Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War

In this lecture Professor Christopher Mackie recaps the culminating events of the Iliad and looks more closely at the character of Hector, his fate and death, and the role of the goddess Athena.

Copyright 2013 Gillian Shepherd / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

This lecture examines the role and status of Athenian drama in Athenian society. Picking up where the last lecture (on the Peloponnesian War) left off, Dr Gillian Shepherd looks at the finale of the Sicilian Expedition, and the event that preceded it: the Melian Dialogue, which purports to recount events which just might have influenced one of the three great 5th century Athenian tragedians, Euripides, when he wrote his play The Trojan Women. This play, as well as others by Euripides and those by Aeschylos and Sophocles, were performed in the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens as part of the Great Dionysia. This was a religious festival in honour of the god Dionysos, but it was also more than that – it was an integral part of Athenian society and politics in the fifth century BC.

Copyright 2013 Gillian Shepherd / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Following the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny in Athens, the Athenians instituted a revolutionary new form of government: democracy. In this lecture, Dr Gillian Shepherd looks at the nature of Athenian democracy and how we think it might have functioned in the 5th century BC, including some of the structures and objects found in the Athenian agora which provide evidence for democracy at work.

Copyright 2013 Gillian Shepherd / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Peisistratos, tyrant of Athens, seems to have ruled benevolently and Athens prospered under his regime. In the course of the 6th century BC, important public buildings were erected in both the Agora (town square) of Athens and on the Acropolis. But change was afoot: in this lecture Dr Gillian Shepherd traces the events of the late sixth century and earlier 5th century BC, an action-packed period for Athens. The Peisistratid tyranny fell and was replaced by a new form of government – democracy. Despite the new regime, life was not peaceful: the Athenians united with other Greeks in bloody clashes with the invading Persians, fighting some of the greatest battles in history - Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea.

Copyright 2013 Gillian Shepherd / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

For reasons that are still unclear to us, the Mycenaean civilisation fell around 1200 BC. After that, life was relatively grim in Greece – a lot of important skills, including literacy, were lost and Greece seems to have had less contact with the outside world. In this lecture Dr Gillian Shepherd looks at this intriguing period between the Bronze Age and the Classical period: occasionally, however, we see a glimmer of light in the Dark Age Greece, such as the extraordinary finds from Lefkandi and flashy 9th century BC burials in Athens. In the 8th century BC - sometimes called the “Renaissance” of ancient Greece – we see an explosion in the archaeological record after the relative paucity of the Dark Ages: more burials, more settlements and more religious activity. The Greeks started venturing abroad, and founded settlements overseas. The 8th century also saw reading and writing reappear – but this time in a new form, an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians.

Copyright 2013 Gillian Shepherd / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.