his friends that he learned everything he knows about love from the sorceress Diotima. Diotima taught him that ideas, which are the offspring of the intellectual intercourse between men and boys, are superior to the offspring of the bodies of women. Socrates says that he learned that men who are sexually attracted to women are misguided, searching for immortality through children. Ideas, she told him, are more likely to make a man famous.

In the Apology (Plato) Socrates tells the jury that he will not weep and wail before the jury and beg for mercy because men who use such tactics for acquittal are "no better than women". In the Republic (Plato), Socrates appears to completely change his mind, and appears to be not just liberal, but a radical feminist. He argues that gender is irrelevant to aptitude for the professions and declares that women ought to be educated along with the men, and in particular, be trained in combat. Socrates says that in his ideal world, women will perform their military exercises naked alongside the men. When his partner in conversation objects that foreigners will laugh, Socrates says that it is no matter, because the women will be "clad in virtue."

Socrates also abolishes the nuclear family in his design of a more perfect city than Athens. He says that women will be held in common, and be bred like hounds. The bravest warriors will have maximum access to women. Besides rewarding battle courage, the system will produce a better class of warriors in time. This suggestion has a parallel in Aristophanes' play, "Women at the Assembly", where women themselves rewrite the laws of Athens and abolish the private household.

Theory of Forms

Plato's Theory of Forms indicates that the sensory world that is the reality which we as human beings experience, is only a shadow of a higher realm. In this higher realm, Plato assures us that there exist the Forms that embody the true nature of the pale shadows. What we know as sweet is only an afterimage of the Form of Sweetness. The luminous brightness of the sun is only a corporeal display of the Form of Brightness.

The Forms should be understood as a unity amidst disparate things. The disparate things are the things of the sense world, the forms are our intellectual apprehension of the true meaning of those things; and even the lifeblood of the empirical things themselves. The Forms are static, perfect and unchanging: necessary characteristics if they are going to be used to make sense of the empirical world. Following this logic, then, Plato infers a unity to the forms themselves that could be considered the Ultimate Form, or the Form of Form. This is one quality which all Forms share. This is the Form of the Good. Later Christian thinkers influenced by Neo-Platonists would identify this Ultimate Form with God; though certainly famous pagan Neo-Platonists such as Plotinus would do the same.

Epistemology

Many have interpreted Plato as stating that knowledge is justified true belief, an influential view which informed future developments in modern analytic epistemology. This interpretation is based on a reading of the Theaetetus wherein Plato argues that belief is to be distinguished from knowledge on account of justification. Many years later, Edmund Gettier famously demonstrated the problems of the justified true belief account of knowledge. This interpretation, however, imports modern analytic and empiricist categories onto Plato himself and is better read on its own terms than as Plato's view.

Really, in the Sophist, Statesman, Republic, and the Parmenides Plato himself associates knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another (which he calls "expertise" in Dialectic). More explicitly, Plato himself argues in the Timaeus that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives their account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. And opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives their account of something by way of the non-sensible forms, because these forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them. It is only in this sense that Plato uses the term "knowledge."

The state

Plato's philosophical views had many societal implications, especially on the idea of an ideal state or government. There is some discrepancy between his early and later views. Some of the most famous doctrines are contained in the Republic during his middle period, as well as in the Laws and the Statesman. However, because Plato wrote dialogues, it is assumed that Socrates is often speaking for Plato. This assumption may not be true in all cases.

Plato, through the words of Socrates, asserts that societies have a tripartite class structure corresponding to the appetite/spirit/reason structure of the individual soul.

Productive (Workers) — the labourers, carpenters, plumbers, masons, merchants, farmers, ranchers, etc. These correspond to the "appetite" part of the soul.

Protective (Warriors or Auxiliaries) — those who are adventurous, strong and brave; in the armed forces. These correspond to the "spirit" part of the soul.

Governing (Rulers or Guardians) — those who are intelligent, rational, self-controlled, in love with wisdom, well suited to make decisions for the community. These correspond to the "reason" part of the soul and are very few.

According to this model, the principles of Athenian democracy (as it existed in his day) are rejected as only a few are fit to rule. Instead of rhetoric and persuasion, Plato says reason and wisdom should govern. This does not equate to tyranny, despotism, or oligarchy, however. As Plato puts it:

"Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,... nor, I think, will the human race." (Republic 473c-d)

Plato describes these "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" (Republic 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. Sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the Republic then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce these philosopher kings.

However, it must be taken into account that the ideal city outlined in the Republic is qualified by Socrates as the ideal luxurious city, examined to determine how it is that injustice and justice grow in a city (Republic 372e). According to Socrates, the "true" and "healthy" city is instead the one first outlined in book II of the Republic, 369c–372d, containing farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and wage-earners, but lacking the guardian class of philosopher-kings as well as delicacies such as "perfumed oils, incense, prostitutes, and pastries", in addition to paintings, gold, ivory, couches, a multitude of occupations such as poets and hunters, and war.

In addition, the ideal city is used as an image to illuminate the state of one's soul, or the will, reason, and desires combined in the human body. Socrates is attempting to make an image of a rightly ordered human, and then later goes on to describe the different kinds of humans that can be observed, from tyrants to lovers of money in various kinds of cities. The ideal city is not promoted, but only used to magnify the different kinds of individual humans and the state of their soul. However, the philosopher king image was used by many after Plato to justify their personal political beliefs. The philosophic soul according to Socrates has reason, will, and desires united in virtuous harmony. A philosopher has the moderate love for wisdom and the courage to act according to wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge about the Good or the right relations between all that exists.

Wherein it concerns states and rulers, Plato has made interesting arguments. For instance he asks which is better - a bad democracy or a country reigned by a tyrant. He argues that it is better to be ruled by a bad tyrant (since then there is only one person committing bad deeds) than be a bad democracy (since here all the people are now responsible for such actions.)

According to Plato a state, which is made up of different kinds of souls, will overall decline from an aristocracy (rule by the best) to a timocracy (rule by the honorable), then to an oligarchy (rule by the few), then to a democracy (rule by the people), and finally to tyranny (rule by one person, rule by a tyrant). Perhaps Plato is trying to warn us of the various kinds of immoderate souls that can rule over a state, and what kind of wise souls are best to advise and give counsel to the rulers that are often lovers of power, money, fame, and popularity.

Platonic scholarship

Plato's thought is often compared with that of his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the Western Middle Ages so completely eclipsed that of Plato that the Scholastic philosophers referred to Aristotle as "the Philosopher". However, in the Byzantine Empire, the study of Plato continued.

The Medieval scholastic philosophers did not have access to the works of Plato, nor the knowledge of Greek needed to read them. Plato's original writings were essentially lost to Western civilization until they were brought from Constantinople in the century before its fall, by George Gemistos Plethon. Medieval scholars knew of Plato only through translations into Latin from the translations into Arabic by Persian and Arab scholars. These scholars not only translated the texts of the ancients, but expanded them by writing extensive commentaries and interpretations on Plato's and Aristotle's works (see Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes).

Only in the Renaissance, with the general resurgence of interest in classical civilization, did knowledge of Plato's philosophy become widespread again in the West. Many of the greatest early modern scientists and artists who broke with Scholasticism and fostered the flowering of the Renaissance, with the support of the Plato-inspired Lorenzo de Medici, saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and sciences. By the 19th century, Plato's reputation was restored, and at least on par with Aristotle's.

Notable Western philosophers have continued to draw upon Plato's work since that time. Plato's influence has been especially strong in mathematics and the sciences. It inspired the greatest advances in logic since Aristotle, due to Gottlob Frege and his followers Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alfred Tarski, the last of whom summarised his approach by reversing Aristotle's famous declaration of sedition from the Nicomachean Ethics (1096a15: Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas): Inimicus Plato sed magis amica veritas ("Plato is a friend, but truth is yet a greater friend"). Albert Einstein drew on Plato's understanding of an immutable reality that underlies the flux of appearances for his objections to the probabilistic picture of the physical universe propounded by Niels Bohr in his interpretation of quantum mechanics. Conversely, thinkers that diverged from ontological models and moral ideals in their own philosophy, have tended to disparage Platonism from more or less informed perspectives. Thus Friedrich Nietzsche attacked Plato's moral and political theories, Martin Heidegger argued against Plato's alleged obfuscation of Being, and Karl Popper argued in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that Plato's alleged proposal for a government system in the Republic was prototypically totalitarian. Leo Strauss is considered by some as the prime thinker involved in the recovery of Platonic thought in its more political, and less metaphysical, form. Deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss nonetheless rejects their condemnation of Plato and looks to the dialogues for a solution to what all three thinkers acknowledge as 'the crisis of the West.'

Tetralogy

One tradition regarding the arrangement of Plato's texts is according to tetralogies. This scheme is ascribed by Diogenes Laertius to an ancient scholar and court astrologer to Tiberius named Thrasyllus.

In the list below, works by Plato are marked (1) if there is no consensus among scholars as to whether Plato is the author, and (2) if scholars generally agree that Plato is not the author of the work. Unmarked works are assumed to have been written by Plato.

Tetralogies

I. Euthyphro, (The) Apology (of Socrates), Crito, Phaedo

II. Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman

III. Parmenides, Philebus, (The) Symposium, Phaedrus

IV. First Alcibiades (1), Second Alcibiades (2), Hipparchus (2), (The) (Rival) Lovers (2)

V. Theages (2), Charmides, Laches, Lysis

VI. Euthydemus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno

VII. (Greater) Hippias (major) (1), (Lesser) Hippias (minor), Ion, Menexenus

VIII. Clitophon (1), (The) Republic, Timaeus, Critias

IX. Minos (2), (The) Laws, Epinomis (2), Epistles (1).

Works not in Thrasyllus' tetralogies

The remaining works were transmitted under Plato's name, most of them already considered spurious in antiquity, and so were not included by Thrasyllus in his tetralogical arrangement. These works are labelled as Notheuomenoi ("spurious") or Apocrypha.

Axiochus (2), Definitions (2), Demodocus (2), Epigrams, Eryxias (2), Halcyon (2), On Justice (2), On Virtue (2), Sisyphus (2).

Stephanus pagination

The usual system for making unique references to sections of the text by Plato derives from a 16th century edition of Plato's works by Henricus Stephanus. An overview of Plato's writings according to this system can be found in the Stephanus pagination article.

Chronology

The exact order in which Plato's dialogues were written is not known, nor is the extent to which some might have been later revised and rewritten. However, according to modern linguistic theory there is enough information internal to the dialogues to form a rough chronology. The dialogues are normally grouped into three fairly distinct periods, with a few of them considered transitional works, and some just difficult to place. Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose translation of Plato into German still stands uncontested in Germany, is very likely the first to have divided Plato's dialogues into three distinct periods. However, his ordering is quite different from the modern one, and rather than being based upon philology, he claims to have traced Plato's philosophical development. Schleiermacher divides the dialogues thus:

Foundation: Phaedrus, Lysis, Protagoras, Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Parmenides;

Transition: Gorgias, Theaetetus, Meno, Euthydemus, Cratylus, Sophist, Statesman, Symposium, Phaedo, Philebus

Culmination: The Republic, (Critias, Timaeus, The Laws)

The final three dialogues above, in parentheses, were not translated by Schleiermacher, though ten other dialogues (including Ion, etc.) were translated and deemed spurious. Finally, Schleiermacher maintained that the Apology and probably the Crito were Plato's memory of Socrates' actual words.

Lewis Campbell was the first to make exhaustive use of stylometry to prove objectively that the Critias, Timaeus, Laws, Philebus, Sophist, and Statesman were all clustered together as a group, while the Parmenides, Phaedrus, Republic, and Theaetetus belong to a separate group, which must be earlier (given Aristotle's statement in his Politics that the Laws was written after the Republic; cf. Diogenes Laertius Lives 3.37).

Many of the positions in the ordering are still highly disputed. The generally agreed upon modern ordering is as follows.

Early dialogues

Socrates figures in all of these, and they are considered the most faithful representations of the historical Socrates; hence they are also called the Socratic dialogues. Most of them consist of Socrates discussing a subject, often an ethical one (friendship, piety) with a friend or with someone presumed to be an expert on it. Through a series of questions he will show that apparently they don't understand it at all. It is left to the reader to figure out if "he" really understands "it". This makes these dialogues "indirect" teachings. This period also includes several pieces surrounding the trial and execution of Socrates.

Apology

Crito

Charmides

Laches

Lysis

Euthyphro

Menexenus

Lesser Hippias

Ion

The following are variously considered transitional or middle period dialogues:

Gorgias

Protagoras

Meno

Middle dialogues

Late in the early dialogues Plato's Socrates actually begins supplying answers to some of the questions he asks, or putting forth positive doctrines. This is generally seen as the first appearance of Plato's own views. The first of these, that goodness is wisdom and that no one does evil willingly, was perhaps Socrates' own view. What becomes most prominent in the middle dialogues is the idea that knowledge comes of grasping unchanging forms or essences, paired with the attempts to investigate such essences. The immortality of the soul, and specific doctrines about justice, truth, and beauty, begin appearing here. The Symposium and the Republic are considered the centrepieces of Plato's middle period.

Euthydemus

Cratylus

Phaedo

Phaedrus

Symposium

Republic

Theaetetus

Parmenides

Late dialogues

The Parmenides presents a series of criticisms of the theory of Forms which are widely taken to indicate Plato's abandonment of the doctrine. Some recent publications (e.g., Meinwald (1991)) have challenged this characterisation. In most of the remaining dialogues the theory is either absent or at least appears under a different guise in discussions about kinds or classes of things (the Timaeus may be an important, and hence controversially placed, exception).

Socrates is either absent or a minor figure in the discussion. An apparently new method for doing dialectic known as "collection and division" is also featured, most notably in the Sophist and Statesman, explicitly for the first time in the Phaedrus, and possibly in the Philebus.

A basic description of collection and division would go as follows: interlocutors attempt to discern the similarities and differences among things in order to get clear idea about what they in fact are. One understanding, suggested in some passages of the Sophist, is that this is what philosophy is always in the business of doing, and is doing even in the early dialogues.

The late dialogues are also an important place to look for Plato's mature thought on most of the issues dealt with in the earlier dialogues. There is much work still to be done by scholars on the working out of what these views are. The later works are agreed to be difficult and challenging pieces of philosophy. On the whole they are more sober and logical than earlier works, but may hold out the promise of steps towards a solution to problems which were systematically laid out in prior works.

Sophist

Statesman

Philebus

Timaeus

Critias

Laws

Pelagius (ca. 354 - ca. 420/440) was an ascetic monk and reformer who denied the doctrine of Original Sin from Adam and was declared a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church. His interpretation of a doctrine of free will became known as Pelagianism.

He was well educated, fluent in both Greek and Latin, and learned much theology. He spent time as an ascetic,

focusing on practical asceticism, which his teachings clearly reflect. He was not, however, a cleric. He was certainly well known in Rome, both for the harsh asceticism of his public life as well as the power and persuasiveness of his speech.

His reputation in Rome earned him praise early in his career even from such pillars of the Church as St Augustine of Hippo, who referred to him as a "saintly man." However, he was later accused of lying about his own teachings in order to avoid public condemnation. Most of his later life was spent defending himself against other theologians and the Catholic Church.

Beginnings

Pelagius was born about 354. It is commonly agreed that he was born in the British Isles, but beyond that, his birthplace is not known. He was referred to as a "monk" by his contemporaries, though there is no evidence that he was associated with any monastic order (the idea of monastic communities was still quite new during his lifetime; solitary asceticism was more typical) or that he was ordained to the priesthood.

He became better known c. 380 when he moved to Rome to write and teach about his ascetic practices. There, he wrote a number of his major works — "De fide Trinitatis libri III," "Eclogarum ex divinis Scripturis liber primus," and "Commentarii in epistolas S. Pauli," a commentary of Paul's epistles. Unfortunately, most of his work only survives in the quotations of his opponents.

In Rome, Pelagius became concerned about the moral laxity of society. He blamed this laxity on the theology of divine grace preached by Augustine, among others.

Around 405, it is said that Pelagius heard a quotation from Augustine's work Confessions, 'Give me what you command and command what you will.' This verse concerned Pelagius because it seemed from this verse that Augustine was teaching doctrine contrary to traditional Christian understandings of grace and free will, turning man into a mere automaton.

When Alaric sacked Rome in 410, Pelagius and his close follower Caelestius fled to Carthage where he continued his work and briefly encountered St. Augustine in person. He is subsequently in Palestine as late as 418.

Persecutions

An objective view of Pelagius and his effect is difficult. His name has been maligned and used as an epithet for centuries by both Protestants and Catholics, and he has had few defenders. The Roman Catholic church denounced his ideas and yet the Reformation accused Catholics of adhering to his beliefs and condemned both Pelagius and the Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Orthodox Church is silent. Regardless, Pelagius stands, both in reality and in icon, as a radical dissenter from the traditional view of original sin and the means of salvation. Analysis of his work is limited by the fact that Pelagius' life and teachings can only be understood through the works of his opposition as only their writings survive.

Augustine of Hippo

Pelagianism quickly spread, especially around Carthage, which is one reason the opponents acted so promptly and firmly.

Augustine wrote four letters specifically on Pelagianism, "De peccatorum meritis et remissione libri III" (On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins Book III) in 412, "De spiritu et litera" (On the Spirit and the Letter) and "Definitiones Caelestii" (Caelestius's Definitions) in 414, and "De natura et gratia" (On Nature and Grace) in 415.

In these he strongly affirmed the existence of original sin, the need for infant baptism, the impossibility of a sinless life without Christ, and the necessity of Christ's grace. Augustine's works are intended in part for the common people and thus do not address Pelagius or Caelestius (except for the Definitiones Caelestii) by name.

Jerome

Pelagius soon left for Palestine, befriending the bishop there. Jerome, who lived there, became involved as well. Jerome wrote against Pelagius in his "Letter to Ctesiphon" and "Dialogus contra Pelagianos." With Jerome at the time was Orosius, a visiting pupil of Augustine, with similar views on the dangers of Pelagianism. Together they publicly condemned Pelagius.

Bishop John of Jerusalem, a personal friend of Pelagius, called a council in July 415. Church sources claim Orosius' lack of fluency in Greek rendered him unconvincing and John's Eastern background made him more willing to accept that humans did not have inherent sinfulness. Yet the council rendered no verdict and passed the controversy to the Latin Church because Pelagius, Jerome, and Orosius were all Latin.

Diospolis

A few months later in December of 415, another synod in Diospolis (Lydda) under a Cesarean bishop was called by two deposed bishops who came to Palestine. However, neither bishop attended for unrelated reasons and Orosius had left after consultation with Bishop John.

Pelagius explained to the synod that he did believe God was necessary for salvation because every human is created by God and claimed that many works of Celestius did not represent his own views. He also showed letters of recommendation by other authoritative figures including Augustine himself who, for all their disagreements, thought highly of Pelagius' character.

The Synod of Diospolis therefore concluded: "Now since we have received satisfaction in respect of the charges brought against the monk Pelagius in his presence and since he gives his assent to sound doctrines but condemns and anathematises those contrary to the faith of the Church, we adjudge him to belong to the communion of the Catholic Church."

Pope Innocent I

When Orosius returned to Africa, two local synods condemned Pelagius and Celestius without their presence. Because the synods did not have complete authority without papal approval, Augustine and four other bishops wrote a letter urging Pope Innocent I to condemn Pelagianism. He agreed without much persuading.

Pope Zosimus

Pelagius' guilt in the eyes of the Church, however, was undecided. Pelagius wrote a letter and statement of belief showing himself to be orthodox and sent them to Innocent I. In these he articulated his beliefs so as not to contradict what the synods condemned. Zosimus had become Pope by the time the letter reached Rome in 417. Zosimus was duly impressed and declared him innocent.

St. Augustine, shocked that Pelagius and Celestius were not denounced as heretics, called the Council of Carthage in 418 and stated nine beliefs of the Church that Pelagianism denied:

Death came from sin, not man's physical nature.

Infants must be baptized to be cleansed from original sin.

Justifying grace covers past sins and helps avoid future sins.

The grace of Christ imparts strength and will to act out God's commandments.

No good works can come without God's grace.

We confess we are sinners because it is true, not from humility.

The saints ask for forgiveness for their own sins.

The saints also confess to be sinners because they are.

Children dying without baptism are excluded from both the Kingdom of heaven and eternal life.

Every one of these was accepted as a universal belief of the Church and all Pelagians were banished from Italy.

The last canon is no longer widely accepted, for example current Roman Catholic Church doctrine states that children who die without baptism are entrusted to the mercy of God (CCC 1261); thus leaving the salvation of unbaptized infants' still in question.

Pelagius and the Doctrine of Free Will

After his acquittal in Diospolis, Pelagius wrote two major treatises which are no longer extant, "On Nature" and "Defense Of The Freedom Of The Will." In these, he defends his position on sin and sinlessness, and accuses Augustine of being under the influence of Manicheanism by elevating evil to the same status as God and teaching pagan fatalism as if it were a Christian doctrine.

Augustine had been converted to Christianity from the religion of Manicheanism, which stressed that the spirit was God-created, while the flesh was corrupt and evil, since it had not been created directly by God. Pelagius argued that Augustine's doctrine that humans went to hell for doing what they could not avoid (sin) was tantamount to the Manichean belief in fatalism and predestination, and took away all of mankind's free will.

Pelagius and his followers saw remnants of this fatalistic belief in Augustine's teachings on the Fall of Adam, which was not a settled doctrine at the time the Augustinian/Pelagian dispute began. Their view that mankind can avoid sinning, and that we can freely choose to obey God's commandments, stand at the core of Pelagian teaching, and comes through even in the writings of Pelagius' opponents.

An illustration of Pelagius' views on man's "moral ability" not to sin can be found in his Letter to Demetrias. He was in Palestine when, in 413, he received a letter from the renowned Anician family in Rome.

One of the aristocratic ladies who had been among his followers was writing to a number of eminent Western theologians, including Jerome and possibly Augustine, for moral advice for her 14-year-old daughter, Demetrias. Pelagius used the letter to argue his case for morality, stressing his views of natural sanctity and man's moral capacity to choose to live a holy life. It is perhaps the only extant writing in Pelagius' own hand, and it was, ironically, thought to be a letter by Jerome for centuries, though Augustine himself references it in his work, "On the Grace of Christ."

Death and Later

Pelagius probably died in Palestine around 420, as reported by some. Others mention him living as many as twenty years later. The cause of his death is unknown, but the prevailing rumours suggest either that he was killed by his enemies in the Catholic Church, or that he left Rome in frustration and headed into Africa or the Middle East.

His death did not end his teachings, although those who followed him may have modified those teachings. Because little information remains with regard to Pelagius' actual teachings, it is possible that some of his doctrines were subject to revision and suppression by his enemies (followers of Augustine and the Church leadership as a whole at that time).

Belief in Pelagianism and Semipelagianism was common for the next few centuries, especially in Britain, Palestine and North Africa.

Possible Influences on Pelagius

It is likely that Pelagius and Pelagianism were influenced by both Pelagius's Celtic ancestry and his Greek styled learning. Greek thought emphasized punishment over guilt, as the Latin church did; thus Pelagius tried to hold humanity up to a greater responsibility for individual actions. Celtic paganism championed a human's ability to triumph even over the supernatural, which Pelagius may have applied to sin, to some extent. The Greek philosophy of Stoicism was said to be an influence leading to his ascetic lifestyle.

Pelagius in Literature and Film

In Hilaire Belloc's The Four Men, the Sailor leads his companions in the "Song of the Pelagian Heresy for the Strengthening of Men's Backs and the very Robust Out-thrusting of Doubtful Doctrine and the Uncertain Intellectual".

The Pelagius Book by Paul Morgan is a historical novel that presents Pelagius as a gentle humanist emphasizing individual responsibility in contrast to Augustine's fierce fatalism.

Pelagius is referred to in Stephen Lawhead's book, The Black Rood, and makes an appearance in Patrick where he has a discussion with the Anglo-Irish saint.

Pelagius is frequently referred to in Jack Whyte's series of books known as A Dream of Eagles, where a major character's belief in Pelagius' ideas of Free Will and the laxity of the Roman Catholic Church eventually cause him to come into conflict with Church representatives.

The government of the English-Speaking Union (Enspun) in Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed is locked in a perpetual cycle, rotating between the 'Pel-Phase', named after Pelagius, and an Augustinian phase. The former is one of police and social services, the latter is characterized by martial law.

Curiously, Pelagius was the macguffin in the recent movie King Arthur. Although not a major character, he is portrayed as the mentor of young Lucius Artorius Castus, or Arthur. Upon hearing of Pelagius's murder in Rome, Arthur's affection for the monk leads him to break off loyalty with the Roman Empire and help the Britons fight the Saxon invaders.

The Greek cities were originally monarchies, although many of them were very small and the term "King" (basileus) for their rulers is misleadingly grand.

In a country always short of farmland, power rested with a small class of landowners, who formed a warrior aristocracy fighting frequent petty inter-city wars over land and rapidly ousting the monarchy.

About this time the rise of a mercantile class (shown by the introduction of coinage in about 680 BC) introduced class

conflict into the larger cities. From 650 BC onwards, the aristocracies had to fight not to be overthrown and replaced by populist leaders called tyrants (turannoi), a word which did not necessarily have the modern meaning of oppressive dictators.

By the 6th century BC several cities had emerged as dominant in Greek affairs: Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. Each of them had brought the surrounding rural areas and smaller towns under their control, and Athens and Corinth had become major maritime and mercantile powers as well. Athens and Sparta developed a rivalry that dominated Greek politics for generations.

In Sparta, the landed aristocracy retained their power, and the constitution of Lycurgus (about 650 BC) entrenched their power and gave Sparta a permanent militarist regime under a dual monarchy. Sparta dominated the other cities of the Peloponnese, with the sole exceptions of Argus and Achaia.

In Athens, by contrast, the monarchy was abolished in 683 BC, and reforms of Solon established a moderate system of aristocratic government. The aristocrats were followed by the tyranny of Pisistratus and his sons, who made the city a great naval and commercial power. When the Pisistratids were overthrown, Cleisthenes established the world's first democracy (500 BC), with power being held by an assembly of all the male citizens. But it must be remembered that only a minority of the male inhabitants were citizens, excluding slaves, freedmen and non-Athenians.

Society

The distinguishing features of Ancient Greek society were the division between free and slave, the differing roles of men and women, the relative lack of status distinctions based on birth, and the importance of religion. The way of life of the Athenians was common in the Greek world compared to Sparta's special system.

Social Structure

Only free, land owning, native-born men could be citizens entitled to the full protection of the law in a city-state (later Pericles introduced exceptions to the native-born restriction). In most city-states, unlike Rome, social prominence did not allow special rights. For example, being born in a certain family generally brought no special privileges. Sometimes families controlled public religious functions, but this ordinarily did not give any extra power in the government.

In Athens, the population was divided into four social classes based on wealth. People could change classes if they made more money. In Sparta, all male citizens were given the title of "equal" if they finished their education. However, Spartan kings, who served as the city-state's dual military and religious leaders, came from two families. Slaves had no power or status.

They had the right to have a family and own property, however they had no political rights. By 600 BC chattel slavery had spread in Greece. By the 5th century BC slaves made up one-third of the total population in some city-states. Slaves outside of Sparta almost never revolted because they were made up of too many nationalities and were too scattered to organize.

Most families owned slaves as household servants and labourers, and even poor families might have owned a few slaves. Owners were not allowed to beat or kill their slaves. Owners often promised to free slaves in the future to encourage slaves to work hard. Unlike in Rome, slaves who were freed did not become citizens. Instead, they were mixed into the population of metics, which included people from foreign countries or other city-states who were officially allowed to live in the state.

City-states legally owned slaves. These public slaves had a larger measure of independence than slaves owned by families, living on their own and performing specialized tasks. In Athens, public slaves were trained to look out for counterfeit coinage, while temple slaves acted as servants of the temple's deity.

Sparta had a special type of slaves called helots. Helots were Greek war captives owned by the state and assigned to families where they were forced to stay. Helots raised food and did household chores so that women could concentrate on raising strong children while men could devote their time to training as hoplites. Their masters treated them harshly and helots often revolted.

Education

For most of Greek history, education was private, except in Sparta. During the Hellenistic period, some city-states established public schools. Only wealthy families could afford a teacher. Boys learned how to read, write and quote literature. They also learned to sing and play one musical instrument and were trained as athletes for military service.

They studied not for a job, but to become an effective citizen. Girls also learned to read, write and do simple arithmetic so they could manage the household. They almost never received education after childhood.

A small number of boys continued their education after childhood, as in the Spartan agoge. A crucial part of a wealthy teenager's education was loving mentorship with an elder.

The teenager learned by watching his mentor talking about politics in the agora, helping him perform his public duties, exercising with him in the gymnasium and attending symposia with him. The richest students continued their education by studying with famous teachers. Some of Athens' greatest such schools included the Lyceum and the Academy.

Boys went to school at the age of seven, or went to the barracks, if they lived in Sparta. The three types of teachings were: grammatistes for arithmetic, kitharistes for music and dancing, and paidotribes for sports.