How Did Athens Influence The Growth Of Western Civilization

The glory that was Greece," in the words of Edgar Allan Poe, was short-lived and confined to a very small geographic area. Yet it has influenced the growth of Western civilization far out of proportion to its size and duration. The Greece that Poe praised was primarily Athens during its golden age in the 5th century BC. The English poet John Milton called Athens "the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence." Athens was the city-state in which the arts, philosophy, and democracy flourished. At least it was the city that attracted those who wanted to work, speak, and think in an environment of freedom. In the rarefied atmosphere of Athens were born ideas about human nature and political society that are fundamental to the Western world today.
He was the the founder of trigonometry, which is a branch of mathematics dealing with measuring the angles of triangles. Trigonometry is occasionally used by astronomers to map stars and planets. Thales also had many discoveries including recognizing that the Ursa Minor constellation was crucial for sailors to navigate as well as measuring the diameter of the Sun. These two things were great leaps forward in astronomy and they inspired later astronomers to continue observing the Sun and the constellations. He is also credited for successfully predicting an eclipse in 585
One of his first discoveries was that the apparent angular sizes of the Moon and the Sun are the same, which is why their sizes are in proportion to their distances from the Earth. He also recognized that when there is a half moon, the Sun-Moon-Earth angle is exactly a right angle. This allowed him to determine that the distance from the Earth to the Sun was twenty times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Aristarchus recorded the eclipse time and the lunar orbital period as well, which allowed him to discover that the Moon is one third the size of the Earth, and that the Sun is seven times the Earth. This also allowed him to calculate the distances from the Sun to the Earth and from the Moon to the Earth relative to the diameter of the Earth. Finally, Aristarchus was the first Greek astronomer to propose the heliocentric theory, where the Earth orbits around the