Transcript Chapter 11 Cultural Contributions

SECTION 1 Religious Practices
SECTION 2 Science
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Terms to Learn
• oracles
People to Know
• Herodotus
• prophecy
• Socrates
• pancratium
• Plato
• pentathlon
• Aristotle
• philosophia
Places to Locate
• Mount Olympus
• Socratic
method
• hypothesis
• syllogism
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• Olympia
Religious Practices
• Although most Greeks held similar religious
beliefs, there was no single Greek religion.
• Officials in each polis were in charge of
public feasts and sacrifices.
• Greek priests and priestesses often
served as oracles, or persons who, it was
believed, could speak with the gods.
• Oracles generally give advice in the form
of a prophecy, or a statement of what
might happen in the future.
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Gods and Goddesses of Mount
Olympus
• During the Golden Age, the Greeks
worshiped the gods of Mount Olympus.
• There were 12 major gods and goddesses.
Each had specific duties to carry out.
• The Greeks placed importance on the worth
of the individual, allowing them to approach
their gods with dignity.
• The Greeks built temples and held festivals,
including the Olympic Games and the
theater, to honor their gods.
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The Olympic Games
• Every four years, in the middle of summer, a
festival was held in Olympia to honor the
god Zeus.
• The festival was known as the Olympic
Games and was the most important
sporting event in Greece.
• Athletes came from all over Greece and
from Greek colonies in Africa, Italy, and
Asia Minor to take part in the games.
• Only men were allowed to take part;
women were not even allowed to watch.
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The Olympic Games (cont.)
• The Olympics were made up of many
events including:
– chariot races
– boxing
– pancratium–a combination of boxing and
wrestling
– pentathlon–made up of five events: running,
jumping, throwing the discus, wrestling, and
hurling the javelin
• Olympic winners were heroes.
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The Olympic Games (cont.)
• Between the different events at the games,
poets read their works aloud.
• Herodotus, the “Father of History,” first
read his account of the Persian Wars at
the Olympics.
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The Theater
• The theater grew out of festivals given in
honor of the god Dionysus.
• About 600 B.C., the Ionians began telling
stories about Dionysus at festivals.
• Stories were then told about other gods
and heroes.
• About the time of the Persian Wars, a
Greek poet named Aeschylus added an
additional character to each story.
• Aeschylus created what came to be
known as a play.
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The Theater (cont.)
• The first Greek plays were tragedies, or
stories about suffering.
• All dealt with the past and with the
relationships between people and gods.
• Three of the great writers of tragedy were
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
• Soon after the development of tragedy, the
comedy, or a play with a happy ending,
came into being.
• Unlike tragedies, Greek comedies were
about the present.
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The Theater (cont.)
• One of the greatest writers of Greek
comedy was Aristophanes.
• Greek plays were performed only at
community festivals.
• Each actor wore a huge canvas and plaster
mask that showed the sex, age, and mood
of the character.
• The Greeks believed support of the theater
was a public responsibility.
• A panel of citizens judged the plays at each
festival.
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Science
• Among the things on which the Greeks
placed great importance was intellect, or
the ability to learn and reason.
• To the Greeks, studying the laws of nature
and loving wisdom were the same thing;
they called it philosophia.
• Today, people who search for such
knowledge and wisdom are known as
scientists and philosophers.
• Much of what they know is based on the
thoughts of the Greeks.
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Socrates
• In 399 B.C., Socrates, a 70-year-old Athenian
philosopher, was tried in Athens.
• He believed people could discover truth if
they knew how to think.
• In his search for truth, Socrates walked
throughout Athens trying to teach people
how to think.
• He did this by asking questions.
• This form of questioning is known as the
Socratic method.
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Socrates (cont.)
• Some began to consider Socrates a threat
to Athens.
• Socrates was tried before a jury of some
500 citizens and sentenced to death.
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Plato
• All that is known about Socrates comes from
one of his pupils, an Athenian aristocrat
named Plato.
• Plato set up the Academy, a school to train
government leaders, outside Athens in the
sacred grove of the hero Academus.
• He thought political liberty was disorder and
did not approve of it.
• Plato set down his ideas about an ideal state
in a book called The Republic –the first
book ever written on political science.
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Plato (cont.)
• In a work called The Dialogues, Plato
showed how difficult it is to discover truth.
• The Dialogues consists of a series of
discussions in which different people talk
about such things as truth and loyalty.
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Aristotle
• Aristotle was one of Plato’s brightest
pupils.
• Before he died in 322 B.C., he founded his
own school in Athens and wrote more
than 200 books.
• He believed in using one’s senses to
discover the laws that govern the physical
world.
• Aristotle also added to the ideas of an
earlier Greek scientist named Thales of
Miletus.
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Aristotle (cont.)
• Thales developed the first two steps of what
is known today as the scientific method.
– First, Thales collected information.
– Then, based on what he observed, he formed
a hypothesis, or possible explanation.
– Aristotle provided a third step in the scientific
method when he said that a hypothesis must
be tested to see if it is correct.
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Aristotle (cont.)
• Aristotle contributed the syllogism to logic,
or the science of reasoning.
• The syllogism is a method of reasoning
that uses three related statements.
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Discoveries and Inventions
• The Greeks were trying to add to their store
of knowledge.
• Greek scientists discovered that natural
events are not caused by the way gods
behave.
• They also learned that the world is
governed by natural laws that people can
discover and understand.
• Thales of Miletus not only developed the
first two steps of the scientific method, but
also correctly predicted an eclipse of the
sun in 585 B.C.
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Discoveries and Inventions (cont.)
• The “Father of Scientific Medicine” was
Hippocrates.
• Hippocrates drew up a list of rules about
how doctors should use their skills to help
their patients, which is known today as the
Hippocratic Oath.
• Doctors all over the world still promise to
honor the Hippocratic Oath.
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