HUMA 205 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Central Force, Darkest Days, Lapiths
235. Pericles had intended the entire program to perpetuate the memory of Athens’ glorious
achievements, but instead it is a reminder of the gulf between Classical high ideals and the realities of
political existence in fifth-century-bce Greece.
236. The enormous impact of Rome on our culture is partly the result of the industrious and
determined character of the Romans, who early in their history saw themselves as the divinely
appointed rulers of the world.
237. 4.9] has all the qualities of symmetry and grandeur we associate with later Roman imperial
architecture, although it took its inspiration from massive Hellenistic building programs such as that
at Pergamum.
238. By the end of the Hellenistic period, both artists and public seemed a little weary of so much
richness and elaboration, and they returned to some of the principles of Classical art.
239. If Protogeometric pottery seems a long way from Greek art of later centuries, it does show
qualities of clarity and order that reappear later, although in a very diff erent context.
240. Artists of the Hellenistic period sought not so much to equal or surpass their Classical predecessors
in the familiar forms as to discover new subjects and invent new techniques.
241. Even a small community such as Urbino became an independent political and artistic unit,
modeled consciously on the city-states of Classical Greece.
242. Kouroi Astounding progress was made in sculpture from the formalized kouroi of the early
Archaic period, with their flat planes and rigid stances, to the fully rounded figures of the late sixth
century, toward the end .
243. \ THE OLD AND MIDDLE KINGDOMS The huge scale of many Egyptian works of art is at least
in part the result of the easy availability of stone, the most frequently used material from the early Old
Kingdom to the Late Period.
244. The four most important kingdoms that split off —Syria (the kingdom of the Seleucids), Egypt,
Pergamum, and Macedonia (see map, “The Hellenistic World”)—were soon at loggerheads and
remained so until they were fi nally conquered by Rome.
245. In the late fi fth century bce, as the Greeks became embroiled in the Peloponnesian War,
sculpture and vase painting were characterized by a growing concern with the individual rather than
a generalized ideal.
246. Ever since the Archaic period, philosophers have spent some two and a half millennia debating
the question: “What is philosophy?” Some of its branches are logic (the study of the structure of valid
arguments), metaphysics (investigation into the nature of ultimate reality), epistemology (theory of
knowledge), ethics (moral philosophy), aesthetics (the philosophy of the arts and, more generally,
taste), and political philosophy.
247. CHAPTER 2 Early Greece The most signifi cant wave of colonization was that which moved
eastward to the coast of Asia Minor, in some cases back to territory that had been inhabited by the
Mycenaeans centuries earlier.
248. First Sparta and then Thebes achieved an uneasy control of Greek political life.
249. Almost all of his works are lost, but from later accounts Ennius’s tragedies appear to have been
adapted from Greek models.
250. In a great passage in Book II of the Georgics, Virgil hails the “ancient earth, great mother of crops
and men.” He does not disguise the hardships of the farmer’s life, the poverty, hard work, and
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frequent disappointments, but still feels that only life in the country brings true peace and
contentment [Fig.
251. The variety of movement, gesture, and rhythm achieved in the relatively limited technique of low
relief makes the frieze among the greatest treasures of Greek art [Fig.
252. Earliest surviving Greek music MUSIC 458 Aeschylus, Oresteia trilogy wins first prize in drama
festival of Dionysus 440 Sophocles, Antigone c.
253. Most of the Mycenaean centers were in the southern part of Greece known as the Peloponnesus,
although there were also some settlements farther north, of which the two most important were
Athens and Thebes.
254. CHAPTER 4 The Roman Legacy for the acrobats and jugglers who performed in public squares
and during gladiatorial contests [Fig.
255. Any study of Roman culture inevitably involves examining the infl uences that went to make it
up, and it is always necessary to remember the Roman ability to absorb and combine outside ideas and
create something fresh from them.
256. 27 BCE–14 CE Horace, Odes and Ars Poetica; Virgil, Aeneid, Georgics, Eclogues; Ovid,
Metamorphoses, mythological tales; Livy, Annals of the Roman People 100–150 Tacitus, History;
Juvenal, Satires; Pliny the Younger, Letters; Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars; Epictetus, Enchiridion, on
Stoicism c.
257. 280–207 bce), who wrote that “beauty consists of the proportion of the parts; of fi nger to fi nger;
of all the fi ngers to the palm and the wrist; of those to the forearm; of the forearm to the upper arm;
and of all these parts to one another, as set forth in The Canon of Polykleitos.” Even if the exact
relationships are lost, what was important about Polykleitos’s ideal—and what made it so
characteristic of the Classical vision as a whole—was that it depended on precisely ordered and
balanced interrelationships of the various parts of .
258. 2.16]. The Ionic style of temple architecture, which was widely used in Classical Greece, did not
become fully established until later.
259. Referring particularly to Oedipus, Aristotle makes the point that the downfall of a tragic fi gure is
generally the result of a fl aw or an intellectual miscalculation (the Greek word is hamartia) in his
character.
260. Even in their darkest days, the Classical Greeks never lost sight of the magnitude of human
capability and, perhaps even more important, human potential—a vision that has returned over the
centuries to inspire later generations and has certainly not lost its relevance in our own times.
261. At the center of the west pediment, standing calmly amid a fi ght raging between Lapiths and
Centaurs, was the fi gure of Apollo, the god The Visual Arts in Classical Greece .
262. 2.13].This statue marks a literal turning point between the late Archaic world and the early
Classical period.
263. Their victories set the scene for the Classical Age of Greek culture.
264. National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece// © Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY Unlike the
relaxed culture of the Minoans, Mycenaean culture as refl ected in its art was preoccupied with death
and war.
265. Acropolis, Athens, Greece//© Altrendo/ Getty Images coveries in northern Greece at the Royal
Cemetery of Vergina suggest that some of it may yet be found [Fig.
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