Mid-fifth century
450 BCE
450 is not a famous year. That is why it is a good one. The war with Sparta has not begun. The Parthenon has not been started. Gorgias has not walked into Athens. Socrates is nineteen, and has written nothing, because he never will.
What the year does have is a city that can pay poets, sculptors, and a Milesian who says the sun is a stone — and a sea full of other answers. Elea is still thinking about the One. Acragas has Empedocles. Abdera has Protagoras. If the atom already has a name, the name is Leucippus. Sicily thinks it invented the art of speech.
Pins sit where these people are, as far as the record allows, not where their reputations later settled. A filled dot is someone living. A hollow ring is someone just gone. A square is a school or a text, not a person you could have met. A diamond is a city that matters and has none of these in residence.
Around this year
- 458The Oresteia of Aeschylus, at Athens.
- 456/5Aeschylus dies at Gela.
- 454The league treasury is moved from Delos to Athens.
- 451/0Pericles' citizenship law. Two Athenian parents.
- 450This map. The Parthenon has not started. Gorgias has not come.
- 447Work begins on the Parthenon. Phidias oversees the sculpture.
- 446/5Thirty Years' Peace between Athens and Sparta.
- 444/3Thurii is founded on the site of Sybaris.
- 441/0Samian war. Sophocles is a general. Plutarch gives Melissus the fleet.
- 438The gold-and-ivory Athena is dedicated. Alcestis of Euripides.
- 431War with Sparta. This generation begins to be cut down. Pericles dies in 429.
Years are the conventional modern chronology, often taken from later synchronisms in Diogenes Laertius, the Suda, and the Apollodoran tradition. An exact year is a convenience. Plato is used only as a dramatic witness. Where a life is a tradition, the dossier says so. The shoreline is the modern coast: the Maeander mouth, the Thermaic Gulf, and the Nile delta have moved since the fifth century.