GREEK ACHIEVEMENTS
ARTS
PHYLOSOPHY
SCIENCE
Statues and Paintings
Writing
Architecture
The sculptors of greek satues tried to make them look perfect, showing how beautiful people could be, thet studied the human body, especially when it was moving, so they carved stone and marble statues.
The paints are admired for its realism and detail, painting scenes on vases, pots, and other vessels; often shows scenes from myths or athletic competitions, and using two colors, blalck and red; others covered whole vases with glaze and then scraped parts away to let the red background show through.
Greeks took great care in designing their buildings, especially the temples, rows of tall columns surrounded them, they were very carefuly when they measurede these columns, because columns sanding in a long row, often looked as though they curved in the middle, and to prevent this optical illysion, they made their columns bulge slightly in the middle.
They wanted their buildings to reflect the greatness of their cities. The most impressive of all was the Parthenon in Athena, and was built on the Athenian acropolis; the interior was decorated with carvings and columns.
Writers created many new writing forms, including drama and history. They created drama, or plays, as part of their religious ceremonies; actors and singers performed scenes in honor of the gods and heroes, and became a popular form of entretainment, especially in Athens.
Some writers produced tragedies, which described the hardships faced by greek heroes. Among the berst tragedy writers were Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Sophocles wrote about a Greek hero who mistakenly killed his own father.
Others focused on comedies, which made fun of people and ideas; one famous was Aristopanes. He used his comedy to make serious pooints about war, courts of law and famose people.
The Greeks were the first people to write about history, the greatest was Thucydides
Thucydides wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, he tried to be neutral in his writing and tried to figure out what had caused it, hoping that Greeks could learn froem their mistakes.
The ancient Greeks worshipped gods and goddesses wose actions explained many of the mysteries of the world, but a few people had begun to think about other explanations, and these people are called philosophers. They belived in the power of the human mind to think, explain, and understand life.
Socrates belived that people must never stop looking for knowledge. He tought by asking questions about human qualities such as love and courage; when people answered, he challenged their answers with more questions; he wanted to make people thing and question their own beliefs. This made people angry, even frightened, and for these reasons, he was condemned to death with a poison, he took it and died.
Plato was a student of Socrates, he also was a teacher and a philosopher, created a school, the Academy . He wrote many works, the most famous is called The Republic where describes Plato's idea of an ideal society, based on justice and fairness to everyone, he argued, society should be run by philosophers.
Aristotele, perhaps the greatest Greek thinker, he was a Plato's student, and tought that people should live lives of moderation, or balance, not being greedy, but neither should they give awaky everyting they own; he belived that moderation was based on reason, or clear and ordered thinking.
Also made great advances in the field of logic, the process of making inferences. He argued that you could use facts you knew to figure out new facts.
Mathematics
Euclide was interested in geometry, the study of lines, angles and shapes. Others included a geographer who used mathematics to accurately calculate the size of the earth.
Medicine and Engineering
Hypatia was a woman that taught about mathematics and astronomy.
Doctors studied the human body to understand how it worked, they made many discoveries.
Hippocrates wanted to figure out what caused diseases so he could better treat them; he is better known today, though, for is ideas about how doctors should behave.
Engineers discovered water screws to bring water to their fields, tis device was invented by Archimedes. Others inventors created mechanical toys like birds, puppets, and coin-operated machines.