Thread: If athiests ruled the world

Originally Posted by sycld

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.

Wouldn't disagree. Since we're not writing academic papers here, I couldn't be arsed being amazingly specific.

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.

Perhaps. Classical philosophy largely didn't advocate this... but it often worked out the other way. For example, Polybius' and Cicero's opinions on the Roman Republican constitution were not actually fully realised in practice.

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?

The Stoics were strong of course, as well as Epicurean thought. Then the civic thought was developed from ancient Athenian politics (Plato, Aristotle, even some derived from Thucydides). The classical influence on humanism is pretty broad.

edit: i assume we're talking about Renaissance Humanism here