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Updated: June 13, 2025
And even that satire on themselves, to which, in the immortal lampoons of Aristophanes, the Athenian populace listened, exhibits a people whom, whatever their errors, the world never can see again with whom philosophy was a pastime with whom the Agora itself was an academe whose coarsest exhibitions of buffoonery and caricature sparkle with a wit, or expand into a poetry, which attest the cultivation of the audience no less than the genius of the author; a people, in a word, whom the stagirite unconsciously individualized when he laid down a general proposition, which nowhere else can be received as a truism that the common people are the most exquisite judges of whatever in art is graceful, harmonious, or sublime.
Still, amid all this discouragement, it would seem that Paul attracted sufficient notice, from his conversation with the idlers and chatterers of the Agora, to be invited to address the Athenians at the Areopagus.
No traces of the Agora, which occupied the shallow valley between the Pnyx and the Acropolis, remain. It was the heart of the city, and was adorned with numerous public buildings, porticoes, temples and statues. It was often thronged with citizens gathered for purposes of trade, discussion, or to hear and tell some new thing.
Let the Acropolis, its sculptures, its landscape, wait. It has waited for men three thousand years. And so to the Agora. “Full market time.” The Agora was a beehive. From the round Tholus at the south to the long portico at the north all was babel and traffic. Donkeys raised their wheezing protest against too heavy loads of farm produce. Megarian swine squealed and tugged at their leg-cords.
The effects of lighting and color are so carefully studied, and the compositions of the originals are so closely followed that the illusion is sometimes startling; it is as if real Titians, Rembrandts, and Carpaccios hung on the wails of the Wellesley Barn. In 1889, also, the Glee and Banjo clubs were formed. In 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into existence.
No streets give vistas of stately buildings. No squares, save that of the Agora 120 by 230 ft. within an encircling colonnade provide open spaces where larger buildings might be grouped and properly seen. Open spaces, indeed, such as we meet, in mediaeval and Renaissance Italy or in modern English towns of eighteenth century construction, were very rare in Priene.
In his caustic fashion the old man describes these fops formed after the model of the Greek talkers of the agora, dealing in jests and witticisms, singing and dancing, ready for anything; such an one was, in his opinion, good for nothing but to exhibit himself as harlequin in a procession and to bandy talk with the public he would sell his talk or his silence for a bit of bread.
The agora of a Greek city, which was a place of public assembly something like the Roman Forum, is known to us only by descriptions in ancient writers, but we possess some remains of Greek theatres; and from these, aided by Roman examples and written descriptions, can understand what these buildings were.
“Worthy Lacedæmonian,” said Democrates, with what patience he could command, “if you desire to go over all that little business which concerned us then, at least I would suggest not in the open Agora.” He started to walk swiftly away. The Spartan’s ponderous strides easily kept beside him. None in sight. Lycon kept fast hold of his cloak. For practical purposes Democrates was prisoner.
We much need to encourage and elaborate opportunities for profitable discussion to-day. We should revert to the dialectic of the Athenian agora and make it a chosen instrument for clarifying, co-ordinating and directing our co-operative thinking. Plato's indecision and urbane fair-mindedness is called irony. Now irony is seriousness without solemnity.
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