The Greeks

“No evil can befall a good man, either here or hereafter.” Socrates
“The first and greatest victory is over self.” Plato
“Dear is Plato, dearer still is truth.” Aristotle
“Live according to nature and you will never be poor.” Epicurus
(from the walls of the USC Philosophy library)

The answers to the question “How can human life be made happy?” that the Greeks discovered prepared Greece and Rome to become the Western Church. There is much to be said about the Greeks’ ethical vision. It was intimately directed by angelic forces (both good and evil), but never came into its’ own as an effective way for public happiness.
The main contribution of the Greeks was the discovery of the mind, human law, and human knowledge. In the early centuries it was the statesmen and poets that brought moral leadership to Athens, Sparta, and some of the other small city-states, but the most important tradition that developed was that of Western philosophy. This project was a matter of using human knowledge and asceticism to direct the mind and body so as to make one happy. The highest of the Greek systematic thought comes in Plato and Aristotle, and it is The Republic and Nicomachean Ethics which give us the most complete account of these ancient ethics. A good early example of Greek ethical thought is The Golden Verses of Pythagoras which was a lengthy poem written to describe the moral life as developed in Pythagoras’ own soul and teaching.
The greatest and best of the Greeks, Socrates, is the person to look at in order to get a glimpse of the heights to which the life of the mind can bring us. The answer to the question he gave in his life was that loving, and living by, ultimate truth is the way to happiness. Sometimes he expressed this in terms of the Good, what he considered to be the most profound universal, having a purely nonphysical existence. He was put to death by the Athenian government for his attempt to impart his example to some of the young men in the city. The death story (Crito, Phaedo) is the most important one for subsequent Western history, next to that of Christ. This event had a profound effect on Roman thought, as we shall see.
The limitations of Socrates’ view were precisely what made Greek civilization fail. He believed that if someone really knew what was good, he or she would do it. This was actually true in his own case, due to the forcefulness of his intention to be good. But for most of humanity, it is not the case, of course. Interestingly, this was also what led him to believe that all of the gods were good. There was no room in his view for demonic malice, or human sin, and thus evil on the public level could not be dealt with in any effective way. Though Plato and Aristotle made many improvements on his ethics, it was not until the apostle Paul that this problem was solved in the Western world. The Romans had to invade Greece to keep the city-states from destroying one another and those around them.
But several things had been gained, and they also should not be slighted. The idea of the mind, of the good, of human knowledge, of law, and of the philosophical way of life proved very important for the development of Christianity.
I have omitted Epicurus and the early Stoics, since most of their historical influence came within Roman history (Lucretius, Epictetus, and Seneca).