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.

For this site the significance is specific. Two of the strands the encyclopedia follows 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.

These two strands were never as separate as a modern eye expects. Plato’s dialogues argue like courtrooms and end like initiations; scholarship has long debated how much the philosophical ascent of the soul owes to the cultic ascent, and where exactly the line between reasoning and rite was drawn — if it was drawn at all. What is established is that the vocabulary itself is Greek. Logos, nous, gnosis, daimon, psyche, theos: the words in which later Hermetic, Gnostic, Neoplatonic, and Christian writers framed their highest claims were minted here, and carried their Greek freight with them.

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 figure of Hermes Trismegistus is itself a Greek reading of an Egyptian god; the Corpus Hermeticum is Greek philosophy in Egyptian dress, or Egyptian wisdom in Greek — the two are no longer fully separable. The Renaissance that recovered this material called it ancient wisdom and treated it as older than Greece. Much of it, on inspection, simply was 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