Historical Context: From Nature to Ethics

Classical Greek philosophy flourished in Athens between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, a period framed by the city's victory over Persia at Marathon and Salamis, the imperial ascendancy under Pericles, and the long, ruinous Peloponnesian War against Sparta (431-404 BCE), which ended in Athenian defeat and a brief, violent oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. This was also the golden age of Athenian democracy, tragic drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), and public rhetoric, all of which shaped the intellectual climate in which philosophy became a distinctly civic, argumentative practice conducted in the agora and the gymnasia rather than in isolated schools.