27 The Golden Age

When we were talking about the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, I told you that later we should also hear of a Golden Age.

Well, we have come to the Golden Age now. This doesn’t mean that people at this time used things made of gold, nor that they had a great deal of gold money. It means—well, let us see what sort of a time it was, and then you can tell what it means.

After the wars with Persia, Athens seemed to have been cheered up by her victory to do wonderful things, and the next fifty years after the Persians were driven out of Greece—that is, 480 to 430 B.C.—were the most wonderful years in the history of Greece, and perhaps the most wonderful years in the history of Europe.

Athens had been burned down by Xerxes. At the time it happened this seemed like a terrible misfortune. But it wasn’t. The people set to work and built a much finer and much more beautiful city than the old one had been.

Now, the chief person in Athens at this time was a man named Pericles. He was not a king nor a ruler, but he was so very wise and such a wonderful speaker and such a popular leader that he was able to make the Athenians do as he thought best. He was like the popular captain of a football or soccer team who is a fine player himself and makes fine players of all the others on his team. Athens was his team, and he trained it so well that all the players were tops in their positions. Some people became great artists. Some people became great writers. Others still became great philosophers . Do you know what philosophers are? They are wise men and women who know a great deal and love knowledge.

The artists built many beautiful buildings, theaters, and temples. They made wonderful statues of the Greek gods and goddesses and placed them on the buildings and about the city.

The philosophers taught the people how to be wise and good.

The writers composed fine poems and plays. The plays were not like those we have nowadays but were all about the doings of the gods and goddesses.

The theaters were not like those we have nowadays, either. They were always out of doors, usually on the side of a hill, where a grandstand could be built facing the stage. There was little or no scenery, and instead of an orchestra of musicians, there was a chorus of singers to accompany the actors. The actors wore false faces or masks to show what their feelings were, a comic mask with a grinning face when they wanted to be funny and a tragic mask with a sorrowful face when they wanted to seem sad.

Perhaps you have seen pictures of these masks, for in the decorations of our own theaters these same comic and tragic masks are sometimes used.

Athens had been named after the goddess Athena, who was supposed to watch out for and look after the city. The Athenians thought she should have a special temple. Accordingly, they built one to her on the top of a hill called the Acropolis. This temple they called in her honor the Parthenon, meaning the maiden , one of the names by which she was known.

The Parthenon is considered by some people to be the most beautiful building in the world, although as you see by the picture, as it is today, it is now in ruins. In the center of this temple was a huge statue of Athena made of gold and ivory by a sculptor named Phidias. We are told that it was the most beautiful statue in the world as the Parthenon was the most beautiful building, but it has completely disappeared, and no one knows what became of it. One might guess, however, that the gold and ivory tempted thieves, who may have stolen it piece by piece.

Phidias made many other statues on the outside of the Parthenon, but most of these have been carried away and put in museums or have been lost or destroyed.

This statue of Athena and the other sculptures on the Parthenon made Phidias so famous that he was asked to make a statue of Zeus to be placed at Olympia, where the Olympic Games were held. The statue of Zeus was finer even than the one he had made of Athena and was so splendid that it was called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. You remember the pyramids of Egypt and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were two others of the Seven Wonders. It is interesting that each of these three Wonders was located in a different continent. Can you tell which was in Africa, which in Asia, and which in Europe?

Phidias has been called the greatest sculptor who ever lived, but he did a thing which the Greeks considered a crime and would not forgive. We do not see anything so terribly wrong in what he did, but the Greeks’ idea of right and wrong was different from ours. This is what he did. On the shield of the statue of Athena that he had made, Phidias carved a picture of himself and also one of his friend Pericles. It was merely a part of the decoration of the shield, and hardly anyone would have noticed it. But according to the Greek notion, it was a sacrilege to make a picture of a human being on a statue of a goddess. When the Athenians found out what Phidias had done, they threw him into prison, and there he died.

The Greeks used different kinds of columns on their buildings, and these columns are used in many public and in some private buildings today. I’ll tell you what each kind is like; then see how many you can find.

The Parthenon was built in a style called Doric .

The top of the column is called the capital, and the capital of the Doric column is shaped like a saucer with a square cover on top of it. There was no base or block at the bottom of the column. It rested directly on the floor. As the Doric column is so plain and strong-looking, it was called the man’s style.

The second style is called Ionic .

The capital of the Ionic column has a base, and the capital has ornaments like curls underneath the square top, and the column has a base.

As this column is more slender and more ornamental than the Doric, it was called the woman’s style.

The third style is called Corinthian .

The capital of the Corinthian column is higher than either of the other two and still more ornamental. It is said that the architect who first made this column got his idea for its capital from seeing a basketful of toys that had been placed on a child’s grave as was the custom instead of flowers. The basket had been covered with a slab, and the leaves of the thistle called the acanthus had grown up around the basket. It looked so pretty that the architect thought it would make a beautiful capital for a column, and so he copied it.

I asked some boys which one could find the most columns. The next day one boy said he had seen two Ionic columns, one on each side of the door of his house. The second had seen ten Doric columns on the savings bank. But the third said he had seen 138 Corinthian columns.

“Where on earth did you see so many?” I asked.

“I counted the lampposts from my house to the school,” he said, “They were kind of Corinthian columns.”

One of the friends of Pericles was a man named Herodotus. He wrote in Greek the first history of the world. For this reason Herodotus is called the Father of History, and someday if you study Greek you may read what he wrote in his own language. Of course, at that time there was very little history to write. What has happened since hadn’t happened then. He wrote about Egypt and other parts of the ancient world. He wrote about places so far away that most Greeks had never visited them. One was Kush, in Africa way south of Egypt. Mostly Herodotus’s history was a story of the wars with Persia, which I have just told you about.

In those days every once in a while a terrible contagious disease, called a plague , would break out, and people would be taken sick and die by the thousands, for the doctors knew very little about the plague or how to cure it. Such a plague came upon Athens, and the Athenians died like poisoned flies. Pericles himself nursed the sick and did all he could for them, but finally he, too, was taken sick with plague and died. This happened at the very end of the Golden Age, which has been called in honor of its greatest man, the Age of Pericles. EOIM9Tx+ECPznxEgVFM/HRt84gxrPhpmhFrfRTNL25lpLjCzxnqQJglkJbUQ5QT7