16 Athens, School of Greece

In the period between the Thirty Years’ Peace and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles presided over a Golden Age in terms of the visual and literary arts. The Athenians under Pericles defined the city-state through architecture, religious festivals, and public life. Major building programs on the Acropolis in 447−435 B.C. and in 414−410 B.C. created masterpieces. The agora, the commercial and civic center, and the Pynx, the location of the assembly, were expanded and remodeled. At the same time, Athens emerged as the intellectual center of the Aegean world. Athenian tragic poets such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, along with the comic poet Aristophanes, defined Western drama. The Athenian democracy provided conditions conducive to the writing of history and the flourishing of philosophy and oratory, so that the Attic dialect became “literary Greek” and remained so into the Byzantine age. To a great extent, the view of Classical civilization as the heritage of the West is largely a legacy of the Athenian democracy.