Believing that the gods were forces that amused themselves arbitrarily by playing with their pawns, humanity, the Greeks found a great detachment. They resigned themselves to their fate and so worry was replaced by the search for knowledge. The Ionian natural philosophers of the 6th and 7th centuries BC, together with their descendants, were convinced that there was a world plan guided by conception. The attempt to recognize this design by great thinkers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle thus began the origin of the Sciences. The self-confidence and awareness of these men as observers and creators of their world then saw the evolution of fields such as philosophy, physics, mechanics, medicine and biology. These in turn led to the emergence of new and sometimes different methods of political thinking. Ethics and theories of the state were written as guiding principles for human action. Social conflicts and the existence of individuals were discussed in Homer's epics and Greek tragedies. The emphasis on individualism soon became a hallmark of the Western spirit and re-emerged once again during the Renaissance and Enlightenment period, which took references and influences from Greek philosophy. Politically, however, it led to a state of permanent rivalry and lack of peace between individual political communities. A political unification was successfully achieved only by the Macedonians under the leadership of Philip II and Alexander the Great, who in turn spread Hellenism to Asia and the East with his conquests. The subsequent Hellenistic cultures and Diadochoi empires adhered to the ideal of the “cosmopolitan” or citizen of the world, who combined the thought and lifestyle of the East with… like Peter and Paul after the death of Jesus. With their rise to the state religion of the Roman Empire began the ambivalence of a close connection and contrast between worldly and spiritual dominion in the subsequent Roman Empire. Religion and religious conflicts have long had an enormous influence on politics, even after the Enlightenment. The Eastern Roman Empire survived the attacks of the Germanic peoples. Emperor Justinian managed to regain some territories in the West in the 6th century. Greek became the official language under Emperor Heracleius. The Byzantine Empire gradually developed from the Eastern Roman Empire, supported by the Latins. The iconoclastic controversy of the 8th/9th century divided the empire, during which larger regions were lost to the advance of Muslim Arabs in the Mediterranean and Slavs in the Balkans.
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