Ancient Greece

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Ancient Greece was not a country but a scatter of independent city-states — Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and hundreds more, spread across the Aegean, the coast of Asia Minor, and colonies from the Black Sea to Sicily — bound by a shared language, a shared body of myth, and a shared sense of being Greek against everyone else. The Greeks called the land Hellas and themselves Hellenes. The civilization conventionally dated from the eighth century BCE, when the Iliad and Odyssey took written form, runs through the classical flowering of the fifth and fourth centuries to the conquests of Alexander, after which Greek culture spread across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East in the period historians call Hellenistic.

The political geography mattered to everything that grew out of it. No central authority, no priesthood with a fixed canon, no empire holding the cities in one hand: each polis kept its own laws, its own calendar, its own patron deity and local hero, and competed with the rest in war, athletics, and prestige. Greek religion had no scripture and no creed — it was a thing performed rather than believed, a year of sacrifices and festivals carried out so that the city would prosper and the gods would not turn away. Into that openness, with nothing official to contradict, two distinct ways of pressing past the surface of the world took shape, and both of them ran on long past the cities that bred them.

Two currents that run all the way down into the later esoteric and theological traditions were born here. The first is philosophy: the practice, traced from the Ionian thinkers through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of asking what the world is made of and how a life should be lived by argument rather than by appeal to the gods. The second is the mystery religions — the secret initiatory cults at Eleusis, the rites of Dionysus, the brotherhoods that gathered around the names of Orpheus and Pythagoras — which promised their initiates a changed relation to death and the divine, and which left almost no record because secrecy was the point.

The philosophical strand

The story conventionally opens on the Ionian coast, in the trading city of Miletus, in the sixth century BCE. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes asked a question no surviving culture had quite asked in that form: not which god made the world but what the world is made of — water, or the boundless, or air under pressure — and answered it without invoking the gods at all. The move was not atheism; it was a wager that the cosmos has an order the mind can reach by reasoning. The early texts survive only as fragments quoted by later writers, reconstructed in the great nineteenth-century editions and laid out for English readers in John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy, which still frames the Milesians as the first to look for a single material principle, an archē, beneath the flux of things.

From that opening the line runs through Heraclitus and his world-ordering logos, through Parmenides and the Eleatics who argued that change is illusion, through the Atomists and the cosmos of void and indivisible particles, to the turn that Socrates forced in fifth-century Athens. Socrates wrote nothing; what survives is the figure his pupils made of him — the man who turned the question from the heavens to the human, who claimed to know only that he knew nothing, and who was tried and executed by the city in 399 BCE for impiety and corrupting the young. His pupil Plato built from that death a philosophy of two worlds: the shifting things the senses report, and the eternal Forms that the soul, rightly trained, can come to know. Plato’s pupil Aristotle reversed the gaze, locating form within things and founding the disciplines — logic, biology, physics, ethics, the analysis of tragedy — by which the West would divide knowledge for two thousand years. The vocabulary of the soul (psyche) and of the intellect (nous) was fixed in their pages with a precision later traditions would mine without exhausting.

What made this strand portable was that it never became the property of a single city or sect. Plato founded the Academy in a grove outside Athens; Aristotle founded the Lyceum; the Stoics taught in the painted colonnade — the stoa — that gave them their name, and the Epicureans in a garden. These were schools, not churches: they trained successors, kept libraries, and carried on their arguments across generations and after the death of the founder. When the classical city lost its independence to Macedon and then to Rome, the schools survived the cities, and it was through the schools — above all the long Platonic line that ran to Plotinus and the Neoplatonists — that the philosophical strand reached late antiquity intact. The closing of the Athenian Academy by Justinian in 529 CE is often given as the symbolic end of the classical philosophical institution, by which time its texts and its categories had already been absorbed into the theology written in Greek across the Christian and Islamic worlds.

The mystery strand

Alongside the philosophers, and often among the same people, ran the initiatory cults. These were not a separate religion competing with the civic gods but an intensification within Greek religion — an offer, to those who paid and prepared, of something the public festivals did not give. At Eleusis, fourteen miles from Athens, the Mysteries of Demeter and her daughter were conducted every year for close to a thousand years; initiates fasted, processed by torchlight, and were brought in the windowless Telesterion to a vision whose content they were forbidden, on pain of death, to speak. No initiate ever broke the silence in a surviving text, and so the rite is known only by its architecture and its effects: the testimony, repeated by writer after writer, that those who had seen it no longer feared death. The cults of Dionysus worked by a different route — wine, dance, the dissolving of the self in the god — and the brotherhoods that traced their teachings to Orpheus and Pythagoras added a doctrine the public cults lacked: that the soul is immortal, fallen into the body, and bound to a cycle of rebirth from which the purified can escape. The Pythagorean communities of southern Italy went further still, binding initiates into a shared life of dietary rule, study, and secrecy — a brotherhood that was at once a religious order, a school of mathematics, and, for a time, a political faction. Inscribed gold tablets buried with the Orphic-Bacchic dead, found from Thessaly to Sicily, give terse instructions for the soul’s passage in the underworld — what to say to the guardians, which spring to drink from — the nearest thing to a leaked page of a mystery doctrine that survives.

The defining account of what the mysteries did belongs to Aristotle, who wrote that the initiate was not there to learn anything but to undergo something and be brought into a state — a transformation of the person, not a transmission of facts. That formula, preserved by the later writer Synesius and made central by modern scholarship, marks the deepest difference between the rite and the argument: the philosopher’s ascent was something you reasoned your way to, and the initiate’s was something done to you in the dark. Yet the two were never as separate as a modern eye expects.

Where argument and rite meet

Plato’s dialogues argue like courtrooms and end like initiations. The Symposium stages the ascent to Beauty itself in the explicit language of the Eleusinian greater and lesser mysteries; the Phaedrus describes the soul’s vision of the eternal as an initiation into the most blessed of rites; the Phaedo distinguishes the true initiate from the man who merely carries the wand. Whether Plato is reporting an experience or borrowing a vocabulary is a problem the philologist Christoph Riedweg sharpened into a discipline: the mystery-words function as a literary transposition, but the transposition only works because the rite behind it produced a real and vivid thing. The Orphic and Pythagorean teaching of the immortal, transmigrating soul is, on the philosophical side, simply Platonism’s own doctrine of the soul, arrived at by a different door. Scholarship has long debated how much the philosophical ascent owes to the cultic one, and where the line between reasoning and rite was drawn — if it was drawn at all. What is established is that the same culture produced both, that the same men sometimes practiced both, and that the order each described — a hidden truth reached by stages, the soul climbing toward the divine — is recognizably one order seen from two sides. The kinship between number and cosmos worked out in Pythagorean-Platonic harmonics is the clearest case of the two strands fused: a mathematics that was also a path of purification.

The vocabulary of the divine

What both strands left behind, and what carried furthest, was a language. The words in which later Hermetic, Gnostic, Neoplatonic, and Christian writers framed their highest claims were minted here, in Greek, and carried their Greek freight with them. Logos — at once word, reason, ratio, and the world’s intelligible order — became, in the Gospel of John, the divine Word made flesh, and in the Corpus Hermeticum the creative utterance of the Mind of God. Nous, the intellect that in Aristotle thinks itself, became in the Neoplatonists the first emanation from the One and the level of reality at which the divine is mind. Gnosis, the ordinary Greek for knowledge, hardened into a technical name for the saving knowledge of God that delivers the soul. Psyche, daimon, and theos traveled the same way. None of these terms began as theology; each was a Greek word for a Greek thing, drafted afterward into claims about ultimate reality, and each kept, inside its new use, the shape of the world that had coined it.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The Greek philosophical corpus reaches the modern reader along two channels. For Plato, Aristotle, and the major Neoplatonists, substantial works survive in Byzantine manuscripts winnowed through the libraries of Alexandria, Athens, and Constantinople and printed from the Aldine editions of the early sixteenth century onward; for the Presocratics, the early Stoa, and Epicurus, the original works are lost, and what survives are fragments quoted by later authors, assembled in Hermann Diels’s Doxographi Graeci (1879) and Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903), the source of the universal DK numbering used to cite the Presocratic fragments. For an English reader, Benjamin Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato (1871, rev. 1892), Thomas Taylor’s pioneering translations of Plato and the Neoplatonists, and Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy remain in print and in the public domain; the fuller scholarly picture of the field is laid out in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s survey of ancient Greek philosophy.

The mystery and esoteric material is harder, because secrecy was the point and the cults kept no scripture. No primary cultic text from Eleusis survives; the rite is reconstructed from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, from Pausanias and Plutarch, and from the hostile but informative reports of the Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria. The Orphic poetry survives as fragments collected by Otto Kern (1922); the Hermetica reached the English-reading public through Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906) and Walter Scott’s Hermetica (1924–26) before the critical editions of Nock and Festugière and the translation of Brian Copenhaver (1992) became the scholarly standard. The argument that the philosophical ascent and the cultic one share a structure was put on a philological footing by Walter Burkert’s Ancient Mystery Cults (1987) and Christoph Riedweg’s study of mystery terminology in Plato, Philo, and Clement (1987). Philo’s own corpus, the bridge from Greek philosophy into Jewish and Christian theology, is available complete in English only in C. D. Yonge’s Victorian translation, hosted in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and superseded for scholarship by the Loeb edition of Colson, Whitaker, and Marcus.

The long afterlife

That afterlife is the longer story. When Egyptian priests and Jewish exegetes and Christian theologians began to write about God in the Hellenistic world, they wrote in Greek and thought, often, in Greek categories. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of the early church, read the Hebrew scriptures through Plato and the Stoics, made the logos the mediator between an unknowable God and the world, and bequeathed to Christian theology a method of allegorical reading and a vocabulary it would never set down. The figure of Hermes Trismegistus is itself a Greek reading of an Egyptian god — the scribe-god Thoth refracted through Greek philosophy — and the Corpus Hermeticum that gathered under his name is Greek philosophy in Egyptian dress, or Egyptian wisdom in Greek; on inspection the two are no longer fully separable. G. R. S. Mead, who put the first complete English Hermetica into print as Thrice-Greatest Hermes, called the corpus a Hellenistic theosophy, and the philological work since has confirmed its date: not the antediluvian Egyptian revelation the Renaissance took it for, but a product of the same Greek-speaking Egypt that produced Philo and the Neoplatonists.

The Renaissance that recovered this material called it ancient wisdom and treated it as older than Greece. Marsilio Ficino, ordered by Cosimo de’ Medici to set Plato aside and translate the newly arrived Hermetica first, placed Hermes at the head of a chain of prisca theologia — an ancient theology descending through Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato to the threshold of Christ. Isaac Casaubon’s 1614 demonstration that the Corpus was a late-antique Greek composition did not end the lineage so much as relocate its prestige. Much of what the Renaissance prized as wisdom older than Greece was, on inspection, simply Greece, returning under other names.

→ In the library: The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett, 1892) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Logos · Nous · Hermes Trismegistus · Olympia · Socrates · Plato · Aristotle · Mystery Religions · Eleusis · Dionysus · Orpheus · Pythagoras · Psyche · Corpus Hermeticum · Philo Of Alexandria · The Renaissance · Parthenon · Pythagorean Platonic Harmonics · Stoicism