What would the Greeks be without the Romans? While it may sound like a trivial question, the truth of the matter is that if the Roman Empire had never existed, ancient Greece would’ve been a minor footnote in the history of a continent that never emerged out of a primitive existence. Without Rome, Greece would’ve been treated in history like any of the Mesoamerican and South American kingdoms and empires that we’ve read about, in that at the end of the day, Greece’s lasting legacy would’ve been largely swept aside by larger forces and rendered insignificant in the course of history. You might ask, at this point, “why do you think Rome mattered more than Greece, then?” And my answer is that while Greece was a civilization that expanded only at the pace of its own peoples’ population growth, Rome wasn’t hindered by such challenges because it was, by its nature, forced to adopt a nature of conquering, assimilating, and incorporating peoples around it into the empire.
While the Greeks’ empire stopped at the lands its people occupied, the Roman Empire stopped at the lands and peoples that it had managed to conquer and assimilate. While the Greeks may have thought up wonderful philosophies and advanced the field of mathematics and sciences by leagues, it was Rome with its development of continent-spanning infrastructures that first applied any of this to reality. While the Greeks were constrained by the size and development of their own nations, the Romans were not. Similar to how international socialism dwarfed national socialism in scope and scale, the cosmopolitan Roman Empire dwarfed the accomplishments and grandeur of the ethnostates of Greece by orders of magnitude. While the Greeks may have been the predecessors of the Romans, it was the Romans that cemented the importance of Greece in the history of human civilization.
Given the title of this article, “the Judeo-Christian relationship,” you may think that this comparison between these two civilizations is irrelevant to the topic at hand. I must disagree, because just as Judaism is constrained by its own people’s numbers, so was Greece. Just as Greece laid the foundations for Roman religions, values, and philosophies, the Jews have laid the foundations for Christianity. Just as the Roman Empire developed Europe beyond what it could’ve ever been otherwise, Christianity developed Europe and the Americas beyond what those continents’ peoples could’ve ever amounted to otherwise. As someone that is Jewish, I see Christianity as a force for good that has instilled Abrahamic values in larger swaths of the population than Judaism could’ve ever hoped – or even wanted – to do.
Just as I could look at the Roman Empire as a vessel through which extropic Greek principles could create a stable republic, I look at the Christian world as a vessel through which Jewish values could impact more people than they ever could have otherwise. Just as Greece’s philosophies, principles, and values evolved over eons of its many city-states interacting with its citizens and each other, Jewish values and teachings arose in the earliest of states, Mesopotamia, and have been tried-and-tested over the millennia in ways that other belief systems’ values and teachings have not. At the end of the day, the western world would be nothing without Rome and Christianity, and by virtue of saying that, Ancient Greece and Judaism wouldn’t hold nearly as much weight in history without their more expansionist successors. Ancient Greece and Judaism were just seeds, from which the largest trees that mankind has ever seen have grown from.
How we deal with this information matters, because it shows how victory does not have to be present in our own lives – or ever even achieved by our own people – for it to manifest over time. The simple transmission of thoughts and lessons alone is enough to change the history of the world. If we are what we think, than we should consider the weight that comes with learning, exploring, and developing new ideas, because what it means for future generations is – in the long run – incalculably more valuable than what it means for us today. Putting it in a metaphor, the father that does not teach his children anything dies at the end of his life, while the father that does invest his time in teaching and instructing his children lives on, in one way or another, for generations to come, with his impact felt for longer than he will ever know.
