Greece

It is a heavily mountainous, rocky outpost, on the extreme southeast of what would become Europe. It existed on the periphery of the known world of the ancient Near East. No one in the world of the Bronze Age would have expected it to have ever amounted to much especially after its existing palatial civilization collapsed. Yet out of the long-term reckoning of that collapse would come new forms of government and ways of exploring and viewing the world. However one wishes to conceive of “Western civilization,” it certainly found its origins in Greece.

Greece (Hellas in Greek) sits at the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula as it juts out into the Mediterranean Sea. The modern nation of Greece extends over the historic territory of Hellas along with areas of ancient Macedon and Thrace; in the ancient world the land of Greece was reckoned the peninsula of the Peloponnesus and mainland Central, or Continental, Greece, with Epirus and Thessaly representing its northern border, along with the constellation of islands which filled the Aegean Sea to the east, Ionian Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Most of the land of Greece is quite rugged; only within the past century have many of its towns and cities been connected by overland routes. Most association and trade among Greek towns took place by sea, and the geography well explains the ancient Greek penchant for many city-states (polis in Greek): sometimes at war, sometimes in alliances, but always in competition.

In Genesis 10:2-5 the Genesis author spoke of Japheth as a son of Noah who himself had a son named Javan among whose children were Elishah, the Kittim, and the Dodanim, who would populate “the coastlands”; Japheth is Iapetos in Greek and is reckoned as the ancestor of the Greeks; Javan is associated with the Ionians of western Asia Minor and Greece; Elishah with Cypriots; the Kittim with southeastern Asia Minor (and in later writings, the Romans), and Dodona was an ancient and well honored location in ancient Greece (and “Danaan” was one of the terms the most ancient Greeks used to speak of themselves). The Biblical record well accords with DNA evidence suggesting the islands and mainland of Greece were populated by people from Anatolia. Throughout the Hebrew Bible the “coastlands” and “islands” would be used to speak of lands controlled or heavily influenced by the Greeks.

The earliest flowering of civilization in Greece, and all of Europe, centered on Crete and the Cycladic islands of the Aegean Sea which we now speak of as the Minoan civilization (ca. 3200-1450 BCE). Minoan art and trade goods can be found throughout the Aegean, the Levant, and Egypt, and strongly influenced its successors, which we deem the Mycenaeans (ca. 1750-1050 BCE). The Mycenaean was a palatial civilization based in mainland Greece, with Mycenae as perhaps the strongest and most representative city-state. The Mycenaeans built well-fortified cities with what would be later deemed “cyclopean” walls, wrote in proto-Greek in what is called Linear B, and were active in trading and warfare among the various city-states which comprised the Mycenaean world along with the western coast of Asia Minor. Yet in most respects the Mycenaeans modeled themselves after the Bronze Age civilizations of the ancient Near East, maintaining a very top-heavy hierarchy centering on the palace and gifts and trading with other palaces.

Yet everything would change for Greece between 1250 and 1050 BCE: the Mycenaean, and in fact the entire Bronze Age ancient Near Eastern, system collapsed. Cities and palaces were destroyed or ultimately abandoned, as was writing and the Linear B script. Ramses III of Egypt, in the days of the judges of Israel (ca. 1150 BCE), testified to the ravages of the “Sea Peoples” whom he claimed destroyed cities and civilizations around the Mediterranean and who had invaded Egypt itself; while the “Sea Peoples” may have included many other people, it certainly featured many Mycenaean Greeks. After defeating the “Sea Peoples” Ramses III settled some of them, the Peleset, in the southwestern Levant; they would become the Philistines of whom Amos would declare originated from Caphtor, likely Crete (Amos 9:7).

From this period until ca. 776 BCE, the days of the judges, united monarchy, and the beginning of the divided monarchy in Israel, Greece experienced what had frequently been called its “Dark Age”; modern scholars prefer the less judgmental “Early Iron Age”. The population of Greece was halved by this time; later Greeks would claim an invasion of the Dorians, a Greek speaking people from the north, also took place during this time. The palatial administrative structure had completely collapsed and fallen, and quite notably, no one attempted to replace it. We have very little information about this period, which is why many referred to it as a “dark age”; while the characters and many of the details of the Iliad and the Odyssey are Mycenaean, many believe the social imaginary of these epic stories better reflects the Greek Early Iron Age. The ancient Greeks would always look back to the time of the Mycenaeans as a lost “golden age” and prized the Iliad and the Odyssey like we do the Bible. And yet what they would develop barely resembles the world of the Mycenaeans.

The period from 776 BCE until the defeat of Xerxes and the invading Persians in 480 BCE, the rest of the divided monarchy, the exile, and the early days of the Second Temple Period in Israel, is known as Archaic Greece. Everything which would reach its full flowering in the Classical period found its origins in Archaic Greece. Greece experienced a population explosion in the 8th century BCE which led to the consolidation of the smaller villages and kinship groups of the Early Iron Age into the poleis, or cities, developed as such for the first time, and also Greek colonies would again form on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor and throughout what would become Magna Graecia, “Great Greece,” in the southern half of Italy and on Sicily. Beginning this period with the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE is appropriate: representatives of the Greek poleis would convene and compete in various athletic contests, with great glory and honor bestowed upon the victors. Thus the elite among the various Greek cities cultivated and fostered this competitive spirit which also led to many other artistic, cultural, and military innovations. At some point in the ninth or eighth century BCE, a single individual (it would seem) developed a version of the Phoenician alphabet modified to reflect the Greek language which we now know as the Greek alphabetic script (which the Romans would modify to become the Latin script we use to this day), and according to some scholars, not primarily to record economic activity but in order to preserve the epic cycles we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey. The different cities were all Greek in language, religion, and character, yet developed different forms of governance: in the late Archaic period the democracy of Athens was prepared by the laws of Solon and the work of Cleisthenes, and the Spartans, having defeated and enslaved the neighboring Messenians and reducing them to “helots,” fine-tuned a highly disciplined militaristic society, and many other Greek city-states vacillated among tyrannies, oligarchies, and other forms of governance. During the Archaic period some Greeks devoted themselves to exploring the world around them and through such investigation attempted to explain how everything came to be and how everything should work: this quest for wisdom and understanding would be called philosophy, the pre-Socratic philosophers all date to the Archaic period, and Pythagoras advanced the study of mathematics and music. Archaic Greeks also developed new military strategies centered on what would be known as the phalanx, armed infantry formed in close rank and files, and they would soon be tested in a significant way.

From its inception the Persian Empire had maintained a significant presence in western Asia Minor. Since the Greek colonies on the coast of Asia Minor constantly instigated rebellions against the Persian authority, Darius I sent an invading force to conquer Greece in 490 BCE. Such began the Persian Wars, and on paper, it should not have been a contest: the Persian Empire was the largest the world had ever seen, with all the nations of the ancient Near East at their disposal, and the naval fleets of the Egyptians and Phoenicians; the Greeks, even at their most unified, were far smaller. And yet the Athenians and their allies defeated Darius’ forces at Marathon. A decade later, Darius’ son Xerxes (the Ahasuerus of Esther) vowed revenge against the Greeks and personally led an impossibly large army and navy against Greece. The Greeks would suffer defeat at Thermopylae and Athens would be burned; yet the Greeks completely smashed the Egyptian and Phoenician navies at the Battle of Salamis, and Xerxes’ land army would be decisively defeated the next year at Plataea. Against all odds the Greeks preserved their freedom from Persian domination; otherwise what we deem the origins of Western civilization would have been snuffed out before they could be well established.

The defeat of the Persians inaugurated what we now call the Classical period of ancient Greece, lasting around 150 years until 340 BCE. During the Classical period the Greeks rebuilt Athens with its Parthenon and many other marvels which we can see to this very day. The Classical period was the age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, philosophers of metaphysics and the natural world whose teachings and questions continue to drive philosophy and how we understand the world to this day. The Classical period also saw the flowering of Greek theater with the comedies of Aristophanes and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, often using the characters and stories of the Mycenaean heroic age to explore and sit in the challenges and difficulties of the present world, and studied and presented to this very day. Herodotus, the “father of history,” explored the known world and wrote his discoveries down in his Histories, which remains a primary source for a lot of ancient Near Eastern history and the Persian Wars.

During the Classical period Athens remained a democracy but cultivated and developed a maritime empire around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. They were resisted by the Spartans and the Peloponnesian League, leading to the Peloponnesian Wars (431-404 BCE), chronicled in a rigorous historical exposition by Thucydides. The Spartans ultimately defeated the Athenians but would lose hegemony over Greece to the Theban Boeotian Confederacy in the early 4th century BCE. Between the Persian Wars and Philip II of Macedon, the Greek world thus featured the rise and fall of coalitions centered around Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, and always with intrigue stemming from the involvement of the Persian court.

The Classical period featured the flowering of all sorts of intellectual, philosophical, and technological advancement rarely surpassed in human history. Yet the Greeks could never find unity among themselves. The Classical period would meet its end at the hands of those whom the Greeks would have considered backwater half-barbarians, the Macedonians to their north, who under Philip II defeated the Greek coalition at Chaeronea in 338 BCE and thus conquered Greece. His son Alexander, tutored by Aristotle himself, finished what his father started, exerted authority over all of Greece, and then set out and conquered the Persian Empire, and thus the whole ancient Near Eastern world, and even reached the Indus of India by 323 BCE.

From 323 until 146 BCE the Greeks experienced the Hellenistic Age. The Greeks may not have had much military power at this time, but their cultural and intellectual influence was rapidly transforming the world around them by means of the Macedonian empires throughout the Near East. Many Greeks decamped for the cities of these empires to the east or the Italy in the west.

Rome’s influence in Greece would grow throughout the second century BCE, culminating in the Battle of Corinth in 146 BCE, in which Corinth was completely destroyed, and all Greece would be absorbed by Rome into its Empire by 27 BCE. The Roman period in Greece would technically not end until 1453 CE and the fall of Constantinople. The Romans organized most of historic ancient Greece into the province of Achaea, and some of its northern areas were made part of Macedonia. During this time Greece would have no political power whatsoever beyond the local level; but in a very real way the Greeks would “conquer” the Romans in terms of intellect and culture. Roman elites highly valued well-studied Greeks as the tutors of their children, and such is why we speak rightly of Classical and Late Antiquity as “Greco-Roman.” Koine Greek remained the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean world; in the early part of the Roman period Paul would visit Greek cities such as Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, and Corinth, and established churches there. Over time the Greeks would come to see themselves as Romans, and in the days of the “Eastern Roman Empire” (or “Byzantine Empire”), the people of Greece identified as Romans (ca. 350-1450 CE).

The prophet Joel chastised the Phoenicians and Philistines for capturing Judahites and selling them into slavery to the Greeks (cf. Joel 3:4-6). In the days of the Maccabees, the Israelites appealed to the Spartans and entered into a league of friendship with them (ca. 145 BCE; cf. 1 Maccabees 12:20-30). We otherwise do not see many direct connections made between the Israelites and the Greeks proper before the days of Jesus. And yet it would be the Greek culture into which the Seleucids would compel the Jewish people to assimilate; the Hebrew Bible would be translated into Greek to become the Septuagint; Koine Greek was spoken throughout Israel in the Second Temple Period. The Gospel would come to Greece; while the Greeks would become Orthodox Christian, the prevalence of Greek-speaking and Greek philosophically instructed Christians would lead the story of what God accomplished in Christ to take on much of the scaffolding afforded by the Greek philosophical systems. The New Testament was communicated first and foremost, after all, in Koine Greek. The medieval world in the West was profoundly shaped by the synthesis of the Christian religion and Greek literature, mathematics, and philosophy, and in truth all philosophical theories to this day, in some way or another, represent a re-hashing of the various philosophical schools and ways of thought manifest in ancient Greece.

Thus Greece became the cradle of Western civilization; its religion and philosophy would dominate the ancient world; Judaism and Christianity would both be significantly defined by their engagement with, absorption of, and resistance to the thought world of the Greeks. We can marvel at and appreciate the contributions of the Greeks while also being on guard lest we are beguiled and captured by such philosophies (cf. Colossians 2:8). In all things may we submit to God in Christ through the Spirit and obtain the resurrection of life!

Ethan R. Longhenry