The university at Alexandria was home to the mathematicians Euclid, Apollonios and Archimedes, along with the inventors Ktesibios the water clock and Heron the model steam engine. People, like goods, moved fluidly around the Hellenistic kingdoms. Koine was a unifying cultural force: No matter where a person came from, he could communicate with anyone in this cosmopolitan Hellenistic world. At the same time, many people felt alienated in this new political and cultural landscape.
Once upon a time, citizens had been intimately involved with the workings of the democratic city-states; now, they lived in impersonal empires governed by professional bureaucrats. Hellenistic philosophers, too, turned their focus inward.
Diogenes the Cynic lived his life as an expression of protest against commercialism and cosmopolitanism. And the Stoics argued that every individual man had within him a divine spark that could be cultivated by living a good and noble life.
In Hellenistic art and literature, this alienation expressed itself in a rejection of the collective demos and an emphasis on the individual. The Hellenistic world fell to the Romans in stages, but the era ended for good in 31 B. Octavian took the name Augustus and became the first Roman emperor. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The classical period was an era of war and conflict—first between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the years B.
Archaic Greece saw advances in art, poetry and technology, but is known as the age in which the polis, or city-state, was For almost 30 centuries—from its unification around B. From the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom through the military conquests of the New By turns charismatic and ruthless, brilliant and power hungry, diplomatic and The Greek philosopher Aristotle B. Become A Member Tours Donate. What Is Hellenism? Donate to Support the Museum.
Support Our Work. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. All text and images on this site are protected by the U. And that Hellenization was most visible in a place like Sepphoris which was being reconstructed during the youth of Jesus. It was visible in several other cities around Galilee.
A place like Beth-shean, for instance, which still has a magnificent theater dating from the Hellenistic period. We have clear evidence in all of that architectural remains Hellenism was having a strong impact even on Galilee during this period. Early Christianity engaged Hellenistic culture generally, and more specifically Greek philosophy, from the end of the first century on.
We see bits and pieces of this in passages such as the prologue of the 4th Gospel where this concept of the logos comes to play. During the second century and beyond there's a continuing engagement over a variety of issues. Some of them having to do with fundamental philosophical issues such as the nature of reality and the nature of God.
Some of them having to do with issues of ethics and morality. These are two poles around which the dialogue develops during the course of the subsequent centuries. By the middle of the century we see someone like Justin Martyr, for instance, one of the early Christian apologists, that is, one of the people who was trying to explain Christianity to the Greco-Roman world and doing so in the context of and using the categories of Greco-Roman thought.
We see this fellow Justin Martyr active in Rome around the middle of the century trying to explain the nature of Christ and the nature of his relationship to God in terms of certain philosophical theories, the philosophical theory that comes ultimately from stoicism that postulates a dichotomy between speech that is external and thought that's internal Justin has a theology of the word of God that wrestles with the issue of what kind of status Jesus has as an intermediary between God and humankind.
And increasingly in the philosophical environment of the second and third centuries belief was becoming widespread that God was a very transcendent kind of being, that is, a being who is very distant from human kind. And therefore to say that Jesus was in some way God incarnate presents a philosophical conundrum, because it's impossible to conceive of the transcendent as immanent, as embodied in human flesh, the way that Christians were coming to proclaim. Justin and other Christian apologists certainly argued that the tradition of polytheistic belief and practice that was current in the Greco-Roman world was wrong, was immoral, and was philosophically deficient.
Insofar as they were making that last point -- that polytheism was philosophically insufficient -- they were saying something similar to what Greek philosophers were saying.
Because among Greek philosophers there was a growing appreciation for the unity of the divine and for the notion that there may be a single simple divine principle underlying all things. But no Greek philosopher of the second or third century would have thought that that divine principle could somehow have been enfleshed.
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