Significant Events
Armed conflict between Athens and Sparta, 431–404 b.c., that resulted in the transfer of hegemony in Greece from Athens to Sparta.
What is the Peloponnesian War?
A form of drama that portrays a conflict between the protagonist who is brought to ruin or extreme sorrow especially as a result of a fatal flaw.
What is a Greek tragedy?
An open area that served as a gathering place and as a market in early Greek city-states.
What is an agora?
Government by the people or "the rule of many."
What is democracy?
An organized system of thought, from the Greek for "love of wisdom."
What is philosophy?
The period between 461 B.C. and 429 B.C. when Athens reached the height of its power and brilliance.
What is the Age of Pericles?
A long verse that tells the deeds of a great hero.
What is an epic poem?
The city-state
What is a polis?
A form of government in which a select group of people exercises control or "the rule of the few."
What is oligarchy?
A loose confederation of Greek city-states led by Sparta. The confederation was the oldest and longest-lasting political association in the ancient Greek world.
What is the Peloponnesian League?
A defensive alliance headed by Athens that says that all Greek city-states will come together and help fight the Persians.
What is the Delian League?
The school rejected determinism and advocated hedonism (pleasure as the highest good), but of a restrained kind: mental pleasure was regarded more highly than physical, and the ultimate pleasure was held to be freedom from anxiety and mental pain, especially that arising from needless fear of death and of the gods.
What is the Epicureanism?
A fortified gathering place at the top of a hill that was sometimes the site of temples and public buildings.
What is the acropolis?
The five ancient Spartan magistrates having power over the king.
What is Ephors?
Group of traveling teachers in ancient Greece who rejected speculation and argued that it was simply beyond the human mind to understand the universe.
What is a sophist?
The two oldest surviving examples of Greek literature. These epic poems describe the Trojan War, a conflict between the Greeks and the city of Troy that the epics say was fought almost 1200 years before the Common Era.
What are the Iliad and Odyssey?
The qualities of excellence that a hero strives to win in a struggle or contest.
What is arête?
A heavily armed citizen soldier in Ancient Greece.
What is a hoplite?
A system of government in which the people make the decisions in government.
What is direct democracy?
Form of teaching that employs a question and answer format to lead pupils to see things for themselves by using their own reason.
What is the Socratic method?
The period from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 b.c. to the middle of the first century b.c. It was marked by Greek and Macedonian emigration to areas conquered by Alexander and by the spread of Greek civilization from Greece to northern India.
What is the Hellenistic Era?
A sacred shrine where a god or goddess was said to reveal the future through a priest or priestess.
What is an Oracle?
In ancient Sparta, a captive person who was forced to work for the conqueror.
What is a helot?
The process of temporarily banning politicians from the city by popular vote.
What is ostracism?
The school taught that virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge, and that the wise live in harmony with the divine reason (also identified with Fate and Providence) that governs nature, and are indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and pain.
What is stoicism?