What made the ancient Greeks so generative? It seems they founded the Western philosophical and scientific traditions, but what led to their innovativeness?
Hypothesis: they weren’t any more innovative than anyone else; their language and culture just got transmitted over a much larger area. In the wake of Alexander’s conquests, Greek became the working language of government bureaucrats across most of the Middle East. It quickly turned into a status symbol and a credential, sort of like a college degree today. Speaking, reading and writing Greek automatically put you into the educated social class. A working knowledge of Greek culture followed along naturally with the language.
Without Alexander’s conquests, I very much doubt that Aristotle’s name would be at all known today.
Hypothesis: they weren’t any more innovative than anyone else; their language and culture just got transmitted over a much larger area. In the wake of Alexander’s conquests, Greek became the working language of government bureaucrats across most of the Middle East. It quickly turned into a status symbol and a credential, sort of like a college degree today. Speaking, reading and writing Greek automatically put you into the educated social class. A working knowledge of Greek culture followed along naturally with the language.
Without Alexander’s conquests, I very much doubt that Aristotle’s name would be at all known today.
And it probably did not hurt that the Romans saw the Greeks as “thinkers” and also spread their ideas westward (north?).