Emily also brought in delicious chocolate chip cookies! It was a good day.
I also got the notes I missed from being absent from Tuesday from Madi Day:
Socrates
If you were an ancient female citizen you would see all the flaws of Socrates. He isn't attractive, but he is brilliant. He was put to death because of his ideas, he was making people think. He cared nothing for appearance are any of the other conventions of his day, he was only interested in the mind. He wanted to start a revolution in thinking all across the Greek world. The worlds first astronomers had gathered their views on astronomy, such as the movement of the stars, which they said the gods moved. They took to gods out of the heaven and replaced them with reason. Gradually the Greeks started to say, these are not persons, these are things. These Greeks began to calculate the movement of the Earth and the moon. It was the birth of science. Thales was the first great Greek scientist. He was the first man to measure the height of the Greek pyramid. The Greeks were making all these breakthroughs, learning that they can use science, mathematics, etc. Socrates was not interested in the stars and the heavens, he wanted to study people using reason and logic. He turned his back to the world of nature, he wanted to study the people. Socrates spent his days wandering the streets of Athens talking to people and studying them. He loves the city. His life was spent questioning the assumptions the fellow people of Athens asked about their life. Socrates told someone at a dinner party that he was more beautiful than this other man. A fight broke out. Socrates says you must make every decision on what you know is right, rather than no. Socrates says let no day pass without discussing an unexamined life is not worth living. He wants to make a point in the world. He want people to talk about reason.
The Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War and Pericles was dead. The Athenians went to Socrates. For over 50 years Socrates had been questioning the ways of Athenian life. He changed the life of Athens. After they lost the war, he was arrested. The Athenians would now put to trial the one man that questioned the way they lived their lives. Socrates trial would be held in Athens central market place .He would be charged by a series of general citizens that had been chose. He would only be given a little time to defend him himself. He was timed by a water clock. He showed no fear to the face of his accuser's. He was stubborn, he said he would never cease to settle. It is not an approach designed to win sympathy. He is doing what he thinks is the right thing to do, he thinks the life he had chosen, which was thinking for yourself, was the best life to choose. If he simply apologized to the court, but instead he told the Jorey that he deserves free dinners. The court found Socrates guilty, with the penalty of death. He was taken to the court to Athens prison, the sight of the prison still exist, we can still trace the layout of the cell where Socrates was most likely hidden. He would be executed by drinking Hemlock. Some of the cups used for the Hemlock still exist. It was extremely painful. Socrates treated the affair as if it was nothing at all. He washed himself with the poison before he drank it. Socrates friends were more upset and broke down when the poison was poured. But Socrates to stop. He was dying on his bed, his friends watched in silence. Socrates, in his life and in his death becomes a hero. From now on a hero of conviction.
Greek decided to build a empire, in the depths of defeat. The need to be critical and self critical is the message Socrates left behind. He wanted the people to mature. Athens was never the great amount of power it was before but it was never not, it was in the middle.
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