Emergence of Diverse Methods of Political Thinking in Ancient Societies

Believing the Gods to be forces that arbitrarily amused themselves by toying with their pawns, humankind, the Greeks found a great deal of detachment. They resigned themselves to their fate and thus concern was replaced by the pursuit of knowledge. The Ionic natural philosophers of the 6th and 7th centuries B.C., along with their descendants, were convinced that a world plan existed that was driven by conception. The pursuit to recognize this plan by great thinkers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle thus initiated the origin of Sciences. The self-confidence and awareness of these men as observers and creators of their world therefore saw the evolution of fields such as philosophy, physics, mechanics, medicine and biology. These in turn led to the emergence of new and sometimes diverse methods of political thinking. Ethics and theories of the state were written as the guiding principles for human action. Social conflicts and the existence of the individuals were dealt with in Homer’s epic and the Greek tragedies. The emphasis on individualism soon became a hallmark of the occidental spirit and once again resurged during the period of Renaissance and Enlightenment, which took references and influences from Greek philosophy. Politically however, it led to a state of permanent rivalry and lack of peace between the individual polities. A political unification was accomplished successfully only by the Macedonians under the leadership of Philip II and Alexander the Great, who in turn spread Hellenism to Asia and the Orient with his conquests. The subsequent Hellenistic cultures and Diadochoi empires adhered to the ideal of the “cosmopolitan” or the world citizen, which combined the thinking and way of life of the Orient with t...

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...stles like Peter and Paul after the death of Jesus. With their ascent to the state religion of the Roman Empire began the ambivalence of close connection and contrast between worldly and spiritual rule in the later Roman Empire. Religion and religious conflicts exerted huge influence on politics for a long time, even after the enlightenment. The Eastern Roman Empire outlasted the attacks of the Germanic peoples. Emperor Justinian could re-capture some territories in the West in the 6th century. Greek was made the official language under Emperor Herakleios. The Byzantine Empire developed gradually from the Eastern Roman Empire, supported by the Latin’s. The iconoclastic controversy in the 8th/9th century divided the empire, during which time further larger regions were lost through the advance of Muslim Arabs in the Mediterranean and the Slavs in the Balkans.