Prehistoric Greek culture was much like that of the balance of the land north of the Europus; savage. It was only though millennia that settlements allowed the constructions of societies to develop that bring more intense cultural development and social order. The Minoan culture was the first to arrive in Greece and bring a written language and culture concatenated from the ancient civilizations of the south. The Minoan cultures demise was sudden as it's home islands were obliterated except for that of Crete in a Krakatoa like explosion circa 1500 B.C. A local civilization followed-that of Agamemnon and Trojan legends, yet mankind was still led by oppressive royal societies as its best form of governance except in Ur, circa 2000 B.C. God called Abraham out of Babylon and into the desert and Israel in a relationship destined to bring about the major change in human history-a government by a transcendent God of love and respect for mankind by one another, though human original sin would make them fall short of achieving perfection even of democracy.
Classical Greece embodied the contradictions of mankind's relations with itself. A cluster of city states each with a different form of government developed bring them to war incessantly with each other. Athen's and its limited franchise democracy one out and had a league of Delos over-taxing the resources of the other members to pay for things like building the Parthenon. Sparta declared war on Athens after its completion and began the end of classical Greece.
Sparta was the worst of Greek government development with a homosexual butch elite warrior caste annihilating any social order besides war and training for war. Sparta created nothing lasting for posterity except some military victories of dubious necessity. Greek, known by Greeks as Hellas, in Sparta provide slaves named helots to serve of interest of the arrested social order of warriors. It would take the Roman Republic to actualize the society unifying Athenian and Spartan government values to perfect the idea of a Republic.
Servility and savagery each are opposed to democratic individualism…
Tacitus wrote of German society in the first century…
“25. The rest of their slaves have not, like ours, particular employments in the family allotted them. Each is the master of a habitation and household of his own. The lord requires from him a certain quantity of grain, cattle or cloth, as from a tenant; and so far only the subjection of the slave extends.21 Hid domestic offices are performed by his own wife and children. It is usual to scourge a slave, or punish him with chains or hard labor. They are sometimes killed by their masters; not through severity of chastisement, but in the heat of passion, like an enemy; with this difference, that it is done with impunity.22 Freedmen are little superior to slaves; seldom filling any important office in the family; never in the state, except in those tribes which are under regal government.23 There, they rise above the free-born, and even the nobles: in the rest, the subordinate condition of the freedmen is a proof of freedom."
European society needed to be lifted out of it's savage paganism over the next millennium...
Decadent imperialism followed the Roman Republic, yet Christian culture flourished to provide a unity to stand against the invasions of the Omayyad Empire under the false prophet Muhammed. Pope Gregory led a defense against the Omayyad crusades of invasion of Europe that reached Rome, France and the Aegean Islands. Christianity was the motivating cultural element that led Europe out of the pagan re-civilized social structures and into first the imperial structure and then with the reformation and the Dewitt Brothers democratic revolution in Holland into the world's first general government for the masses movement in the form of democracy. While the papacy had become corrupted by worldliness fr a time, it moved Martin Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox and others to form independent and general literacy so people could read the Bible in their own language for themselves...God's teleos had drawn mankind out of a planet of the apes and into one moving to democratic individualism.
Christian movement reflected in ensuing mirrored democratic movements against imperial rule from Rome. Christianity was the motive for invention of the printing press by Guttenburg in 1440. Christianity is a living culture founded upon a transcendent faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God; ancient Greek culture is dead. Ancient Greek culture, or cultures more accurately are one of the great research subjects of archaeology however beginning more than 25,000 years ago with excavations done at the Francthi cave in the neolithic period of hunters moving through the ages to farmers and the emergence of Minoan culture centered at the island of Thera/Santorini before its end with the apocalypse of volcanism giving rise to the legends of Atlantis.
Jesus Christ ended the pagan era of humanity substituting atoning and renewing spiritual faith in the Absolute post-temporal creator of temporality and much more. The Christian culture began with the physical appearance of Jesus Christ on Earth with His birth in Bethlehem circa October, 3 B.C. The laws of God were then written on the hearts and minds of believers as the prophet Jeremiah had related they would be centuries before. Christian culture brought the end of animal sacrifice and misguided beliefs in inanimate objects as gods. The spiritual draft of Jesus Christ was the central cohering element in the rise of western Europe to civilization. From the remarkable writings of the 1st century apostle Paul 4th/5th century Augustine to the 15th century physicist Isaac Newton and contemporary Christians the Christian culture is a remarkable motivating force in human creativity and ingenuity.
Ancient Greek cultures after the end of the neolithic period were known as bronze age cultures. They developed in mainland Greece (Minoan), Turkey (Anatolian) and in some Aegean Sea islands (Cycladic). A transitional culture developed between the late neolithic and bronze ages called today the Korakou culture with simple mostly non-metallic artifacts extent. It has red colors and good pottery and was a decent, modest culture in the beautiful land. The following Minoan culture named for King Minos was a brilliant early culture giving rise to the first European alphabetic scripts discovered...linear A. The following Mycenaean culture was the legendary culture of King Agamemnon and later the heroic age written of at its end by the Homeric poets circa 1100 B.C.
The war with Troy and intercultural conflict helped bring the end of Mycenaean culture. Aeolian, Ionians and Dorian tribes people invaded the weakened culture flowing over the borders of the culture creating an age of darkness lasting nearly four centuries until reformation of an archaic post-Mycenaean civilization in Attica around the year 750 B.C. The city state of Athens would produce some of the greatest creative minds of ancient world history before the Christian era...Parmenides, Heraclitus., Protagoras, Anaximander, Alexander, Sappho, Euripedes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great etc. With the appearance of the apostle to the gentiles Paul and his oratory at Athens describing the unknown God to the Athenians at the Agora through which Socrates had once walked and talked with his fellow philosophers the end of the decadent and pagan era of Greece after the end of the golden age of 5th and 4th century Athens began. The Christian culture of which Paul bespoke overcame the dominant Roman civilization transforming its natural corruption and downward plunge into a faith that would motivate the Emperor Constantine to refound a Greek Byzantine culture on the Dardanelles bridging the old world and new; bring lands north and south of the Mediterranean into one fold that would survive the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Christianity became the genius of a transcendent universal spirit moving the people of the world into a teleos of God, the end of which cannot be presently known. More than 2000 years old already Christian culture may reach the stars, for the world may pass away but the words of Jesus Christ will last forever.