Pericles And The Peloponnesian War

1: 427BC (4th year of the Peloponnesian war * Plague visited Athens in 430, 429, 427 BC (30% pop dies) * Pericles began the war, the strategy was for athens to stay behind the walls (not to fight the Spartans on land – in funeral speech) – Spartans are better fighters * So many people behind the walls, not heigenic conditions, so plague could have came because of result of this strategy * Terrible strategy came out of the best intentions * Pericles saying follow intelligent design * Pericles is one of the early victims of his own best efforts (dies of plague) * 427 B.C * things looking very bad * Sophicles * He saw pericles make Athens the most beautiful city * He saw Athens
* Reason only furthers that goal * He claimed that sometimes its even useful for reason to fabricate lies for human beings because they make us feel better about ourselves * Darwin * He argued in the same fasion that reason was just a tool developed by the instinct for survival * Sophicles * Similar critic of the enlightenment of his time * That yes the development of reason in enlightenment has brought tremendous benefits to Greece (Athens is best example) * Pericles the best model for this kind of achievement * Oedipus too brought tremendous benefits to Thebes through his intelligence and reason * He solved riddle of the sphinx by cracking code of the numbers (reason and quick wits) * The flourishing of knowledge and reason hides a darker more difficult reality that is difficult to
A dangerous one that is blind to itself * Pericles become enamored by his success and his ability and it grew inside himself a rising quest for power and control that was now in charge hidden from himself which was driving him towards this war with Sparta and driving Athens in a disastrous direction

4: Oedipus is intelligent, quick-witted, bold, daring, quick to act, able * All qualities that Pericles ascribes to Athenians of his day in the funeral speech * They being Oedipus great results to some extent * But these same qualities are the very ones operative in his own undoing * He’s confident and challenges the oracles prenouncement * He moves immediately to escape the sentence of the oracle * While he is escaping he kills the first older man that he meets * He marries the first older women he meets * In the process of saving himself with his tremendous ability – brings himself down * This is perhaps the meaning of the oracle that he is given * The oracles always had a hidden meaning behind the surface one * Meaning of the oracle * Character is