10.3 Europe: 500 to 401 b.c.  (Page 2/4)

As in Phoenicia, some Greek ports constructed in that time of low sea levels in the Mediterranean are today below sea level. Medicine of that period in Greece was a mixture of religious mysticism with some rational thought and procedures. Ascelepios was worshipped as the God of Healing and temples were erected for him for that purpose over many centuries and were in present day terminology mixtures of religious shrines and health spas. Alcaeon, possibly of this century, wrote a book Concerning Nature, which may be the beginning of Greek medical literature, although only a few fragments survive. He established a connection between the sensory organs and the brain, described the optic nerves and concluded that the brain was the organ of the mind, therefore also responsible for thought and memory. A century later Aristotle thought erroneously that the heart was the center of sensation. (Ref. 213 , 281 , 224 , 125 )

NOTE: Insert Map: GREECE DURING THE PERSIAN WARS

The period 475 - 429 B.C. has been called the "Golden Age of Pericles", the greatest ruler of Athens. In view of the thousands of pages that have been written concerning ancient Greece, it is sometimes difficult to keep things in proper perspective. Attica was actually a small area, with Sunium, the most distant point from Athens, being only forty miles away (although admittedly this was a long walk, with only feet for transportation). It was, however, a period of literature, plastic arts and the development of the foundations of science. This was the time of Socrates, for whom philosophy was neither theology nor metaphysics but ethics and politics with logic an introduction and a means. (Ref. 47 ) It was the time of the historian Herodotus (born about 484 B.C.) and in lonia the time of the great physician Hippocrates who fostered the scientific approach to the treatment of disease as opposed to the priests' explanation that disease was the result of anger of the gods. He was born on the island of Cos in 460 B.C. and became known eventually as the "Father of Medicine". Protagoras (480 - 410 B.C.) was the chief proponent of the Sophists, who taught the virtue of proper use of words and a method of verbal reasoning according to rules of argument whereby a man might hope to unravel all the mysteries of the universe. Their doctrines, including one that stated that the law was a conspiracy of the weak against the strong, provided the oligarchy with justification for violence and chicanery used to overthrow the democracy eventually (414 - 411 B.C.) Other philosophies included that of the Cynics who cared only for virtue and relation of the soul to God with the world and its learnings amounting to nothing; and the Stoics and Epicureans, using logic and rhetoric toward a similar goal. Parmenides and Zeno, of the famous paradoxes, were Eleatics. (Ref. 47 , 221 )

This great age of Greece ended with the Peloponnesian War - a war of Sparta and her allies against Athens and hers, which raged for thirty years beginning in 431 B.C. and which wasted all the power of Greece. Forty years of aggressive Athenian imperialism and land grabbing activities had forced most mainland cities to look to Sparta for leadership. Athens had control of the seas but commanded few mainland areas outside of Attica, and it was obvious from the beginning that neither side could win. Then in 430 and 429 B.C. a pestilence, which may have been a malignant form of scarlet fever