As you learned in the Windows On (Excellence Through Struggle) box on pages 88-89, the Greeks thought it appropriate to express their values and ideals through depictions of the male athlete. For the Greeks, the inner qualities of commitment, struggle, and perfectionism were reflected in the outward beauty of the triumphant male athlete. Rather than seeing physical beauty and athletic achievement as antithetical to their intellectual counterparts, the Greeks saw the intellectual and the physical as expressions of a single set of ideals. Assess the evidence of Greek efforts to describe and create perfection below and then respond to the essay question that follows. Read the poems describing the divine on page 85. According to the Greeks, what are the essential differences between humans and the gods? How does the Greek notion of the gods compare to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian ideas you read about in Chapter 1 (page 26)? In the excerpt from the Iliad on page 87, the hero Achilles must make a difficult choice: to risk death in Troy or to live a long, but inglorious, life back home. From the point of view of Homer's contemporaries, what choice should Achilles make? Did he really have a choice, or was his fate already decided? The red-figure cup on page 95 is decorated with scenes of a boy's education. What were Greek boys supposed to learn in school? What values were they supposed to acquire? Why were girls not educated in a similar manner? Compare the statue of Doryphorus on page 97 and the statue of Aphrodite on page 99. What do they tell us about Greek male and female ideals? Read Parmenides and Xenophanes descriptions of the internal and divine on page 100. In what ways do they break from earlier ideas? How does their thinking compare to Plato's? As the map of the Greek world on page 101 makes clear, many of the most important Greek thinkers came from Athens. However, this does not mean Greek thinkers did not look beyond Athens for information and inspiration. Examine the map below depicting the world as Herodotus saw it. In what ways is it accurate? In what ways is it inaccurate? What cultural biases does it reveal?