Video:
Audio:
Recommended Reading:
- Powerpoint presentation
- Plutarch’s biography of Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver.
- Plutarch’s biography of Solon, the Athenian reformer.
- Polis is an introduction to the Greek city-state by one of the world’s foremost authorities on micro-states.
- Although his views on American foreign policy are most unfortunate, Victor Davis Hanson’s The Other Greeks is a masterful discussion of the agrarian tradition in the Archaic Age, the counterpart to the development of the polis.
The Polis – Quiz
- Identify at least one of the major reforms made by Solon in the early 6th century B.C.
- In several poleis, tyrants seized power from _________ with the support of the ________.
- The Spartans maintained a formal state of war against the ________ to help maintain their control of them.
- The development of ________ as the core of the polis’s army led to an undermining of the Homeric heroic code.
- True/False: The polis was viewed by Greeks as a comprehensive institution that commanded its inhabitants’ loyalties in every area.
- _________ seized power and made Athens a tyranny in 560 B.C.; his family was later ousted, and a democratic faction led by ________ made Athens a democracy around the year 500.
- _________ was the semi-legendary ruler of Sparta who militarized its society.
- canceled land debts, freed debt slaves, secularized justice, reorganized Athenian social classes
- oligarchic factions, “new rich”
- helots
- hoplites
- True
- Pisistratus, Cleisthenes
- Lycurgus