Quote Originally Posted by benzss View Post
I guess my point was that humanism wasn't all that different from classical thought which predated it by several hundred years.
The Classical period, like every period of human history in every continent, is complex and so full of self-contradition that it's not easy to pin it down.

However, much of Classical thought was dominated by the idea of a strict caste-based society with a large, servile mass as its base and leadership mostly coming from a small elite. Most of the Classical era made even Medival Europe seem like a fluid society by comparisson.

Also, I may be full of shit here, and if so someone please correct me, but aside from Stoicism and some of the mystery religions that fluorished in the late Roman Empire, what strong expressions of humanism were there in Classical thought?