Why was Ancient Greek society as influential as it was, on the rest of Essay

Why was Ancient Greek society as influential as it was, on the rest of the world - Essay Example The classical Greek was mostly rocky and mountainous and colonized with many new states across the Mediterranean Sea (Ancient Greek Colonization, 2012). Greece as a society was a male dominated patriarchal society in nature where women did not had many rights. Their ranks were established in accordance of their husbands’ and fathers’. Most of the women in Athens were not entitled to reading, writing, ownership of property and right to politics. They were under the protection of their male counterparts, fathers and relatives. As we see in many states today those women have not been entitled to many rights, the influence seems to come from ancient Greece. The Greek society was actually divided between two types i.e. Citizens and Slaves. Citizens enjoyed all rights while slaves did not have right to property or families of their own while citizenship was only entitled to males of the city states who had freeborn parents (Ancient Greece and Rome, 2012). The Greeks has great influence on the intellectual history. They not only produced many philosophers but invented alphabets that led the foundations of modern day language. The alphabet was invented by the Semites of the Mediterranean coast,  including the Hebrews and the Phoenicians, who did not used words to represent consonants instead they used simple drawings. The Phoenicians apparently passed it on to the Greeks.   The Greeks improved on the idea by inventing vowels, using some extra letters their language had no use for. The word alphabet is believed to be taken from two Greek words Alpha and Beta (Boeree, 2012). Classical Greek philosophy is the most important factor that strengthened the footings of modern day intellectual work. Greece produced the world famous philosophers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle etc. Socrates revolutionized many areas of western thought introducing the fields of democracy, epistemology and ethics. Then his student Plato introduced the idea of spiritualism a nd the existence of God by understanding the manifestations of the material world. Aristotle then produced a new philosophy where he demonstrated that the world is what we can sense through our five senses (Rise of Western Culture & Philosophy, 2012). The ancient philosophy gave us the basis for modern day philosophy by providing metaphysics. Meta physics is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the questions of what this world is made of and what is the substance of this reality named as world. Greek philosophy provides us with the ancient concepts that provide the basis for modern day knowledge of ethics, cynicism and hedonism, empiricism and epistemology. That’s why Ancient society has been so influential in its era to other societies but it also provides the basis for modern day knowledge to excel and intellectualism to prevail (Boeree, 2012). Greece is one of the most powerful societies ever that impacted rest of the world in the most influential way. Especially Greece influenced the west in the past and today the ideas of political systems working in United Nations of America are profoundly influenced by the Greek and Romans. The Ancient Greek umpire practiced the citizen based political participation. In an Assembly, all male citizens of the time used to gather to discuss about the issues and vote. As the participation in Assembly was paid and full democratic in nature so every citizen could have participated in the affairs of government. The modern day representative democratic style of government has been derived from Greece too where the Greek had a council and each tribe used to send about 50 citizens to the council from which a representative was chosen.