United States or Spain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Those who spread the Christian doctrine among the Hellenized peoples and the sophisticated communities that dwelt round the Mediterranean found it necessary to explain and justify it by the metaphysical and ethical catchwords of the day, and in so doing they took Philo as their model.
Up to the first century of the Christian era the rabbis encouraged the union of Shem and Japheth the two good sons of one parent and the stream of ideas flowed quite freely between the teachers in Palestine and the Hellenized colony in Egypt.
Why, if survival of Nature cults, popular, and openly performed? A two-fold element in these cults, Exoteric, Esoteric. The Mysteries. Their influence on Christianity to be sought in the Hellenized rather than the Hellenic cults. Cumont. Rohde. Radical difference between Greek and Oriental conceptions. Lack of evidence as regards Mysteries on the whole.
Perseus died a few years after, as a state prisoner, at Alba on the Fucine lake; his son in after years earned a living in the same Italian country town as a clerk. Thus perished the empire of Alexander the Great, which had subdued and Hellenized the east, 144 years after its founder's death. Defeat and Capture of Genthius
Those settled in Sicily, Magna Graecia, and Campania came into contact with the Greeks at a period when they were unable to offer resistance to their civilization, and were either completely Hellenized, as in the case of Sicily, or at any rate so weakened that they succumbed without marked resistance to the fresh energy of the Sabine tribes.
The supposition of an especially close affinity between the Iapygian nation and the Hellenes finds further support in the frequent occurrence of the names of Greek divinities in the inscriptions, and in the surprising facility with which that people became Hellenized, presenting a striking contrast to the shyness in this respect of the other Italian nations.
Josephus indeed introduces in the speech the Hellenized doctrine of immortality, which regards the soul as an invisible spirit imprisoned in the mortal body and seeking relief from its prison. He goes on, however, to make the Jewish commander point out how preferable is death to life servitude to the Romans, in a way in which Eleazar might himself have spoken.
It thus fortunately happened that the deeper and maturer philosophy of Greece proper had a kind of intermedium between the systems of other nations and its own. The Eastern knowledge was borne to Europe through the Greek channels of Asiatic colonies, and became Hellenized as it passed. Thus, what was a certainty in the East, became a proposition in Ionia, and ultimately a doubt, at Athens.
The Emperor Hadrian resided long at Athens, and became imbued with a taste and admiration for Greek; and thus the literature of Rome became Hellenized. From this epoch the term classical can no longer be applied to it, for it no longer retained its purity. To Greek influence succeeded the still more corrupting one of foreign nations.
A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities, with their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken up, or at least brought into contact with each other and partially modified and hellenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life and religion was already being traced.
Word Of The Day