Expression

Pericles (c. 495-429 BC) was the leading statesman of Athens at its peak, so dominant that historians call the era the 'Age of Pericles.' He was not a king or tyrant; he led by persuasion, elected again and again as a strategos (general) and winning the assembly to his views by the power of his speech. Under his leadership Athens deepened its democracy, paying poorer citizens so they could afford to serve on juries and in office, and used the treasury of the Delian League (an alliance against Persia) to fund a spectacular building program, including the Parthenon. In his famous Funeral Oration, delivered to honor the war dead, Pericles praised Athens as 'an education to Greece,' a city where citizens governed themselves, valued both beauty and wisdom, and balanced private freedom with public duty. He showed the heights a free, self-governing people could reach. Yet his story is also a warning: he led Athens into the long Peloponnesian War against Sparta, and died in 429 BC of the plague that swept the crowded city early in the war, after which Athens declined. Greatness in leadership, the Greeks learned, can build a golden age and also overreach.

For the Greeks, music was not just entertainment; it was a window into the order of the universe. The two great instruments were the lyre, a stringed instrument plucked at gatherings and used to accompany poetry (Apollo's instrument, associated with reason), and the aulos, a double-reed pipe with a wild, exciting sound (Dionysus's instrument, used in drama and festivals). But the Greeks' deepest discovery was mathematical. Tradition credits Pythagoras (6th century BC) with finding that musical harmony comes from simple whole-number ratios. Pluck a string, then stop it exactly halfway (a 2:1 ratio) and you get the same note an octave higher; a 3:2 ratio gives a perfect fifth; 4:3 a perfect fourth. The most beautiful, consonant sounds correspond to the simplest numbers. This stunned the Greeks: the beauty we hear is built on number we can measure. They believed the same ratios governed the planets, the 'music of the spheres.' From this came the Greek modes, scales with different characters thought to shape the soul (one mode noble, another sorrowful). This idea, that music reflects a divine, mathematical order, passed straight into the medieval Church and the chant we will study later.

This week's writing assignment is introduced today and may carry over as homework. Your task: write a vivid description of a single walk through Athens or Sparta at the height of its glory (see the full assignment and rubric for this week). The skill is descriptive writing, painting a place so clearly that a reader feels they are standing in it. The key tools are the modifiers you studied on Day 3: precise adjectives and adverbs, and the five senses. Today's work session: (1) Choose your city. (2) Brainstorm a sensory chart with five columns, sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, and fill each with at least two concrete details (e.g., sound: 'the rhythmic chip of a sculptor's chisel,' 'argument rising from the agora'). (3) Decide the path your reader will walk (e.g., from the city gate, through the agora, up to the temple), so your description has order and movement. (4) Draft your opening sentence. Remember the rubric: use at least four senses, choose vivid specific modifiers (not 'nice' or 'big'), keep it accurate to ancient Greece, and describe a place rather than tell a story.

Return to St. Paul on the Areopagus. He stood, a single man, before the proud philosophers of Athens, the very city whose democracy, art, and reason we studied all week, and proclaimed the crucified and risen Christ. Some sneered, some believed. He needed exactly the fortitude we studied: courage to speak unwelcome truth in the home of human wisdom. The Greeks had reached high with their reason and beauty; Paul showed them the One they had been reaching for. Close the week by recalling your fortitude challenge from Day 2: did you do the hard good thing you named?

All year we keep one growing timeline so the whole story of the world stays connected in your mind. This week - Ancient Greece I: The Birth of the Polis - gave us new dates to add. Place each one in its right spot, and notice how the World History thread (the Day 1 spine) and the US History thread (Day 2) run along their own tracks at the same time.