Classical Greece

Classical Greek civilisation is conventionally dated from the overthrow of the Athenian tyrants in 510 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. In the 5th century the city-states of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes turned back the Persian invasions of Darius and Xerxes (Marathon 490; Salamis 480), and Athens under Pericles built the Parthenon, staged the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and pioneered direct democracy. The 4th century brought the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the medicine of Hippocrates, the mathematics of Eudoxus, and — at the end — the Macedonian conquest under Philip II and his son Alexander, which in twelve years carried Greek language and culture to Egypt, Persia, and the borders of India. For Scripture, classical Greece matters in two ways. First, it gave the world Koinē Greek, the common-tongue descendant of Attic in which the Septuagint and the New Testament are written. Second, it shaped the philosophical climate Paul addressed at the Areopagus (Acts 17:16–34) and the social and rhetorical world of the Corinthian and Ephesian congregations. Daniel’s prophecy of the goat from the west (Dan 8:5–8, 21) foretold this rise.