Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 25, 2025
You may hear very intelligent critics in Paris who in Paris is not an intelligent critic? speak disparagingly of the Greek want of expression; of the lack of passion, of vivid interest, of significance in a word, in Greek sculpture of the Periclean epoch. The conception of absolute beauty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it.
Now the position of women in historical Greece was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know, was very high indeed. This was a question to touch such a man to the quick; the position he gives women is very high: very much higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that had been made by that time in general culture.
And if those Periclean times be not remote enough, yonder lies Oria on its hilltop, the stronghold of pre-Hellenic and almost legendary Messapians; while for such as desire more recent associations there is the Albanian colony of San Giorgio, only a few miles distant, to recall the glories of Scanderbeg and his adventurous bands.
The dramatic nature of his plan has been frequently pointed out; to him the main plot is the destruction not of Athens, but of the Periclean democracy, the overthrow thereof being due to a conflict with another like it; hence the marked change in the last book, in which the main dramatic interest has waned.
We must take a little account of the Cosmos nowadays it helps to rectify our bearings. They have their history, no doubt. But save for that one gleam of Periclean sunshine the record, though long and varied, is sufficiently inglorious and does not testify to undue exertions. A change is at hand. Gregorovius lamented the filthy condition of the old town. It is now spotless.
All the old culture and choice ideas seemed like blowing bubbles. And dear old Corinna Wade, she seemed to be blowing bubbles still, as she sat there so charming in her soft white dress, and talked with her bright animation about the influence of woman in Parliament and the influence of woman in the Periclean day.
The typical Athenian of the Periclean age would have been in the first state of mind. His 'good' would be in the nature of success: to spread Justice and Freedom, to make Athens happy and strong and her laws wise and equal for rich and poor. Antisthenes had fallen violently into the second.
The era of the Greek rhapsodists, when a body of matchless epical literature was handed down by memory from generation to generation, and a recitation of the whole "Odyssey" was not too much for a dinner-party, the era of Periclean culture, when the Athenian populace was wont to pass whole days in the theatre, attending with unfaltering intellectual keenness and æsthetic delight to three or four long dramas, either of which would exhaust a modern audience, the wild and vast systems of imaginary abstractions, which the Neo-Platonists, as also the German transcendentalists, so strangely devised and became enamored of, the grotesque views of men and things, the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the learned thought of the Middle Ages, the Buddhistic Orient, with its subtile metaphysical illusions, its unreal astronomical heavens, its habits of repose and its tornadoes of passion, such are instances of great diversities of character, which would be hardly accountable to each other on the supposition of mutual sanity.
If so early a philosopher as Anaxagoras took this point of view, his personal contribution as a member of the Periclean circle may have been more significant in the religious field than one would conjecture from the character of his work. Before we proceed to mention the sophists, there is one person on our list who must be examined though the result will be negative, namely, Diagoras of Melos.
The younger, immortalized by Cicero's treatise on Friendship, was born about 186 B.C., and was a man of fine culture noted as an orator. His personal worth was so generally esteemed that it survived to Seneca's day. Its time of greatest splendor was the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.; that is, intermediate between the Homeric age and the Periclean.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking