In week four of the course you will be studying the history of ancient Greece.  There is
much that the ancient Greeks contributed to the development of Western civilization. 
Probably the two most important concepts were first the idea of democracy and second
the idea of rationalism.  

One important point to remember about ancient Greece was that Greece never existed
as a unified political entity in the ancient world until Philip and then Alexander the Great
created the Greek empire in the late fourth century.  Before that Greeks were organized
as city-states, a city and the surrounding territory.  The city-states ranged in size from
Athens and Sparta, as the largest, all the way down to much smaller cities with
populations of a few thousand and territories of a few hundred square miles.  Even
though the Greeks had the conception that they were all Greeks, Hellenes, they never
did unite politically until the forcible conquest of Alexander.  

When historians focus on the development of democracy in Ancient Greece, they are
usually referring to political developments in the city of Athens, which was the most
influential of all the Greek city-states.  In Athens, democracy evolved over the course of
the seventh to fifth centuries, reaching its peak in the mid-fifth century under the
leadership of Pericles.  That political evolution in Athens took place under the influence
of economic, social and military factors that constantly pushed Athens further and
further along the way of increased citizen participation in governmental affairs.  Please
note that Athens removed its king early in the seventh century, and its subsequent
development as a republic provided the first example in the Western world of a
non-monarchical, non-divine, form of government.  

The Greeks were also important for their development of the idea of rationalism, and
you can see this rationalism in the areas of science and philosophy.  The Greeks used
the rational mind (not supernatural or divine explanations) to understand the world
around them and, to a lesser extent, the human mind.  Science, as developed by the
Greeks, was an attempt to observe and analyze the natural world using rational
observation and logical analysis.  In the area of philosophy, the Greeks had a series of
gifted philosophers, most notably Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  These philosophers
examined the whole gamut of the human experience and tried to understand that
experience.  Socrates was the persistent critic, analyzing all assumptions about life and
what people know and did not know.  Plato, his student, was an idealist who theorized
that the material world was a reflection, a construction, an avatar, of an ideal world that
existed elsewhere.  And Aristotle, Plato's student, was a realist who studied the
material, or real, world.

Whereas the early Hebrews were responsible for the formulation of the idea of ethical
monotheism and shifting religious responsibility to the individual, you might say that the
Greeks were responsible for the formulation of the idea of ethical philosophy and
shifting philosophical or intellectual responsibility to the individual and away from
communal myth.