Monuments of Ancient Greece (Legends & Empires) 6 of 8

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• published: 27 Jul 2016
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Mystical Monuments of Ancient Greece https://www.britannica.com/art/Greek-Revival https://www.britannica.com/place/Delphi-ancient-city-Greece https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Greece The beginnings of the Polis: The name given to polis formation by the Greeks themselves was synoikismos, literally a “gathering together.” Synoikismos could take one or both of two forms—it could be a physical concentration of the population in a single city or an act of purely political unification that allowed the population to continue living in a dispersed way. The classic discussion is by Thucydides, who distinguishes between the two kinds of synoikismos more carefully than do some of his modern critics. He makes the correct point that Attica was politically synoecized at an early date but not physically synoecized until 431 bce when Pericles as part of his war policy brought the large rural population behind the city walls of Athens. A more extreme instance of a polis that was never fully synoecized in the physical sense was Sparta, which, as Thucydides elsewhere says, remained “settled by villages in the old Greek way.” It was an act of conscious arrogance, a way of claiming to be invulnerable from attack and not to need the walls that Thucydides again and again treats as the sign and guarantee of civilized polis life. The urban history of Sparta makes an interesting case history showing that Mycenaean Sparta was not so physically or psychologically secure as its Greek and Roman successors. The administrative centre of Mycenaean Sparta was probably in the Párnon Mountains at the excavated site of the Menelaion. Then Archaic and Classical Sparta moved down to the plain. Byzantine Sparta, more insecure, moved out of the plain again to perch on the site of Mistra on the opposite western mountain, Taygetos. Finally, modern Sparta is situated, once again peacefully and confidently, on its old site on the plain of the river Eurotas. The enabling factors behind the beginnings of the Greek polis have been the subject of intense discussion. One approach connects the beginnings of the polis with the first monumental buildings, usually temples like the great early 8th-century temple of Hera on the island of Samos. The concentration of resources and effort required for such constructions presupposes the formation of self-conscious polis units and may actually have accelerated it. As stated above, however, the evidence from Lefkandi makes it hard to see the construction of such monumental buildings as a sufficient cause for the emergence of the polis, a process or event nobody has yet tried to date as early as 1000 bce. Another related theory argues..." _________________________________________________________________ Greek Revival: "The British Museum (completed 1847), in London, which utilizes the Greek Ionic order on a massive scale, is the most powerful image of the English version of the style. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (1793) was inspired by the Athenian Propylaea, and the Glyptothek sculpture museum in Munich utilized massive Grecian forms, as did the Altes Museum in Berlin by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1822–30). That there are so many important Greek Revival buildings in Germany is largely due to Ludwig I, king of Bavaria, whose son was king of Greece. Many major examples of the Greek Revival survive in the United States, where the style was adopted on a large scale. It was also in the United States that, for both practical and ideological reasons, many strange distortions of the style found acceptance. The Second Bank of the United States (Philadelphia, 1824) was designed with a Doric temple exterior by William Strickland with the support of the major patron of the style, Nicholas Biddle. It was a dignified example of the style that the two men knew—Biddle from observation and Strickland from reproductions—from the Parthenon. Biddle went further in his pursuit of the style in his own home, Andalusia (Pennsylvania, 1833), for which his architect, Thomas Walter, created a majestic Doric facade to cover an existing structure. This use of Grecian columns (executed in wood) inspired many similar facades. _________________________________________________________________ Delphi: "Excavations reveal that Delphi was first inhabited in late Mycenaean times (as early as the 15th century bce). Priests from Knossos brought the cult of Apollo to the site in the 8th century bce. Some 200 years later, during the First Sacred War (c. 590 bce), the Amphictyonic League (to which Delphi pertained) destroyed the nearby town of Krisa, whose taxation of visitors to the oracle had prompted the war, and free access to Delphi was opened. The league subsequently reorganized the Panhellenic Pythian Games, which were held in Delphi every four years beginning in 582 bce. By then the prestige of the Delphic oracle was at its height. It was consulted not only on private matters but also on affairs of state, and its utterances..."