History Discussion
Identify two specific aspects of the Athenian Acropolis and its Parthenon, and explain their significance to ancient Greek culture and the western heritage in the arts. Comment on one feature of the ancient Greek theater that you find especially intriguing. Explain the manner in which audiences today might receive the plot of the comedy Lysistrata, and compare Lysistrata to a specific modern work of stage or film.
• Should the ownership of the Elgin Marbles remain with the British Museum or should they be returned to Greece?
• Are we all Greeks?" The English Poet Percy Byshe Shelley in the 19th century wrote:
• "We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece-Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters....
"The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race."