Panhellenic Humanities flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Dactylic hexameter

The epic meter of Homer and Vergil: six feet of dactyls (long-short-short) or spondees (long-long), with a fixed caesura and a final foot typically spondaic. It suits oral-formulaic composition.

Iambic trimeter

The spoken meter of Greek tragedy and comedy dialogue: three iambic metra per line, resolving in the last foot, with the final syllable anceps. It approximates ordinary speech rhythm.

Parabasis

A feature of Old Comedy, especially Aristophanes, in which the chorus steps forward and addresses the audience directly, often in the playwright's voice, on politics, poetry, or civic themes.

Thucydides' methodological claim

In Book 1.22 Thucydides says he reconstructed speeches as the situation demanded and aimed at accuracy of events, calling his work a possession for all time rather than a prize piece.

Homeric Question

The debate over whether the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of one poet or of multiple oral composers. Parry and Lord's fieldwork on living oral epic shaped modern answers.

Cleisthenic tribes

Cleisthenes' 508/7 BCE reform replaced four Ionic tribes with ten based on trittyes drawn from city, coast, and inland regions, mixing citizens and weakening aristocratic factions.

Delian League

A naval alliance founded 478/7 BCE under Athenian leadership against Persia, with tribute (phoros) and ships contributed by members. It became an instrument of Athenian empire.

Seisachtheia

Solon's 'shaking off of burdens' (594/3 BCE): cancellation of debts and removal of debt-bondage markers, part of reforms that also created property classes and broadened political access.

Battle of Chaeronea

Philip II of Macedon's victory in 338 BCE over a Greek coalition including Athens and Thebes. It ended effective Greek independence and led to the League of Corinth under Macedonian hegemony.

Hellenistic kingdoms

The successor states after Alexander's death (323 BCE): Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Asia, and Antigonid Macedon, plus smaller powers like Pergamon. They blended Greek and local institutions.

Socratic elenchus

A method of question-and-answer refutation used by Socrates, exposing inconsistencies in an interlocutor's beliefs and often ending in aporia. Plato dramatizes it in early dialogues.

Theory of Forms

Plato's view that intelligible, unchanging Forms are more real than sensible particulars, which participate in them. The cave allegory and divided line illustrate the hierarchy of knowledge.

Aristotle's four causes

Material (what it is made of), efficient (what produces it), formal (its defining structure), and final (its purpose). Aristotle uses all four to explain natural and artificial things.

Stoic ekpyrosis

The Stoic doctrine that the cosmos is periodically consumed by fire and reborn in a cycle, governed by logos. It supports their determinism and ethics of living according to nature.

Epicurean ataraxia

Freedom from mental disturbance, the goal of Epicurean ethics, achieved by limiting desires, removing fear of gods and death, and cultivating friendship. Pleasure is defined as absence of pain.

Ptolemy's Almagest

A 2nd-century CE astronomical treatise systematizing the geocentric model with epicycles and eccentrics. It dominated Western and Islamic astronomy until the Copernican revolution.

Ablative absolute

A Latin participial construction with a noun and participle in the ablative, grammatically independent of the main clause, expressing circumstance, cause, or time (e.g., urbe capta).

Indirect statement in Latin

Reported speech using an accusative subject and infinitive verb (or ut with subjunctive after verbs of commanding). It is common in Caesar, Livy, and Cicero.

Dactylic hexameter in Latin

The meter of the Aeneid and other epics: six feet of dactyls or spondees, with a caesura and a final spondee. Latin word quantity and elision govern scansion.

Elegiac couplet

A hexameter followed by a pentameter, used by Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. The pentameter's second half closes with a long syllable, typically a disyllabic word.

Cursus honorum

The fixed sequence of Roman magistracies: quaestor, aedile (optional), praetor, consul, and censor, with minimum ages. It structured aristocratic competition in the Republic.

Tribune of the plebs

An annually elected plebeian magistrate, sacrosanct in person, with power to veto and to summon the assembly. The office emerged from the Struggle of the Orders.

Battle of Actium

Octavian's naval victory in 31 BCE over Mark Antony and Cleopatra, leading to the annexation of Egypt and Octavian's sole rule. It marks the end of the Roman Republic.

Res Gestae Divi Augusti

Augustus' first-person account of his achievements and expenditures, inscribed after his death in 14 CE and surviving in copies such as the Monumentum Ancyranum.

Tacitean historiography

Tacitus' Annals and Histories combine compressed, pointed prose with moral judgment, invented speeches, and attention to senatorial politics and imperial vice under the Principate.

Red-figure pottery

An Athenian technique developed around 530 BCE in which figures are reserved in clay color against a painted black background, allowing painted internal detail. It displaced black-figure.

Kouros and kore

Archaic Greek standing statues of nude young men (kouroi) and clothed young women (korai), often votive or funerary, marked by frontal pose and the 'Archaic smile'.

Pompeian painting styles

Four successive Roman wall-painting modes at Pompeii: masonry imitation, architectural illusion, ornamental panels, and fantastic architecture with figures. They date from the 2nd c. BCE onward.

Pantheon dome

A Roman concrete dome completed under Hadrian (c. 126 CE), about 43 m in span, with a central oculus. Its unreinforced construction and coffering remain influential.

Stratigraphy

The archaeological principle that in undisturbed deposits lower layers are older than upper ones. It underpins relative dating and the reconstruction of site formation processes.

Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art

Johann Joachim Winckelmann's 1764 work, a founding text of art history and Neoclassicism, which idealized Greek art as noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.

Reception studies

An approach treating later uses of antiquity as creative interpretations rather than passive inheritance, analyzing how each era's horizon of expectations shapes its reading of classical texts and images.