Greece, together with the adjectives 'Greek' and 'grecian,' are mentioned in the Bible about four dozen times. It first occurs in Isa 66:19, describing the Greece as one of the places to which God will send his servants to proclaim "my glory among the nations . . . and bring all your brothers, from all the nations, to my holy mountain in Jerusalem as an offering to the Lord."
Famous for bequeathing to the modern world the gift of democracy, ancient Greece was never a nation until 1821, but a constellation of about 1500 independent—and often warring (especially Athens and Sparta)—city-states (polis). Its early history is shrouded in thick mists of myths and legends of stange gods and titans who often behaved worse than humans, of conquests, wars, and tragedies. Historians of ancient Greece point to its earliest beginnings in the Minoan culture of Crete which collapse about the 14-13th Cent BC (about the time Israel was settling in Canaan), followed by the Mycenean civilization on the Peloponnese peninsula, before assuming the shape that we now know from Greek historians like Thucydides and Herodotus. But between 800 and 750 BC, says Edith Hall,
Greek culture changed forever. Some resourceful speakers of Greek, probably traders, borrowed the signs used by the ingenious Phoenicians to represent consonantal sounds, adopted some other signs to indicate vowels, and used them to write down in Greek their already canonical authors. . . . In writing down these poems, the freedom-loving Greeks, newly empowered by Phoenician technology, invented and cemeneted themselvs and their collective past." The most important of these were the Iliad by Homer, which provided the "charter myth of Greek ethnicity" for at least 12 centuries.
By the 7th Cent BC, this cultural revolution was beginning to develop into the independent mindedness (individualism), rational inclination and curiosity for which the ancient Greeks were famous, reaching the peak of their philosophical and scientific excellence in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the late 5th and early 4th Cent. Their sense of self-confidence and pride was only reinforced by their defeat of two invasions by the Persians, made famous in the stories of the Marathon and of Leonides and the 300. United in time of war against an outside enemy, their individualism prevented them from being united in time of peace. Greece would, despite their cultural greatness, have gone the way of most great ancient nations, had they not been forced by a tough-minded outsider, Philip of Macedonia, to form a Hellenic League. Philip was, however, murdered in 336 BC before he could realized his dream, and the task was left to his son, who would become known as Alexander the Great.
Alexander, strictly speaking, was not a Greek but had been tutored by two great Greek teachers—Lysimachus of Acarnania and Aristotle—who imbued in him a love for all things Greek. It was Alexander who spread Hellenist culture and values in all the places he conquered. While Greek culture and values blossomed everywhere, Greece itslef was, by the 2nd Cent BC, was already reaching the end of their civil and military rigour. The Romans were set on a path of greedy expansion. In 146 BC, e.g., Corith (on the same day as Carthage) was taken and razed to the ground by the Romans. The Romans gluttonously scooped up all the literary treasures of Greece and carted them back to Rome, where Greek ideas became the basis of Roman civilization, and through them, the philosophical framework of the Western world.
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