Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

(both c. 480), the philosopher Socrates (c. 469), the historian Thucydides (c. 460), the comic dramatist Aristophanes (c. 448), the historian and moralist Xenophon (c. 430), and the philosopher Plato (c. 427). As if these intellects were not enough, Athens welcomed resident foreigners, to whom it gave the status of metic, and attracted from overseas such seminal figures as the historian Herodotus, the rhetorician Gorgias, the scientist Anaxagoras, the political theorist Protagoras, the mathematician Theodorus from Cyrene, and the orator Lysias (a permanent resident whose family came from Sicily). Their conversations were among the most dynamic the world has witnessed. It is hardly surprising that the Theban poet Pindar called Athens “the noisy city,” a city of ceaseless talk.