the Fourth Week of Advent
Click here to learn more!
Bible Dictionaries
Greece
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or (or Hellas; Lat. Grœcia, Gr. Ἕλλας)
The southernmost part of what is now called the Balkan Peninsula was the cradle of a race whose ideas contained the germs of our present Western civilization. As the religious life of mankind divides itself into the time before and after the dawn of Christianity, so the rational and political life of mankind divides itself into the time before and after the expansion of Hellenism. The mental activity of the Greeks in the great classical period, culminating in the 5th and 4th centuries b.c., made not only the Hellas of later times but all the world their debtor. The language they spoke, the art and literature they created, the spirit of liberty they fostered, and the philosophical temper in which they faced the problems of life, form essential elements in the finest modern culture. If criticism is, as M. Arnold said, ‘a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world’ (Essays in Criticism, London, 1895, i. 38), the contribution of Greece can never be neglected.
Like Palestine, the other ancient home of great ideas, Hellas proper was a small country. The Hellenic part of the peninsula (to the south of Macedonia and Thrace), with the isles of Greece, was much the same in extent as the modern Greek kingdom-about 250 miles in greatest length and 180 in greatest breadth. In a large sense, however, Hellas was an ethnological rather than a geographical term, for it embraced every country inhabited by the sea-loving and enterprising Hellenes-all their settlements on the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, on the coasts of the Hellespont, the Bosporus, and the Euxine Sea. As the west coast of the homeland was mountainous and harbourless, while the east was full of gulfs, bays, and havens, Greece turned her back on Italy and her face to the aegean and Asia Minor, so much so that in the 6th and the beginning of the 5th centuries b.c. the centre of gravity of Hellenic civilization is to be looked for in Ionia rather than in Attica, the moat famous names in science, philosophy, and poetry being at that time associated with the Asiatic coast or the neighbouring Cyclades. But the Ionian Greeks, isolated by the estranging sea and weakened by internal jealousies, were unable to offer a successful resistance to the Persian advance, and the glory of saving European culture is due to the Athenians who fought at Marathon and Salamis.
In the classical period, Greece was an aggregate of self-governing city-States, of which Aristotle surveys no fewer than 158. These States combined for once, with brilliant results, in face of the Asiatic peril, but they never afterwards seemed to be capable of united action. Wasting their strength and resources in fratricidal wars which gave now Athens, now Sparta, now Thebes, a temporary hegemony, they proved in the day of reckoning too feeble to resist the military power either of the Macedonian monarchy or of the Roman republic. The career of Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, closed the Hellenic and opened the Hellenistic period of history. It created a world-Empire and a world-culture, both of which borrowed their best features from a Greece which was ‘living Greece no more.’ While the new order reinforced the old Hellenic elements in Asia Minor, it brought into being a vast number of Greek cities-the conqueror himself is said to have founded seventy-in lands hitherto barbarian. It made Greek the language of literature and religion, of commerce and administration, throughout the Nearer East. And when the Romans became the sovereign people, it was Greek rather than Roman ideals that they sought to make effective throughout their Oriental dominions. ‘The desire to become at least internally Hellenised, to become partakers of the manners and the culture, of the art and the science of Hellas, to be-in the footsteps of the great Macedonian-shield and sword of the Greeks of the East, and to be allowed further to civilise this East not after an Italian but after a Hellenic fashion-this desire pervades the later centuries of the Roman republic and the better times of the empire with a power and an ideality which are almost no less tragic than that political toil of the Hellenes failing to attain its goal’ (T. Mommsen, The Provinces of the Rom. Emp.2, 1909, i. 253).
Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans ever treated the conquered Greeks as ordinary subjects. The sacred land of art and poetry was not ruled like Egypt or Gaul. There was a province of Achaia, but never of Hellas, Such cities as Athena and Sparta were spared the humiliation of being placed under the fasces of a Roman governor and having to pay tribute to Rome. New Corinth, Caesar’s Roman colony, the least Hellenic of the cities of Greece, became the seat of government. Nevertheless, the free communities had little more than a simulacrum of their ancient power. The Roman governor could always make his voice heard in their councils, and a rescript from him brooked no delay in obedience. The right of bringing a proposal before the Ecclesia no longer belonged to every citizen, but was confined to definite officials, and the conduct of business was placed in the hands of a single στρατηγός. The citizens were always liable to be called to account for their proceedings (cf. Acts 19:40), while the sovereign power could at any moment cancel the constitution of a free city, and take the offenders under its own direct administration. At the best, Hellenistic life was now sorely cramped by the limitation of its sphere; ‘high ambition lacked a corresponding aim, and therefore the low and degrading ambition flourished luxuriantly’ (Mommsen, op. cit. i. 283). Shadowy assemblies still convened, engaged in grave debate, passed solemn resolutions, made appointments, and distributed honours. But political life of a serious kind was a thing of the past. Hellenism as described by such a writer as Plutarch already suggests ‘a gilded halo hovering round decay’ (Byron, The Giaour). ‘The general effect produced by the many pictures, allusions, references, illustrations which he takes from the Greek world of his times is that romantic adventures, great passions, monstrous crimes, were foreign to the small and shabby gentility of Roman Greece. The highest rewards he can set before the keenest ambitions are no better than if we should now fire our youths’ imagination with the prospect of becoming parish beadles, vestrymen, or at most town councillors’ (J. P. Mahaffy, The Silver Age of the, Greek World, 1906, p. 349).
The twenty years’ civil war, which ended in the transformation of the Roman Republic into an Empire, was calamitous to the Greeks, who seemed fated to be always on the losing side. They preferred Pompey to Caesar, Brutus to Antony, and they were compelled in the end to raise levies for Antony’s campaign against Octavian. The three decisive battles of the war-Pharsalus, Philippi, and Actium-were fought on the soil or the coast of Greece, and the contending armies almost bled the poor country to death. Many of its cities fell into decay, vast tracts of arable land were turned into pasture or reverted to the state of Nature, and ‘Greece remained desolate for all time to come’ (Mommsen, op. cit. i. 268). The dawn of the Christian era saw the nadir of her fortunes, the hour in which she was most neglected and despised. Thinking that an improvement might be effected by a change of administration, the Greeks petitioned Tiberius in a.d. 15 to transfer Achaia from the senatorial proconsul to an Imperial legate. This arrangement was sanctioned, and lasted till a.d. 44, when Claudius restored the province to the senate; whence there was once more a proconsul (ἀνθύπατος) in Corinth (Acts 18:12). Nero, who posed as a Philhellene, was accorded so flattering a reception during a progress through Greece that he bestowed freedom and exemption from tribute upon all the Greeks; but Vespasian found it necessary to restore the provincial government in order to avoid civil war. Greece received its greatest Imperial benefactions in the beginning of the 2nd century.
‘As Hadrian created a new Athens, so he created also a new Hellas. Under him the representatives of all the autonomous and non-autonomous towns of the province of Achaia were allowed to constitute themselves in Athens as united Greece, as the Panhellenes. The national union, often dreamed of and never attained in better times, was thereby created, and what youth had wished for old age possessed in imperial fulness. It is true that the new Panhellenion did not obtain political prerogatives; but there was no lack of what imperial favour and imperial gold could give. There arose in Athens the temple of the new Zeus Panhellenios, and brilliant popular festivals and games were connected with this foundation, the carrying out of which pertained to the collegium of the Panhellenes, and primarily to the priest of Hadrian as the living god who founded them’ (Mommsen, op. cit. i. 266).
Even in the period of greatest depression Hellas still maintained her old pre-eminence in education, though for a time the universities of Rhodes, Alexandria, and Tarsus rivalled that of Athens. The life of studious ease was to be enjoyed in the cities of Greece as nowhere else, and Plutarch cheerfully turned back from the vulgar splendour of Imperial Rome to the quiet refinement of his native Chaeroneia. In all that pertained to good taste and humanity the Hellenes continued to bear the palm. Gladiatorial shows were never popular in Greece, except in the Roman colony of Corinth, and Dio Chrysostom (i. 385) expressed his disgust and horror when these barbarities began on occasion to be seen even in Athens.
In religious rites and ceremonies Greece was remarkably conservative. Pausanias (Description of Greece [ed. J. G. Frazer, 6 vols., London, 1898]) records (passim) that as he went through the country in the 2nd cent. of our era he found the primitive worships faithfully maintained in every city and village by the simple, unquestioning natives. And the great religious festivals-Olympic, Isthmian, Pythian-never failed to attract crowds. It is a familiar fact that religious beliefs which science has discredited may still have a long life before them. Ever since the days of Plato the traditional religion of Greece had been ‘a bankrupt concern’ (Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 1912, p. 107). And among those who not only doubted or denied the existence of the Olympian gods, but turned in weariness and disappointment from Stoic, Epicurean, and Academic systems alike, there was a thirst for some deeper satisfaction of the soul’s wants. When Alexander’s empire extended the bounds of knowledge, attention began to be directed to foreign faiths, and Oriental mysteries gradually came into vogue. Sacrifice and prayer to Hera or Athene were replaced by the orgiastic worship of Cybele or the mystic rites of Isis. The Eleusinian Mysteries-the cult of Demeter and Cora-constitute ‘the one great attempt made by the Hellenic genius to construct for itself a religion that should keep pace with the growth of thought and civilization in Greece’ (W. M. Ramsay, Encyclopaedia Britannica 9 xvii. [1884] 126). The only native gods of Greece who could hold their own against foreign rivals were the mystery-deities, Dionysus and Hecate. The cult of Isis secured a foothold in the aegean islands, spread to Attica in the 3rd cent. b.c., to Rome in the 1st, and ultimately established itself throughout the wide Roman Empire, as the adoration of the Madonna has done in the Catholic world. ‘The great power of Isis “of myriad names” was that, transfigured by Greek influences, she appealed to many orders of intellect, and satisfied many religious needs or fancies’ (S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, 1904, p. 569). Christianity was preached in some of the leading cities of Greece soon after the middle of the 1st cent. (see Athens and Corinth), but made slow progress throughout the country, where paganism, in one form or another, maintained itself till about a.d. 600.
Ionia (Javan) was known to the later Hebrew prophets (Ezekiel 27:13, Isaiah 66:19), and the Jews of the 2nd cent. b.c. came into touch with Greece proper. References to Athenians and Spartans occur in 1 Maccabees 12-14, 2 Maccabees 6:1; 2 Maccabees 9:15; a long list of Greek cities is found in 1 Maccabees 15:23; and, according to 1 Maccabees 12:6, Jonathan the Hasmonaean greeted the Spartans as brethren and sought an alliance with them against Syria. During the Maccabaean conflict the term ‘Greek’ came to be used by strict Jews as synonymous with anti-Jewish or heathen (2 Maccabees 4:10; 2 Maccabees 4:15; 2 Maccabees 6:9; 2 Maccabees 11:24), and ‘Hellenism’ as identical with heathenism (4:10). See Hellenism.
Literature.-A. Holm, History of Greece, Eng. translation , London, 1894-98; J. P. Mahaffy, A Survey of Greek Civilisation, do. 1897, Rambles and Studies in Greece3, do. 1897, and Progress of Hellenism in Alexander’s Empire, do. 1905; J. G. Frazer, Pausanias and Other Greek Sketches, do. 1900; J. A. Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, do, 1898; L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, 5 vols., Oxford, 1896-1909, The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion, London, 1912; articles ‘Graecia’ in Smith’s DGRG [Note: GRG Dict. of Greek and Roman Geography.] , ‘Greece’ in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) , Encyclopaedia Biblica , ‘Griechenland’ in RGG [Note: GG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart.] .
James Strahan.
These files are public domain.
Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission.
Hastings, James. Entry for 'Greece'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/g/greece.html. 1906-1918.
