Describe Athens' Golden Age under Pericles, including the Parthenon, Greek drama, and the origin of history-writing with Herodotus and Thucydides.
After the Persian Wars, Athens led the Delian League, an alliance originally formed to defend Greek cities from Persia, but under the statesman Pericles (who dominated Athenian politics roughly 461-429 BCE) Athens increasingly used the League's treasury for its own projects -- a use of shared funds that was controversial even at the time. The most famous result was the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena built on the Acropolis between 447 and 432 BCE, designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates and decorated with sculpture by Phidias, still considered one of the finest examples of Greek architecture nearly 2,500 years later.
This same Golden Age produced Western theater: tragedies by playwrights like Aeschylus, Sophocles (who wrote Oedipus Rex), and Euripides, and comedies by Aristophanes, performed at open-air festivals such as the City Dionysia. It also produced history-writing itself as a discipline: Herodotus, later called the "Father of History," wrote an account of the Persian Wars gathering stories from many sources, while Thucydides, writing soon after about the war between Athens and Sparta, insisted on eyewitness testimony and verified evidence over legend -- a standard historians still hold themselves to today, including in the very course you are studying now.
Mastery looks like: They can describe the Parthenon's purpose and era and explain the key difference between Herodotus's and Thucydides's approaches to history.
Common stumbles: Treating Herodotus and Thucydides as interchangeable "ancient historians" rather than noting their different standards of evidence.