"During the Age of Pericles, Athens blossomed as a center of education, art, culture, and democracy. Artists and sculptors, playwrights and poets, architects and philosophers all found Athens an exciting and enlivening atmosphere for their work. Athens under Pericles saw the building of the Acropolis and the glory of the Parthenon. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (in short, all of the great Greek writers for the stage) invented theater as it is known in the modern-day. Hippocrates (who inspired the Hippocratic Oath still taken by physicians today) practiced medicine in Athens then while sculptors like the famous Phidias (who created the statue of Zeus at Olympia, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as well as the statue of Athena Parthenos for the Parthenon) and Myron (who produced the masterpiece Discus Thrower) worked in their marble and stone. The great philosophers Protagoras, Zeno of Elea, and Anaxagoras were all personal friends of Pericles (Anaxagoras especially, who influenced Pericles’ public demeanor and acceptance of fate, especially after the death of Pericles’ sons) and Socrates, the man considered the 'father of western philosophy', all lived in Athens at the time".
- Google
