Expression

Alexander III of Macedon (356-323 BC) was tutored as a boy by Aristotle himself, then inherited his father Philip's powerful army at age twenty. In thirteen years he conquered the largest empire the world had yet seen, defeating Persia, founding some twenty cities (many named Alexandria), and reaching India, all before dying of fever in Babylon at just thirty-two. He carried a copy of Homer's Iliad and wept, legend says, when he ran out of worlds to conquer. But Alexander's deepest legacy was not military; it was cultural. Everywhere he went, Greek language, art, philosophy, and city life took root, fusing with local cultures to create the Hellenistic world. For the next three centuries, an educated person from Egypt to Syria spoke Greek. This is why, when the Gospel came, it could be written and preached in koine (common) Greek and travel swiftly across the whole eastern Mediterranean. The New Testament itself is written in that Greek. Alexander never knew it, but his conquests helped prepare what St. Paul called 'the fullness of time.' His life also warns us: boundless ambition can conquer the world and still die young and unsatisfied. Was he 'great'? Brilliant and brave, certainly, but the question of whether conquest is greatness is worth weighing.

Greek drama, born in Athens, was sung as much as spoken. The great tragedies (by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and comedies (by Aristophanes) were performed at religious festivals honoring Dionysus, in open-air theaters carved into hillsides whose acoustics were so fine a whisper carried to the back row. At the heart of each play stood the chorus, a group of performers who sang and chanted in unison, often accompanied by the aulos (the double-reed pipe we met last week), commenting on the action and voicing the community's response. The actors too delivered many lines in a heightened, musical speech between talking and singing. The word 'music' itself comes from the Muses, the nine Greek goddesses of the arts, and 'orchestra' was originally the circular dancing-space where the chorus performed. Beyond the theater, the Greeks' greatest gift to music was theoretical: building on Pythagoras, they developed the system of modes and named the intervals, the vocabulary the West still uses (diatonic, chromatic, harmony, melody, are all Greek words). Almost no Greek music survives as sound, but a few fragments do, such as the Seikilos epitaph, the oldest complete song with notation. The Greek conviction that music shapes the soul passed directly into the Church's care for sacred chant.

This week's writing assignment is introduced today and may carry over as homework. Your task: choose ONE concept, Athenian democracy, or a key idea of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, and explain it so clearly that a beginner understands it (see the full assignment and rubric for this week). Expository writing has one job: to make something understood. It is not description (painting a scene) and not persuasion (arguing a side); it is explanation. Today's work session: (1) Choose your concept and write a one-sentence thesis that states plainly what it is (e.g., 'Plato's Theory of Forms is the idea that the perfect, unchanging realities are more real than the changing things we see'). (2) List the key terms a beginner would need defined. (3) Brainstorm at least one concrete example or analogy that makes the idea click (Plato's cave is itself an example). (4) Sketch a simple three-part outline: what it is / how it works (with example) / why it still matters. Remember the rubric: clear thesis, logical steps, defined terms, a concrete example, and a closing on why it matters.

Return to St. Justin. He spent his youth doing exactly what we studied this week, sitting at the feet of the Greek philosophers, loving wisdom. But he found that all their best insights were like seeds longing for the full plant, and that the plant was Christ, the Logos, the Word. Justin shows that the Greek mind was not Christianity's enemy but, when purified, its servant. He loved truth all the way to the cross, dying rather than deny it. That is wisdom crowned by faith and fortitude. Close the week by recalling your wisdom challenge from Day 2.