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Ancient Times:
Greece, Rome, and Christianity
Europeans were by no means the pioneers of human civilization. Half of recorded history had passed
before anyone in Europe could read or write. The priest of Egypt began to keep written records between
4000 and 3000 B.C.E., but 2,000 years later the poems of Homer were still being circulated in the Greek
city-states by word of mouth. Shortly after 3000 B.C.E., while the pharaohs were building the pyramids,
Europeans were laboriously setting up the huge, unwrought stones called megaliths, of which Stonehenge
is the best known example. In a word, until after 2000 B.C.E., Europe was in the Neolithic or New Stone
Age. This was in truth a great age in human history, the age in which human beings leaned to make and
use sharp tools, weave cloth, build living quarters, domesticate animals, plant seeds, harvest crops, and
sense the returning cycles of the months and years. But the Middle East – Egypt, the Euphrates and Tigris
Valley, the island of Crete, and the shores of the Aegean Sea (which belonged more to Asia than Europe) –
had reached its Neolithic Age 2,000 years before Europe. By about 4000 B.C.E. the Middle East was
already moving into the Bronze Age.
After about 2,000 B.C.E., in the dim, dark continent that Europe then was, great changes began
that are now difficult to trace. Europeans, too, learned how to smelt and forge metals, with the Bronze Age
setting in about 2000 B.C.E. and the Iron Age about 1000 B.C.E. There was also a steady infusion of new
peoples into Europe. They spoke languages related to languages now spoken in India and Iran, to which
similar peoples migrated about the same time. All these languages (whose interconnection was not known
until the nineteenth century) are now referred to as Indo-European, and the people who spoke them became
the ancestors both of the classical Greeks and Romans and of the Europeans of modern times. All
European languages today are Indo-European with the exception of Basque, which is thought to be a
survival from before the Indo-European invasion, and of Finnish and Hungarian, which were brought into
Europe from Asia some centuries later. It was these invading Indo-Europeans who diffused over Europe
the kind of speech from which the Latin, Greek, Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic languages were later derived.
The origins and spread of Indo-European languages.
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Key Terms
Indo-European Languages
The Iliad and The Odyssey
city-state
democracy
direct democracy
republican democracy
aristocracy
tyranny
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle
classics
Alexander the Great
Hellenistic Greece
The Roman Empire
Latin
pax Romana
Roman Law
Judaism
Jesus
Paul
Christianity
Constantine
Cult of Caesar
St. Augustine
The Greek World
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The first Indo-Europeans to emerge into the clear light of history, in what is now Europe, were the
Greeks. They filtered down through the Balkan Peninsula to the shores of the Aegean Sea about
1900 B.C.E., undermining the older Cretan civilization and occupying most of what has since
been called Greece by 1300 B.C.E.
Beginning about 1150 B.C.E., other Greek-speaking tribes invaded from the north in successive
waves. These newcomers included many restless, rough, and warlike tribes, and their coming
ushered in several centuries of chaos and unrest before a gradual stabilization and revival began in
the ninth century B.C.E.
The Iliad and the Odyssey, written down about 800 B.C.E., but composed and recited much
earlier, probably refer to wars between the Greeks and other centers of civilization, of which one
was Troy in Asia Minor.
o The siege of Troy (the story from the Iliad) is thought to have occurred about 1200
B.C.E.
The Trojan horse is a famous symbol from the Iliad.
Greek Accomplishments
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The ancient Greeks proved to be an exceptionally gifted people, achieving supreme heights in
thought and letters.
They absorbed the knowledge of earlier eastern cultures, such as the mathematical lore of the
ancient Chaldeans, and the arts and crafts that they found in Asia Minor and on voyages to Egypt.
They often added immediately to that which they learned.
It was the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. who formulated what the Western world
long meant by the beautiful, and who first speculated on political freedom.
As they settled down, the Greeks formed tiny city-states, all independent and often at war with one
another, each only a few miles across, and typically including a coastal city and its adjoining
farmlands.
o Many of these city states were democratic 1, which meant that all male citizens could
congregate in the marketplace to elect officials and discuss their public business. They
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Democracy is a form of government in which governing power is derived from the people, usually either
by direct referendum (direct democracy) or by means of elected representatives of the people (republican or
representative democracy).
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were not democratic in a modern sense in that slaves, resident noncitizens (called
“metics”), and women were excluded from political life.
Politics was turbulent in the small Greek states. Democracy alternated with aristocracy2, and
tyranny3
o From this rich fund of experience was born systematic political science as set forth in the
unwritten speculations of Socrates and in the Republic of Plato and the Politics of
Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E.
o The Greeks also were the first to write history as a subject distinct from myth and legend.
Herodotus, “the Father of History,” traveled throughout the Greek world and far beyond,
ferreting out all he could learn of the past. Thucydides, in his account of the wars
between Athens and Sparta, presented history as a guide to enlightened citizenship and
constructive statecraft.
The Classical Virtues
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Perhaps because they were a restless and vehement 4 people, the Greeks came to prize the
“classical virtues,” (classics) which would have great influence in the subsequent 5 history of
European societies.
o
They valued order, balance, symmetry, clarity, and control. Their statues of idealized
males revealed their conception of what humans ought to be – noble creatures, dignified,
poised, unterrified by life or death, masters of themselves and their feelings.
o
Greek thinkers of the fourth century B.C.E. criticized the web of myth that surrounded
most philosophical thought of the time. Rather than explaining the unknown by use of
gods, Greek thinkers looked for rational or natural explanations behind the variety and
confusion that they saw. In other words, the Greeks laid the foundation for modern
science.
Hellenistic Greece
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Greek influence spread widely and rapidly.
o
Hardly were some of the city-states founded when their people, crowded within their
narrow bounds, sent off some of their number with equipment and provisions to establish
colonies6. In this way, Greek cities were very early established in Italy, in Sicily, and
even in the western Mediterranean, where Marseilles was founded about 600 B.C.E.
The Greek city-states, unable to unite, eventually succumbed 7 to conquest by Philip of Macedon
(Macedonia is the northern part of the Greek world). His son, Alexander the Great (356-323
B.C.E), led a phenomenal, conquering march into Asia, across Persia, and on as far as India.
Alexander’s empire did not hold together, but Greek civilization, after having penetrated the
western Mediterranean, now began to influence the ancient peoples of Egypt and the Middle East.
o
The areas that Greek thought influenced became known as Hellenistic Greece.
 In fact, the most famous “Greeks” after the fourth century B.C.E. and on into the
early centuries of the Christian era usually did not come from Greece, but from
other Hellenized (Greek influenced) areas.
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Aristocracy is a form of government in which a few of the most prominent citizens rule.
Tyranny is a government in which power is vested in a single group or person.
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passionate
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later
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place far away from political leadership, but still controlled by them.
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gave in
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The Roman World
The Roman Empire
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In 146 B.C.E. the Greeks of Greece were conquered by a new people, the Romans, who kept their
own Latin language but rapidly absorbed what they could of the intellectual and artistic culture of
the Greeks.
Over a period of two or three centuries they assembled an empire in which the whole world of
ancient civilization (west of Persia) was included.
The Romans, though ruthless in their methods of conquest, in the long run acted as civilizing
agents. So thorough was the Romanization that in the West, Latin even became the commonly
spoken language.
o
Latin was later displaced by Arabic in Africa but survives to this day, transformed by
time, in the Romance languages of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Romania.
The Pax Romana
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In the Roman Empire, which lasted with many vicissitudes8 from about 31 B.C.E. to the latter part
of the fifth century C.E., virtually the entire civilized world of the ancient West was politically
united and enjoyed generations of internal peace.
Civilization among the elites in this vast empire was remarkably uniform; there were no distinct
nationalities, and the most significant cultural difference was that east of Italy the predominant
language was Greek; in Italy and west of it, Latin.
The distinctive aptitude9 of the Romans lay in organization, administration, government, and law.
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The Romans at first possessed self-governing and republican institutions, but they lost
them in the process of conquest. The governing talents which they displayed in the days
of the empire were of an authoritarian character.
 Locally, cities and city-states enjoyed a good deal of autonomy10. But above
them all rose a pyramid of imperial officials and provincial governors
culminating in the emperor at the top.
The empire kept peace, the pax Romana, and provided a certain justice for its many peoples.
o
Roman judges had somehow to settle disputes between persons of different regions, with
conflicting local customs. The Roman law came to hold that no custom is necessarily
right, that there is a higher or universal law by which fair decisions may be made, and
that this higher, universal, or “natural” law or “law of nature,” will be understandable or
acceptable to everyone, since it arises from human nature and reason.
o
The Romans regarded law as something to be formed by enlightened intelligence,
consistent with reason and the nature of things.
The Coming of Christianity
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The thousand years during which Greco-Roman civilization arose and flourished were notable in
another way even more momentous for all later human history. It was in this period that the great
world religions came into being.
o Within the time bracket 800 B.C.E. – 700 C.E. the lives of Confucius and Buddha, of the
major Jewish prophets, and of Muhammad are all included. At the very midpoint
(probably about 4 B.C.E.), in Palestine in the Roman Empire, a man named Jesus was
born, believed by his followers to be the Son of God.
Like Jesus, the first “Christians” were Jews; but both under the impulse of its own doctrine, which
held that all people were alike in spirit, and under the strong leadership of Paul, a man of Jewish
birth, Roman citizenship, and Greek culture, Christianity began to make converts.
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Ups and downs
skill
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independence
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Christianity eventually fused the monotheism of Judaism and its ethical teachings with the various
themes in Greek philosophy, creating a new synthesis of Judeo-Greek thought.
Christianity gained adherents11 across most of the Roman Empire, and there were certainly a few
Christians in Rome by the middle of the first century C.E.
Both Paul and the elder apostle, Peter, according to church tradition, died as martyrs 12 at Rome in
the time of Emperor Nero about 67 C.E.
Emergence and Spread of Christianity
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The Christian teaching spread at first among the poor and amongst women, the people at the
bottom of society, those whom Greek glories and Roman splendors had passed over or enslaved,
and who had the least to delight in or to hope for in the existing world. Gradually, Christian ideas
reached the upper classes.
Over time, Christianity grew in popularity. In the third century C.E. the Roman government, with
the empire falling into turmoil, and blaming the social troubles on the Christians, subjected them
to wholesale persecution.
In 312 C.E., the Emperor Constantine suddenly converted to Christianity.
o With this sudden jolt, Christianity spread like wildfire.
By the fifth century the entire Roman world was formally Christian; no other religion was
officially tolerated.
Christian Beliefs
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It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the coming of Christianity. Where the Greeks had
demonstrated the powers of the mind, the Christians explored the soul, and they taught that in the
sight of God, all souls were equal, that every human life was sacred, and that all worldly concerns
were in the last analysis superficial.
Typically, the Greeks identified good with beauty and bad with ugliness. Christians saw spiritual
beauty in all, no matter how they appeared on the outside. Suffering itself was in a way divine,
since God (Jesus) had also suffered on the Cross in human form.
Christians worked to relieve as none had worked before.
Persecution of Christians
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The Christians were often denounced and persecuted for their political ideas.
Before Constantine converted to Christianity, the Caesar was held to be a god.
o A cult of Caesar was established; Christians refused to accept this cult. It was because
they would not worship Caesar that the Roman officials regarded them as social
incendiaries13 who must be persecuted and stamped out.
The Christian doctrine on this point went back to Jesus’ belief that one should render to Caesar the
things that were Caesar’s, and to God those that were God’s.
St. Augustine
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In 410 C.E., Rome was plundered by non-Christian foreigners.
With this event obsessing his imagination, St. Augustine wrote the City of God in 420 C.E.
o He wrote City of God to show that though the material world could perish there was yet
another world that was more enduring and more important. There were, he said, really
two “cities,” the earthly and the heavenly, the temporal and the eternal, the city of man
and the “City of God.”
o St. Augustine argued that worldly affairs were always subordinate to a higher spiritual
power, to the City of God.
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converts
a person who dies for their cause.
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someone capable of causing commotion.
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It was with the spread of Christianity that the idea originated that spiritual power and political
power were held to be separate and independent.
Since the beginnings of Christianity, European worldly leaders have attempted to dictate on
spiritual matters, and spiritual leaders have attempted to dictate on worldly matters, but no side has
ever won out.
The idea that no ruler, no government, and no institution is too mighty to rise above moral
criticism eventually opened the way to a dynamic and progressive way of living in the West.
An artist’s rendering of what the historical Jesus could have looked like.
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