Christians would do well to read the pagan classics of ancient Greece and Rome. These classics include the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid; the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Plutarch; and the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.
Though they certainly cannot replace Scripture, the epics, tragedies, histories, and philosophy from the ancient world provide glimpses into real human wisdom.
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More significantly, they help believers more fully understand the world into which God sent his Son. It was a world ruled by Roman order, justice, and duty but built on Greek culture and philosophy. Understanding that culture helps us read Scripture better and comprehend major influences on our Western world.
Epics
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are as foundational to Western civilization’s imagination as the five books of Moses. Both epics explore in timeless detail what it means to be a rational, volitional human being in a world that often seems arbitrary, unfair, and downright cruel.
In the Iliad, Achilles wrestles with his mortality. He knows he was supposed to be the immortal son of Zeus rather than the mortal son of a human father and a goddess mother. For many years, he deflects thinking about his coming death by amassing war trophies. When, however, one of his trophies is taken away from him by his commander-in-chief, he pulls out of the Trojan War and seeks a new way to lead his life. His musings are cut short when his best friend, Patroclus, is killed by the Trojan Hector. In a rage, Achilles returns to war, wreaking havoc on all he touches. His wrath nearly crushes the pity and piety needed to maintain civilization; it only abates when he grieves together with the father of his enemy. That moment of reconciliation should be experienced by all Christians who want to understand what it means to be human.
Understanding Greco-Roman culture helps us read Scripture better and comprehend major influences on our Western world.
The more comic Odyssey is an equally vital read for those in the process of learning who they are and what their duties are. Though Odysseus travels across the Mediterranean world, winning the love of two goddesses along the way, he chooses to return home and fulfill his role as the husband of Penelope, father of Telemachus, and king of Ithaca.
While the Iliad extols the virtues of the battlefield, the Odyssey glorifies the domestic life and the shape it gives to our identity. They’re both imperfect witnesses to eternity written on the human heart (Eccl. 3:11).
Tragedies
The ancient Greeks invented the genre of tragedy and raised it to the highest level of perfection (apart from Shakespeare). Though the Athenians, living in the fifth century BC, set their tragedies in the same mythic, faraway era of the Trojan War, they wrote them in such a way that they commented on the issues and challenges of citizens living in a democracy.
We’re their heirs, and we must ask the same questions and struggle with the same obstacles they did. In the plays of Sophocles, especially Oedipus and Antigone, those questions and struggles reach a fever pitch.
It may seem, at first, that a modern Christian can learn little from a hero who accidentally kills his father and marries his mother, or a heroine condemned to death because she buries her rebellious brother against the orders of her tyrannical uncle. A closer reading will show otherwise. Oedipus is about a man so devoted to saving his city and answering riddles that he risks everything to uncover the dark secrets of his past. Antigone is about a woman who places piety and devotion above political expediency. Both yearn for answers their society would rather suppress. They fix their eyes on the truth, no matter the cost. They’re deeply flawed characters who point to real human virtue.
Histories
Writing in the first century AD, the Greek Plutarch assembled a series of biographies of the famous Greeks and Romans. Like Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings, Plutarch’s Lives offers a moral reading of history and human action. Akin to the work of a modern psychologist, Plutarch tries his best to understand what motivates people to perform the deeds and make the decisions they do.
Plutarch shows, with the insight of the biblical authors, how the choices we make have consequences. His explorations of the choices made by Alexander and Caesar, Themistocles and Pericles, Brutus and Marc Antony are as recognizable and timeless as the biblical portraits of Jacob and Moses, Samson and David, Peter and Paul. Historical works like Plutarch’s help Christians understand the political world into which Jesus was born.
Philosophy
Any Christian who would discern the nuances of theology must read and wrestle with Plato. The ideas and forms of thought of the culture the New Testament writers inherited were strongly influenced by Plato—mostly, I’d argue, for the good.
Plato had already turned philosophy and language itself toward that which is eternal. While it’s true that Plato tended to downplay the body (though far less than the Neoplatonists who followed him), he was right to teach that absolute goodness, truth, and beauty transcend our broken, fragmented world. In his famous Allegory of the Cave, from the Republic, Plato encouraged readers to move past the shadows of our world and to seek out the true origin of all we see around us.
God’s World; God’s Timing
God ordained when and how the second person of the Trinity would enter human history. He knew the New Testament would be written in Greek, just as the Old Testament had been written in Hebrew. Indeed, because of the Hellenistic empire founded by Alexander the Great—he who was tutored by Aristotle, Plato’s greatest pupil—the Old Testament was translated into Greek centuries before Christ was born.
Plato encouraged readers to move past the shadows of our world and to seek out the true origin of all we see around us.
The ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have access to the special revelation of Christ and the Bible, but they did read carefully the general revelation in creation above and conscience within. God used them, I believe, to prepare the Greco-Roman world for the coming of the gospel—so much so that Paul could promise a group of pagan stoics and philosophers in Athens that what they’d long worshiped in ignorance, he’d now proclaim to them as known (Acts 17:23).
Just as the fleeing Israelites plundered the treasure of the Egyptians as they fled toward the promised land (Ex. 12:36), so modern Christians can benefit by reading pagan classics of ancient Greece and Rome.
