If you compare and contrast the civilized and the barbarian cultures (or a happily civilized Greeks and tyrannically civilized Chinese/Indians) and ask yourself the big “WHY”, I think it’s a mistake to look for an answer in some one difference at the dawn of each culture that, through time, produced such divergent results. As is obvious, there was no superior gene, no superior geography, no better environment, no difference in vitamins and access to sea, no *one* choice of the fathers in the first generation of a civilization’s history, that created this difference.
Again this is only tentative, but I would suggest that instead of one massive difference at the birth of each culture, there is one small difference in every generation of each culture. So to understand why the Greeks prospered at 500BC, what enabled them to produce all the fruits of their civilization, I would answer that the answer lies not in some superior gene at the dawn of their race, but instead spread out over the centuries. So, if I were pressed to provide one distinguishing quality that they possessed over unhappy civilizations and over barbaric people, I would give ‘honesty’ as my answer (by that I don’t mean honesty in a superficial sense, but in a metaphysical sense of dealing with reality). Remeber that Ayn Rand, when asked whether she was “extra smart”, or otherwise asked to provide a cause for her intellectual and personal achievements, responided that she didn’t think it had anything to do with her intelligence, but her honesty.
Thus, to explain Greek achievements, I submit we view the progress of their civilization over centuries, starting around 1000BC when their arts were crude and unrefined, and writing was as unknown as it was irrelevant. Then, as we watch them live out their lives over the centuries, we notice at the dawn of their Classical civilization that men, only a few at first, begin to approach their metaphysical views with honesty; as centuries roll by, the minority grows, ever so slightly; these few, due to an honest relationship with their world, choose to employ reason more and more in practicing their livelihood; centuries crawl by, and the minority slowly emerges as a majority. Each successive generation retains and improves the achievements of all previous ones because more and more men in this generation choose to be metaphysically honest, which in turn makes them favor reason more and more. Honesty and reason end up complementing each other, and as each new generation proves to be a match in these two virtues and worthy heirs to its fathers, that civilization grows, the products of the mind multiply, and success and happiness abound.
So then if someone asks, “But why did more and more men become honest with each successive generation? What necessitated this increase in honesty, what necessarily guaranteed that each new generation would be better?”, the answer is, “There was no guarantee.” There were plenty of civilizations in the world’s history that showed explosive growth at first, and yet became stiffled and fizzle out. The Greek choice to be brutally honest with reality was not some derivative of other forces. Though a cultural choice, it was as irreducible as a choice of a single individual - it simply was a society of creatures that possess free will, each individual in which irreducibly (not metaphysically caused by antecedent events) increasingly chose to live in an honest, and therefore rational, manner. This choice of many thousands of men, over centuries, produced an envy of the world.
So, again tentatively, to answer why the Greeks prospered, while the loony Europeans didn’t, the answer is that most Greek men chose to live their lives in an honest fashion, while most Europeans did not. And this was not some sudden choice, but a choice that each successive Greek and European generation made over centuries of living next to one another; each generation made the very same choice time and time again, creating growth and success in one culture, and stagnation and misery in the other. Greeks didn’t always make that choice. Before 800BC they were as primitive as everyone else. After the Roman Empire fell in ~400AD, we don’t hear much of Greek philosophers anymore, because they suffered the same curse that the Romans did - the advent of Christianity, and the institutionalized focus on metaphysical dishonesty.
Take a simple subject such as death. A true Christian today consoles himself that death is not the end, it’s a beginning. Indeed this life is just training for the next one, and death is a joyous gateway from the world of Man to the world of God. Homer, in 800BC and at the very dawn of the Greek civilization, wrote down The Iliad, where men fight for earthly possessions and earthly glory. They seek no happiness after death, they seek to spend their earthly lives in the best way they can. What happens when they die? What awaits them at the Threshhold between life and death? Nothing. What sort of Heaven do they enter? Not a very good one, a hazy and meaningless existence in Hades, something they were very much uninterested in, and cared little for. What prompted a brave warrior of The Iliad to fight on the field of battle? Not martyrdom and success in the afterlife. What consoled him when realizing his chances of survival were slim? Nothing consoled him. There was no theurapeutic God to make him feel good in the Afterlife, no entrance into an effortless existence of Heaven. If struck, he knew that his life finished, and his consciousness would be obliterated in a few moments. A Homeric warrior knew that death was final; there were no ‘extenuating circumstances’, no merging with the Dao, no Hindu reincarnation, no Christian absolution, no 72 perpetual virgins; for him death meant that he as an entity would cease to exist, be irrevocably obliterated, annihilated… erased.
This sort of brutal honesty (inconceivable to a Christian), among other things, is what makes The Iliad such an important poem in history - it was written down not at the twilight, but at the very dawn of Greek civilization, and outlined every important principle that subsequent Greek men would adopt and were to live by.
