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The Epic

Hellenic Greeks

1. Lycurgus - set up Oligarchy in Sparta.
2. Homer - wrote the The Illiad and The Odyssey.
3. Hesiod - wrote long didactic poems discribing the origins of the gods and the hard life of a farmer.
4. Pisistratus - Athens’ first tyrannt.
5. Draco - wrote down Athenian law for the guildsmen in 621 BCE
6. Solon - an outside troubleshooter hired by the Areopagus to help with economic problems. Declared guildsmen and clansmen equal. Created the Council of 400 and a new court system called Heliaea.
7. Leonidas - a king of Sparta.
8. Cleisthenes - last Athenian tyrannt. Called the “father of democracy.” Divided the four Athenian tribes into ten which brought about gerrymandering, or the unfair division of political districts to favor one canidate or party.
9. Themistocles - a politician that persuaded the Athenian assembly to build alarge fleet far bigger than any a city the size of Athens would normally need.
10. Miltiades - an Athenian general who commanded at Marathon.
11. Pericles - provides government officals with payment, and he was on theboard of ten generals for almost twenty years.
12. Phidias - carved the sculpture of the Parthenon. He and Pericles brought together the best of Greeces’ archetects, artists, and sculpturers to Athensfor city planning.
13. Aeschylus - a great Athenian dramatist of the golden age. His best knownplays are those from the Oresteia Trilogy.
14. Sophocles - a popular playwright of the golden age. Wrote the Oedipus tragedies.
15. Euripides - a playwright who wrote Medea. Wrote more about human emotions than about problems of guilt and retribution.
16. Aristophanes - a comedic playwright
17. Herodotus - a scholar who called Egypt “the gift of the Nile.” Compared the cultures of the orient to that of the Greeks.
18. Thucydides - a historian. An Athenian general who had been deprived ofhis command and began to collect materials for a history of the conflict between Sparta and Athens. He wanted to be accurate and describe the behavior of politicians and states that would have a meaning for future generations.
19. Pythagoras - migrated to southern Italy and saw the organizing principleof numbers.
20. Anaxagoras - said that the world was made up of countless tiny particles unchanging themselves but constantly rearranging to give the appearence ofchange.
21. Democritus - gave us the “atomic theory,” the afterunner of the ideas of Anaxagoras.
22. Socrates - an Athenian philosopher/teacher who belived that truth, beauty, and justice were eternal and existed independently from man.
23. Plato - a philosopher and student of Socrates. Said that Sparta had the best form of government (rule by the elite). Wrote Dialogues and philosophies.
24. Aristotle - student of Plato and organizer of Greek thought. He developed rigorous, consistant, and intellectually honest rules of logic and thus gave western thinkers an instrument that could be used for intellectual explorationin any field.
25. Lysander - Spartan naval commander and politician
26. Philip II - Organized the Macedonian warriors into a powerful and unified fighting force and began to extend his control over Greek city-states. He defeated the coalation of Greek city-states and turned the Greek peninsula into a Macedonian protectorate.
27. Alcibiades - Athenian politician and general. He was a ward of Pericles and was for many years a devoted attendant of Socrates.
28. Demosthenes - urged the Greek city-states to unite against Macedon.
29. Hippocrates - the “father of medicine.”