GREECE

The small and famous country in southeastern Europe, Javan to the Hebrews, appears in the Table of Nations (Gen. 10:2, 4; cp. 1 Chron. 1:5, 7). Also mentioned in Is. 66:19.

Its northern limit has never been exactly determined, but it can be passed through the chain of Olympus.
To the south, the limit was the Mediterranean, to the east the Aegean, to the west the Ionian and the Adriatic.

It also includes the Hellas archipelago, and, formerly, the western coastal area of modern-day Turkey.
At the time when the Mediterranean was the great vehicle of civilization, Greece enjoyed, thanks to its location, singular privileges.

The true history of Greece begins with its first documents, from the first Olympiad, in 776 BC. Before, during the period known as heroic, history is so mixed with legends that it is difficult to disentangle between facts and myths. However, it seems certain that the Greeks descended from four tribes. They claimed to have a common ancestor, Helenus.

Within these tribes, the Aeolians and Achaeans played a great role during the heroic era. Homer sometimes applies the name Achaeans to all Greeks. The other two tribes, the Dorians and the Ionians, rose in importance in historical times; the Athenians descended from the Ionians; the Spartans, of the Dorians.

Thus, the heroic era, marked by the expedition of the Argonauts, the Trojan War, etc., ends with a period of transition, and at its end, after a series of invasions, we find the Dorians in the Peloponnese, the Aeolians in the center of the country, to the Ionians in Sparta.

(a) CITIES:
Cities were organized independently and even in highly contrasting ways. You can briefly follow the historical development of Greece until Alexander the Great with the common thread of the following cities: Athens, Sparta, Corinth and cities of Ionia.
Athens.

After the destruction of Mycenae, there was an emigration of Mycenaeans to Athens, who contributed their arts and knowledge to the splendid development of the city. A rebellion led in 700 B.C. at the end of the monarchy in the city, which came to be governed by a council of nobles.

These oppressed the peasants under a feudal regime. This situation led to great social unrest and, in the year 564 BC, a nobleman named Solon proposed an agrarian reform. This was rejected, and the outbreak became inevitable. After a revolution, a powerful warrior, Pisistratus, prevailed in the year 560 BC, as Tyrant.

He banished the nobles and implemented agrarian reform. There came a splendid development of arts and letters, Athens becoming the cultural center of Greece. Upon the death of Pisistratus there was a certain period of turbulence.

His successor, Cleisthenes, completely destroyed the power of the resurgent nobles and established a regime of government that gradually led to a kind of popular democracy. Questions of legislation and government were settled in a popular assembly, with all citizens over 20 years of age participating.

It must be taken into account that neither slaves nor women were citizens, and certainly not foreigners. This popular assembly was advised by a Council of Five Hundred, which was chosen by lot from all citizens, not by election.

This government regime is where figures such as Pericles and Demosthenes, great and eloquent orators, stood out. In Athens it deprived the civil sense of life.
Sparta.

Sparta presented a sharp contrast to Athens. It was a totalitarian and warlike state, where the individual only lived as a function of the state. The entire culture and organization focused on strengthening control over the peoples subjected as slaves, through the creation of a fierce caste of soldiers who were unbeatable.

His sense of life was military, not civil. His contributions to literature, art or architecture were minimal.
Maroon.

Corinth, for its part, was governed by dictators who had to maintain the support of their citizens. Notable among them was Periander.
Ionia.

Ionia, the coast of Asia Minor, was the base of various cities founded by the Greeks, such as Ephesus, Miletus, Pergamum, etc. In this way, it can be said that the Aegean Sea, closed to the north by the Hellespont and to the south by the island of Crete, was the sea of the Greek world.

The Greek cities thus continued a separate and independent development until the crisis of 550 BC. Croesus of Lydia was then defeated by Cyrus of Persia. In the year 500 BC, there was a rebellion of the Greek cities of Ionia against Darius Hystaspes, supported by forces from European territory.

Persia waged a victorious campaign of punishment, destroying Miletus. Then Darius undertook a campaign against Greece itself. In the year 490 B.C. There was a naval expedition in the Aegean Sea. The Athenians then achieved a great victory at Marathon over the Persian army that had landed and advanced into Greek territory.

With a surprise attack, General Miltiades managed to defeat a much superior Persian army. This led to the reaction of the Persian Empire under Darius’s successor, Xerxes (the Ahasuerus of the book of Esther), who invaded Greece and defeated the Greeks at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Themistocles, with a cunning maneuver of his light ships, destroyed the Persian naval power at the Battle of Salamis.

In the year 479 the Persian threat was definitively removed with the Greek victory at Plataea.
In this way, the Greek confederation under Athens (Delia League) had achieved the liberation of Ionia, and the security of the area. However, when some cities wanted to break away from a confederation made for provisional purposes, they found an Athenian power unwilling to lose its hegemony.

Faced with this attempt to form an Athenian Empire, the Spartan League was formed, beginning a series of internal struggles, called the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), which ended with the defeat of Athens, Sparta’s attempt in turn. of achieving hegemony, and the defeat of Sparta at Naxos (376 BC).

A situation that led to a prostration that ultimately led to the conquest of Greece by Philip II of Macedonia, despite the efforts of Demosthenes, and that culminated in the year 338 BC, after the battle of Cheronea. Alexander the Great’s son would embark on the conquest of the Persian Empire.

After the division of Alexander’s empire and the gradual loss of power of Greece, various political-military circumstances led the Romans to the conquest of Greece, incorporated into the Empire from the year 146 BC. with the name of Achaia.

(b) LATER HISTORY.
Incorporated in the year 146 BC. to the Roman Empire, Greece became part of the Eastern Empire, or Byzantine Empire, during the Middle Ages. The crusaders took possession of it in the 13th century. In the 14th century it was conquered by the Turks, under whose yoke it remained until the uprising of 1821.

After tough battles, independence was achieved, with the help of France, England and Russia, which destroyed Turkish power in the naval battle of Navarí (1827). Greek independence was formally recognized at the London Conference (1830).

With the Treaties of Bucharest of 1919-1920, it acquired territories in Asia Minor itself, from which it was expelled by the Turkish nationalist revolution (1922) started in 1920 by Mustafa Kemal “Ataturk”. Attacked by Italy in 1940, it put up an effective resistance, which collapsed before the intervention of German troops in 1941.

Liberated in 1944 from the Germans, it fell into a civil war between communist partisans and royalist troops. After several incidents it has been, since 1974, a republic.

(c) RELIGION IN GREECE
It was during the dark ages that the Greeks developed their ideas about their gods and life. There are no dogmas or magic, priests or superstitions among them. Their gods were beings who had been human and had achieved immortality.

The Greek gods were believed to live in splendid palaces on the summit of Mount Olympus in northern Greece. However, instead of always staying there, they descended to earth frequently, often interfering in human affairs.

In myths they are often seen acting like spoiled children, scolding each other. If there was a man who became a great hero, he was allowed to join the gods, becoming part of the immortals.

An example of the meanness of the Greek gods in mythology is that Zeus, the father of the gods, is presented as a cowering husband, always trying to keep his watchful wife Hera from finding out what she was doing.

Famous myths are those of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans, for which he was condemned to eternal punishment. Another is that of Orestes. Orestes’ mother, Clytemnistra, had killed her husband Agamemnon, Orestes’ father. Clytemnistra died at the same time at the hands of Orestes, her own son. For this crime of matricide he was persecuted by the Furies.

Homer’s poems, for their part, represent the gods appearing to men to direct them, encourage them, or stop them.
Thus, the pantheon of Greek gods can be recapitulated as follows:

Zeus, god of the sky;
Hera, his sister and wife, goddess of domestic fire and marriage.
Demeter, of agriculture.
Poseidon, of the sea.

Hephaistos, of the forge and fire.
Ares, of war.
Apollo, of light, music, knowledge;
Artemis, his sister, of hunting, modesty, innocence.

Hermes, of thieves and merchants, luck and wealth.
Athena, of manual work, wisdom, arts and sciences.
Dionysus, god of wine (equivalent to Bacchus among the Romans).
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love.

Later developments are the Orphic and Pythagorean schools, with which new beliefs appear about the existence of a future life with rewards and punishments. The mystery cults (Eleusis) assure initiates a life after death. There are later additions, among which the introduction of the orgiastic cult of Dionysus, in the 7th century BC, and in the 4th century that of Aesculapius, the god of medicine, stands out.

(d) PHILOSOPHY IN GREECE
Faced with all these idolatrous beliefs and practices, and a degeneration of customs, a deep lack of satisfaction and disbelief in the myths and gods of polytheism arose. Thus arises the current of philosophy, which tries to seek the truth by the means of human reasoning.

It is a long story in the dead end of a groping search, in which the most valid were the questions posed. The answer could only be given by divine revelation, which should be accepted with a humility that is difficult to find in the rationalist mentality.

Thus a long journey was undertaken, exploring all possible avenues to get to know the reason for the existence of man, his origin and destiny, his nature, the nature and personality of the God who was glimpsed behind everything, if he could reach it. be known.

There are several schools of thought that developed:
(A) Thales of Miletus can be considered the first known philosopher (624-546 BC). He saw water as the fundamental principle of everything that exists.

(B) Anaximander (611-546 BC) is the first of whom we have news who openly proposed the transformism of living forms. He suggested that men came from fish.

(C) Pythagoras of Samos (580-500 BC) founded a society of initiates who sought in the harmony of numbers the ultimate essence of the universe, reducing everything to mathematics, and proposing the transmigration of souls.

(D) Parmenides of Elea (475 BC) outlines the idea that thought is the only true reality, developing a monistic pantheism.

(E) Empedocles (450 BC) states the principle that the universe is made up of four elements (water, air, earth and fire), which interact with each other based on two forces, love (which seeks union), and hatred (which seeks separation).

(F) Democritus of Abdera (born around 470 BC) proposes an atomic system, in which a great multitude of atoms, with great diversity of shapes, and in motion, entering into a multitude of combinations, give all the existing forms in the universe.

For him, everything, including life, is matter and movement. He recognizes a nature in which there is law, but no purpose. He is the father of mechanistic materialism. His disciples were Epicurus and Lucretius, who took this atheistic system to its logical extreme of hopelessness.

(G) Plato (427-347 B.C.), disciple of the famous Socrates (469-399 B.C.), opposes relativism and arrives at idealism, in which the ultimate reality resides in the world of Ideas, embodied only imperfectly in the world. Of the mattery. He proposes a paternalistic totalitarian state.

(H) Aristotle of Stagira (324-322 BC) was a disciple of Plato. He founded the Lyceum of Athens, and was an instructor of Alexander the Great. In his works he dedicated himself to classifying and systematizing all the knowledge of his time. He was the founder of formal logic or Aristotelian logic, trying to achieve a coherent system of the universe in its different relationships.

After Aristotle, Greek philosophy entered a slow process of decline. It can be said that Aristotle had been the climax. After him comes a descent into movements such as Epicureanism (see EPICUREANS), founded by Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) and Stoicism (see STOICS), founded by Zeno of Kition (336-264 B.C.).

Another powerful force in this decline is the birth of skepticism and the doctrine enunciated by Pyrrhus (360-270 BC), which affirms the impossibility of certain knowledge (agnosticism). It leads to an absolute distrust in the senses and in the reasoning capacity to reach true knowledge.

This leads to an eclectic position in which everything fits, since we have reached a total hopelessness of being able to know the truth. Dogmas are rejected and only opinions are admitted. Thus we have in Greek philosophy the root of the history of Western thought in its attempt to achieve true knowledge apart from God, through human reasoning alone. An initial optimism is followed by total hopelessness, and the assumption of materialistic, fatalistic, and/or comfortable positions.

(e) EVANGELIZATION OF GREECE
The first place where the Gospel was proclaimed in Europe was Philippi, in Macedonia (see PHILIPPI). The next city mentioned is Thessaloniki (see). But it was in Athens where the Gospel collided with philosophy. Philosophers from the Epicureans and the Stoics wanted to hear Paul, and they brought him to the Areopagus, which was located near the Acropolis (see AREOPAGUS).

There he gave a speech that began with the theme of “THE UNKNOWN GOD.” Indeed, with all its speculation and pretense, the wisdom of this world has not known God (cf. 1 Cor. 1:21, 22-30; 2:4-7).

Man must accept the knowledge that only God can impart: the true knowledge about man, his origin, his fall into sin, his need, the patience of God and his coming judgment, and the provision that He He has prepared salvation in Christ for everyone who believes.

Paul outlined all this in his speech at the Areopagus, before that company of philosophers. Especially direct is his assessment of all of man’s efforts apart from God: “God, having passed over the times of this ignorance, now commands all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30).

It is noteworthy that the doctrine of the resurrection (Acts 17:31-32) was openly opposed to the Greek concept of liberation of the soul from the body. That is where they stopped listening, unable to accept, like so many today, this fundamental and historical truth on which our faith is based: the true and objectively resurrected Christ, conqueror of death, who introduces us, once it has occurred reconciliation for his death, in the sphere of resurrection life.

“Some mocked, and others said, ‘We will hear you about this again’” (Acts 17:32). “The Greeks seek wisdom” (1 Cor. 22). But the wisdom of God reaches much higher than that of men.

In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul had to confront philosophical trends that sought to deny the fact of the resurrection by trying to impose Greek philosophical conceptions on the church. The entire chapter 15 of said epistle is a vehement defense of this capital fact against rationalizing speculations.

Later, the corrupting effects of the application of the concepts of Greek philosophy would find expression in Gnosticism, which was a mixture of Greek idealism and Persian dualism with other mystical elements and Christian vocabulary (see GNOSTICISM).

Later, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle would be used for the erection of theologies foreign in spirit to the revelation of God in his word. The action of the Reformers gave us back the legacy of “Sola Scriptura”, to which the apostle Paul entrusted us, in his farewell speech to the elders of Ephesus: “I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which He has power to build you up and give you an inheritance with all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32).

Thus, the history of Greek philosophy is the history of autonomous human thought. Starting with great flights, it reaches a climax. Not having found an answer that would satisfy the entire man, who can only find his satisfaction in God (cp. Eccl. 3:11) prior to reconciliation with Him, philosophy begins its decline, until it reaches the hopeless existentialist stage. .

This cycle of Greek philosophy, done in ignorance (cp. Acts 17:30) has been repeated in Western civilization following the “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment”, now mired in “vital anguish.” But in the West it has not been in ignorance, but in apostasy, with the deliberate abandonment of a revelation given in Christ.