Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 25, 2025
Our last sight of him is of one beckoning us to follow him to the place where calm is to be found; to find it we must use not the eyes of the body, but the inward illumination vouchsafed by Heaven. To the Athenians of the Periclean age Sophocles was the incarnation of their dramatic ideal. His language is a delight and a despair.
Impracticableness of Ideal However much of the idea of his party and of his youth to found a Periclean government in Rome not by virtue of the sword, but by virtue of the confidence of the nation Caesar had been obliged to abandon in the struggle with realities, he retained even now the fundamental idea of not founding a military monarchy with an energy to which history scarcely supplies a parallel.
Vasari, on the contrary, a surer critic, considered them worthy to be placed beside Michel Angelo's "David"; but it remained for Furtwangler to restore them to their true position as a work of the Periclean age, although copied by Italian sculptors.
But they found in her very soil and atmosphere a spiritual something which enabled them to produce a splendor of literary creation that perhaps had had no parallel in Europe since Periclean days: Yes, surely Ireland was much more creative than Augustan Rome. Have any of you heard of literary savages?
Which brings up, in this immediate connection, the dealings of Periclean Athens with the funds of the League, and the source as well as the destination of these surplus funds. Out of it all came the works on the Acropolis, together with much else of intellectual and artistic life that converged upon and radiated from this Athenian center of culture.
No doubt it had, ever since it existed at all, contained at its very core a monarchic element; but the ideal of a constitution, which floated in more or less clear outline before its best intellects, was always that of a civil commonwealth, a Periclean organization of the state, in which the power of the prince rested on the fact that he represented the burgesses in the noblest and most accomplished manner, and the most accomplished and noblest part of the burgesses recognized him as the man in whom they thoroughly confided.
This process was effected by Sophocles. He was born at Colonus, near Athens, in 495, mixed with the best society in Periclean times, was a member of the important board of administrators who controlled the Delian League, the nucleus of the Athenian Empire, and composed over one hundred tragedies.
Metaphysics, the science of man's intimate nature, and logic, or the grammar and elementary principles of that science received from the latter philosophers of the Periclean age a firm basis.
That in this polemic he may have been aiming precisely at Anaxagoras is indicated by the fact that Diopeithes, who carried the resolution concerning the accusation of the philosopher, was a soothsayer by profession. The strongest evidence as to the free-thinking of the Periclean age is, however, to be met with in the historical writing of Thucydides.
War for liberty, justice and humanity always tends to create such a productive period in literature and the other fine arts. The struggle with Persia was behind the Periclean age in Athens. It was the conflict of England with the overshadowing might of Spain that so vitalized the Elizabethan period.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking