Q 01/05

What does the Greek word 'acropolis' mean?

A) Highest city

B) Holiest city

C) Oldest city

D) Walled city

Answer · why

A) Highest city

Highest city. Greek towns grew up around a defensible hilltop, so many had an acropolis of their own; the one in Athens became so famous that it took ...

Q 02/05

Cecrops, the legendary first king who gave the Acropolis its old name Cecropia, was shown as half man and half what?

A) Snake

B) Bull

C) Horse

D) Goat

Answer · why

A) Snake

Snake. Athenian artists gave Cecrops a man's body above the waist and a serpent's coiled tail below, fitting for a king said to have been born from th...

Q 03/05

Which Athenian statesman launched the fifth-century BC building programme that gave the Acropolis the Parthenon?

A) Solon

B) Cleisthenes

C) Themistocles

D) Pericles

Answer · why

D) Pericles

Pericles. He paid for the work with money the allies had contributed for war against Persia, and his critics, Plutarch says, likened the city to a vai...

Q 04/05

In Greek myth, which gift did Athena plant on the Acropolis to win the city as its patron?

A) An olive tree

B) A fig tree

C) A grapevine

D) A laurel tree

Answer · why

A) An olive tree

An olive tree. In the usual telling her rival struck the rock and raised only a salt spring, so the olive was judged the better gift and the city beca...

Q 05/05

The massive Bronze Age wall around the Acropolis was built in which masonry style?

A) Polygonal

B) Ashlar

C) Opus incertum

D) Cyclopean

Answer · why

D) Cyclopean

Cyclopean. Later Greeks could not believe that men had stacked boulders so huge, and credited walls like these to the Cyclopes, the giants of myth.