Drake 257 

"...there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy.... And these copies represent a small portion of the works of even the most celebrated writers of antiquity.  Of Aeschylus' eighty or ninety plays and roughly one hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven of each have survived....  Virtually the entire output of of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace" (The Swerve, 82).

Classical Greeks Overview

In general, when we speak of the "Classical Greek Era" we refer to what is both a surprisingly brief and incredibly revolutionary period in Athenian culture; covering the c. 5^th and 4^th centuries BC: from the Persian War (490-479 BCE) and ending with the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE).  In other words, this hugely influential period really only covered less than 200 years.

This era gives us tragedy (and some would say theater itself), philosophy (and thus the seeds of "science") and much of what we now consider republican democracy: secular legal and political self representation.

Context: 

The "Classical" era begins 300-400 years after Homer wrote the Iliad and Odyssey.

Trojan War: c 1200 BCE

Homer: c. 800 BCE

Classical Greece: 

Aeschylus (EEskeelus) 525-426 BCE

Sophocles 496 BCE - 406 BCE

Socrates 469 BC–399 BCE

Plato 428 – 348 BCE

Aristotle 384 BC – 322 BC

Alexander The Great 356-323 BCE

Hellenistic Greece refers to the spread and dominance of Greek culture and civilization throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East, in the wake of Alexander’s conquest and empire. This period ends with the rise of the Roman Republic, which annexed Greece in 146 BCE.  Rome, of course, considered itself the inheritor of Greek civilization and adopted Greek gods, myths and heroes, applied Greek political models and technologies, and, for all practical purposes, continued the spread of Greek culture for another four to five hundred years. (A good analogy is viewing America as the inheritors of British and European culture.)

So we’ll spend most of our time reading the foundational, Classical thinkers that shaped the Greek mind, but many of the technologies we associate with the Greeks came from those living in the Greek outposts/colonies after the decline of Greece itself (ie Euclid of Alexandria, Egypt, c. 300 BCE; Archimedes of Syracuse c. 287 BC – c. 212 BCE etc.).

Re-Evaluating "Truth". Central Themes:
Although we'll read a mix of philosophy and theater, it's important to get that this era is marked by a couple central themes, regardless of the genre:

1) Skepticism: A willingness to challenge/question accepted opinions, “truths”, cosmology: all the of the authors in this era -- be they playwrights, philosophers or Christ -- are interested in moving their culture -- and human understanding itself -- beyond the limits of ancient philosophy, religion and culture.

2) An attempt to understand what humans are capable of knowing; a challenge to simply accepting that tradition and perception -- that gods and oracles and dreams -- transmit “True” knowledge.