Children of Athena by Charles Freeman
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, the Stoics, the Epicureans—ancient Greek philosophy continues to shape thought in our day. And contrary to casual assumptions, Greek philosophy didn’t end somewhere BCE but continued to evolve for several centuries under the Romans, providing the new empire with the ways and means to understand the world they ruled.
The Children of Athena is focused on the period after the Roman conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean and before the Byzantine emperors, “beleaguered by their enemies, barbarian and otherwise,” began to enforce dogma by decree. During those centuries, the British author writes, Greek philosophy continued to flourish at “an intellectually highly sophisticated” level, shaping the early formation of Christianity and eventually influencing Judaism and Islam. Freeman astutely notes that “Greek theology would always be more sophisticated than its Latin cousin” for its firmer grounding in Plato and his descendants. The Children of Athena is also an easy-to-understand summary of Greek thought, a primer on the primary ideas that continue to resonate more than 2,000 years later.
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