Sublime

By the 6th century BCE large numbers of Greeks were living and working in Egypt and a fully Greek city, Naucratis, had been founded on the Nile river, 70 kilometres (45 miles) from the open sea. Three hundred years later the Greek general Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, which effectively became part of the Greek world. It is fair to conclude

Aegean island of Lesbos, near the Anatolian coast—almost two thousand years after the birth of Lesbos’s most famous resident, the lyric poet Sappho.

It took faith to stay Jewish in the Hellenistic age,

How was it that this tiny community of 200,000 souls or so (in other words, no more populous than, say, York in England or Little Rock in Arkansas) managed to give birth to towering geniuses across the range of human endeavor and to create one of the greatest civilizations in history?

These are our origins: chaos, violence, and death. And this is the case wherever we turn in the ancient world. The Romans adopted much of the Greek mythology, performing more of a rebrand than a rewrite.