In addition to Hebrew ethical monotheism, Greek thought is the principal source of the Western tradition.  Through discussions of Hellenic history, literature, religion, and philosophy, this chapter examines how Greek culture moved from myth-making to systematic, self-conscious rational thought.

Greek civilization grew from Minoan and Mycenean culture.  The Minoans of Crete were peaceful people whose arts and crafts influenced those of their Mycenean contemporaries. On the Greek mainland, the Myceneans developed a warrior society based on honor.  Though a 300-year Dark Age followed the fall of Mycenean civilization, its art, crafts, and values exerted a powerful influence on later Greek culture.

After the Dark Age, the Greek polis began to take shape, achieving its highest development in Athens.  These small city-states emerged in Greece and the regions colonized by Greeks.  Based on the idea free citizenship, the polis was governed directly by its free adult males who believed that laws came not from gods or divine kings but from themselves.  The armed garrison state of Sparta, built upon a strict hierarchy of free warriors and helots, pointed one direction the polis could take.  However, Athenian democracy proved the more influential direction.  Through the efforts of Solon and Cleisthenes, Athens reduced aristocratic power, opening government to all free male citizens, who, in theory, served from a spirit of civic duty.  This system reached its height under Pericles.  Not without flaws, Athenian democracy rested on the backs of slaves, and while Sparta granted women power to manage the household, Athens excluded women from all public life, regarding them as minors who were legally their fathers' or husbands' wards.

Increasingly expansionistic, Athens clashed with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.  Athens and her allies ultimately lost the war, after which the city-states degenerated into civil strife and internecine warfare.  Severely weakened, the city-states finally fell under the dominion of Macedon.

This history is marked by important developments in literature and religion.  Set during the mythic Mycenean past, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey explore dimensions of human personality and themes of pride, justice, and universal order that later thinkers would treat more systematically.  In Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod, like Homer, examined ideas of justice and universal order.  He also considered the origin of the universe and of good and evil, issues later thinkers would examine through rational thought.  Both poets explored their themes in terms of the myths and deities of Olympian religion.  Succeeding earlier chthonic cults, this religion gained broad appeal throughout Greece.  Lacking fixed dogmas and priestly classes, Olympianism, with its all-too-human gods, also lacked moral standards by which people could live their lives.  In response, some Greeks gradually reimagined Zeus as arbiter of morality and justice.  Others turned to the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries.  Founded upon myths of death and rebirth, these cults emphasized ritual purification and emotional experience, offering adherents the promise of eternal life that Olympianism didn't.

Such mythopoeic thought gradually gave way to speculative philosophy.  Although philosophy never supplanted religion entirely, it enabled many thinkers to move beyond mythic explanations of the universe and arrive at ones based on self-conscious rational methods of inquiry.  The early Cosmologists, such as Thales, Pythagoras, and Democritus, developed rational accounts of nature in terms of imperishable substances, mathematical principles, or the properties of atoms.  Similarly, Hippocrates and his followers rejected mythic-religious explanations of disease and observed symptoms in order to identify their natural causes.  Against the Cosmologists, the Sophists argued that speculation about the universe was futile.  Instead, these thinkers scrutinized people and society and instructed men in the skills of citizenship.  Protagoras and other Sophists examined questions of ethics, law, and morality, but they were philosophical relativists whose critical method undermined traditional authority.

Greek philosophy reached its height in the Athenian thinkers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Unlike the Sophists, these philosophers shared the view that universal principles do exist and that those are available to the rational mind.  Socrates sought to discover those principles through rigorous dialectical discussion that forced his students to participate in the process of acquiring wisdom.  Though he sought to train morally self-aware minds, his challenging method gained him enemies who ultimately prosecuted him and forced him to commit suicide.  Plato located universal principles, which he called Ideas or Forms, in a higher realm of true Being.  The goal of philosophy, he argued, is to train the mind to perceive these Forms and the eternal truth they contain.  Plato also built a theory of the just state on universal principles.  Since only the best-trained minds can grasp these principles, only a philosophical elite, appropriately educated, can rule with true wisdom and moderation.  Aristotle synthesized the concept of universal principles he inherited from Socrates and Plato with the Cosmologists' attention to natural phenomena.  He applied this synthesis to both ethics and politics.  In both areas, by considering specific problems and examples, he offered a realistic assessment of human nature and practical guidelines for how people could make moral decisions and live happily in well-governed communities.

In laying the groundwork of Western thought, Greek thinkers established the principle of the autonomy of reason.  They also developed the subfields of philosophy, posed enduring questions, and pioneered the methods of scientific inquiry.  Further, they shaped the course of Christianity by providing the terminology and techniques Christian thinkers used to develop a systematic theology.  Although these theologians argued that reason was subject to God's revelation, confidence in reason's power never fully disappeared, and it ultimately reasserted its autonomy in the modern world.