A period that reached its peak in the fifth and fourth centuries BC in which culture, learning and democratic politics coalesced to inaugurate Western civilization. Sculptors such as Polyclitus, Praxiteles, Lysippus, and Myron produced some of antiquity's greatest works of art, which the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides similarly created new paradigms in the dramatic arts. The geometric principles and human spirit inaugurated in the Parthenon would decisively shape Greek architecture as it moved from the Classical Age into the Hellenistic period (Hopkins, 2014).

Defining features include: trabeated system, orders, peristasis, isolated temple, proportion, and sculpture.

Leading Examples

Temple of Hera, Paestum, Italy, mid sixth century BCE

Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, Athens, Greece, 334 BCE

Temple of Zeus, Cyrene Libya, fifth century BCE

Temple of Concordia, Agrigento, Sicily, fifth century BCE

Parthenon, Athens, 447-438 BCE

Great Altar of Zeus, originally Pergamon (now in Berlin), mid second century BCE

Democritus of Abdera

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