Ancient Greece: SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Greece in the Archaic Period was made up from independent states, called Polis, or city-state. The social classes applied to men only, as women all took their social and legal status from their husband or their male partner. Women in ancient Greece were not permitted to take part in public life.

Greek Society was mainly broken up between Free people and Slaves, who were owned by the free people. As Athenian society evolved, free men were divided between Citizens and Metics. A citizen was born with Athenian parents and were the most powerful group, that could take part in the government of the Polis. After compulsory service in the army they were expected to be government officials and take part in Jury Service. A metic was of foreign birth that had migrated to Athens, to either trade or practice a craft. A metic had to pay taxes and sometimes required to serve in the army. However, they could never achieve full right s of a Citizen, neither could they own houses or land and were not allowed to speak in law courts.

By 600 bc chattel slavery (treating slaves as property) had become widespread in Greece. By the 5th century BC slaves accounted for as much as one-third of the total population in some city-states. Children born to slaves became slaves themselves. Greeks took many slaves from non-Greek populations, but they also enslaved other Greeks in war.

Slaves were used as servants and labourers, without any legal rights. Sometimes the slaves were prisoners of war or bought from foreign slave traders. Although many slaves lived closely with their owners, few were skilled craftsmen and even fewer were paid.To encourage slaves to work hard, owners sometimes promised freedom at a future date.

Unlike in Rome, freed slaves in Greece did not become citizens. Instead, former slaves mixed into the population of metics—non-citizens, including people from foreign lands or other states, officially allowed to live in a city-state.

City-states and gods also legally owned slaves (the gods’ slaves were generally managed by the gods’ earthly intermediaries, temple priests). These public slaves enjoyed a measure of independence, living on their own and performing specialized tasks. In Athens, for example, public slaves were trained to look for counterfeit coinage. Temple slaves worked as servants of the sanctuary’s deity. Sparta had a special category of slaves called helots, Greek war captives owned by the state but assigned to Spartan families. Helots raised food and performed household chores so that Spartan women could devote their time to raising strong children and men could devote their time to training as hoplite warriors. The helots lived harsh lives and often revolted. Spartans annually sent out a secret band of young men to murder any helots who looked likely to provoke rebellion.

Ancient Greece: WHERE?

Ancient Greece civilization thrived around the Mediterranean Sea from the 3rd millennium to the 1st century BC.

Geographically, it indicates the heartland of Greek communities on the north coast and nearby islands of the Mediterranean Sea.
The heartland of ancient Greece consisted of the mountainous Balkan Peninsula and southern Italian Peninsula, as well as dozens of rugged islands in the northern Mediterranean region.

Mountains acted like walls separating communities. The mountains were once heavily wooded, but early Greeks steadily deforested the slopes for fuel, housing and ships. Most fields were level enough for farming and raising animals were small, supporting communities of only a few hundred inhabitants

The Mediterranean Sea, which connected Greeks with each other and with the rest of the world, encompasses the Aegean Sea and the Ionian Sea. In the world of the ancient Greeks, the seas were more efficient travel routes than roads. Ships could go much faster and carry much more cargo than wagons bumping over rough train. Access to the sea was so important that most Greek communities were within 60 km (40 miles) of the coast. Eventually, ancient Greeks inhabited about 700 communities clustered around the Mediterranean Sea. The settlements reached from the Iberian Peninsula (now occupied mostly by Spain) in the west to the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East in the east, extending southward to the northern coast of Africa.

MOMENTA

Momentum, the singular form of MOMENTA, in physics, is the measure of movement: a quantity that expresses the motion of a body and its resistance to slow down. It is the fundamental quantity characterizing the motion of any object. Momentum is a vector quantity, which means that it has both magnitude and direction.
In philosophy Momentum is the basic element: an essential part of a whole.
Concerning physics, the total momentum of a system made up of a collection of objects is the vector sum of all the individual objects' momenta. For an isolated system, total momentum remains unchanged over time; this is called conservation of momentum. For example, when a batter hits a baseball, the momentum of the bat just before it strikes the ball plus the momentum of the pitched baseball is equal to the momentum of the bat after it strikes the ball plus the momentum of the hit baseball. As another example, imagine a beaver jumping off a stationary log that is floating on water. Before the beaver jumps, the log and the beaver are not moving, so the total momentum is zero. Upon jumping, the beaver acquires forward momentum, and at the same time the log moves in the other direction with an equal and opposite momentum; the total momentum of the beaver plus the log remains at zero.

Diotima of Mantinea

Diotima of Mantinea
Diotima of Mantinea is a major figure in Plato's Symposium. The Symposium is the dialogue set during an all night banquet where the participants decide to examine the concept of Love. It should be noted that no women are present at the banquet. This is a 'men only' view of the topic.
It is interesting that Socrates, the one who is the figure of THE PHILOSOPHER, is the person who introduces the ideas of a woman philosopher.
The speakers introduce most of the major theories about Love. Then, finally, Socrates speaks and he tells of an encounter with a priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who taught him the meaning of Love.
He repeats her teaching with its linking of Love and Beauty and the human soul ascending a ladder of the human perfection in love.

In Plato's Symposium, Socrates says that Diotima was a seer or priestess who, in his youth, taught him "the philosophy of love". Socrates also claims that Diotima successfully postponed the plague of Athens.
Her name has often been used as a moniker for philosophical or artistic projects, journals, essays, etc.: German poet Friedrich Holiderlin used the pen name Diotima as a moniker for Susette Borkenstein Gontard, who inspired him to write Hyperion. In this work, the fictitious first-person author Hyperion addresses letters to his friends Bellarmin and Diotima.

Diotima

"...they are only breath,

words which I command are immortal"