Читать книгу A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy онлайн

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Æschylus, 525 (dramatist before Pericles).

Sophocles, 495 (dramatist during Age of Pericles).

Phidias, 490.

Euripides, 480 (dramatist of the Sophistic and the new learning).

Herodotus, 475.

Thucydides, 471.

Xenophon, 430?

Aristophanes, 444.

Anaxagoras, 500.

Empedocles, 495.

Protagoras, 480.

Democritus, 470.

Sophists (many), 450–350.

Socrates, 469.

Antisthenes, 440.

Aristippus, 435.

Plato, 427.

The Persian Wars and the Rise of Athens.

The centre of gravity of the Greek world was shifted after the Persian Wars from Miletus to Athens, from the colonies to the motherland. Indeed, the history of classic Greece is almost entirely the history of Athens. Of the large cities of Greece,—Corinth, Ægina, Sparta, and Thebes,—Athens was naturally the locality where Grecian civilization would centre when the commercial and maritime colonies fell. The Ionian race, by whom it had been settled, was a mixed race, and by nature very versatile. Before the Persian Wars it had been under the wise tyranny of Pisistratus, who took the first steps toward the founding of an Athenian empire. In the period between the two wars, Themistocles had built the Athenian fleet and thereby made Athens the great maritime and naval centre of Greece. There was, indeed, every reason why Athens and not some other Grecian city should become the new centre of classic Greece. The Spartans were oligarchical, stern, unintellectual, and offensive to strangers; the people of Thebes were held under a strict aristocratic government, the people of Thessaly were aristocratic, luxurious, and stagnant; but the Athenians were democratic, social to strangers, literary, liberal, frugal, and alert. After the Persian Wars the power of the Delian confederacy became more and more centralized in the city of Athens. Controlling the fleet of the Confederacy for her own defense and using the rich treasury of the Confederacy for her own municipal improvements, Athens under the brilliant rule of Pericles, who summoned scholars and artists from all Greece, was the only city of Greece where the Renaissance of Greece was possible. Athens had become the eye of Greece, and the following description of the Greek Renaissance is especially significant in regard to her.