Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times (Kalos) by Paul Tyson

Author:Paul Tyson [Tyson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cascade Books
Published: 2014-07-29T07:00:00+00:00

75. Hellas is the word the classical Greek historian Thucydides uses to describe the place where Hellenes (that is, Greeks) live. Thucydides explains that well before classical times there were distinct tribes living around the Aegean Sea, but there was no common sense of cultural identity among them. Apparently Hellen (a man, and not Helen of Troy) was the first person to provide some sort of unifying inter-tribal sensibility to the region and this is how Hellas became a notion roughly meaning Greece. After Athens had fallen from its short imperial golden age (that is, after the time of Thucydides) the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great created a huge empire, and Greek cultural sensibilities were exported into Africa, Asia, parts of the Mediterranean basin, and Mesopotamia. So the period of ancient history from Alexander to the rise of the Roman Empire is often called the Hellenistic era. Even so, the educated classes of Imperial Rome spoke Greek and the love of Greek culture was a powerful feature of the Roman imperium, so Hellenism comes to mean the influence of Greek culture in the ancient world in a rather broad sense.

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