Blog Post #4

     Today we took more notes on the powerpoint of Excellence. We learned what an agora was. An agora is a gathering place, assembly hall, and a marketplace. It's the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual, and political life in a city. Next word was polis which is the origin of the words politics, metropolitan, and poll. It is also when political entitles are ruled by their bodies of citizens. In 508 BCE was the birth of democracy. Next is Socrates. As a young man he was working as a stonemason. He fought heroically in the Peloponnesian War, and his working class background and battlefield experience shaped the way he viewed the world. He met with young students in workshops just outside the agora. His method was to ask a series of questions to determine their underlying beliefs and their extent of their knowledge. This led to the scientific method. Lastly, we took notes on Athens which was a great city which attracted brilliant thinkers. Visitors from all over the world shared their knowledge of astronomy, medicine, meteorology, literature, philosophy, and all other things scientific. This was often at odds with traditional teachings which centered around the Greek Gods, which got young people questioning their way of thinking. Those were all the notes we took today.