Within Ancient Greek art, poetry was heavily used to help explain religion, science, and as well the aesthetics of Greek society. Around the 8th century B.C.E., Poets such as Homer whom wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, giving epics of apparent historic occurrences and its heroes. Their relation to the order of Greek society and the will of the gods themselves were clear and prevalent themes in his epics throughout. For example, the Iliad discusses the chronology of the Trojan War. The entire story is heavily tied with actions the gods themselves committed on humanity as well as Greek societal customs. Even reading his poetry today, one is able to gain insight of the traditions, laws, and beliefs within Ancient Greek society and culture. Religion was heavily integrated into Greek society. Hesiod was one of the most important epic poets with his work, Theogony. Not only had, Theogony provided an explanation of how the Greek gods were created and how they established permanent control over the cosmos, but it also provided a large-scale synthesis of local Greek traditions concerned with the gods themselves. Within poetry, science was rarely brought up since, in poems, all happenings were due to the gods and their divine will upon humanity and nature. This reflected the times in which science was still a relatively unknown concept until figures such as Pythagoras and Hippocrates attempted to explain things. Even afterwards, poets often did not include science within their work since it proved conflicting with religion and was a controversial subject.
Team 3, Dylan Mulcahy, Jenny Zhan, Caleb Ong, James Jin
You guys did a great job explaining the important role of religion in Greek art and literature. The analysis was particularly informative on the background history of specific literatures such as the Iliad and Theogony. However, your team did not thoroughly nor clearly respond to all parts of the question. For instance, the subject of how science explicitly contracts the Gods’ role in literature is not addressed. It is stated that the reason for the rare discussion of science in literature is that science was not a prominent study until “Pythagoras and Hippocrates…explain[ed] things,” but these specific “things” are not explained nor elaborated. The question at hand is: how did the explanations of these renowned individuals contradict or influence the ideas and customs of the time? More evidence, such as examples or instances, would increase the argument’s credibility and therefore allowing your stand to become more convincing. Another possible improvement to this synthesis response is to address the aesthetics part of the prompt, which is completely neglected except in the first sentence. You could incorporate the aesthetic aspect of the question by discussing the details in the poem that reflect what people accepted as beautiful at the time. Moreover, you could include the poems’ emphasis on the humanoid traits of the gods, which conveys the people’s belief that the human figure represented beauty.
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