An unexpected cause happened after the Persian Wars: the Greek flood of new ideas. When the war ended, religious beliefs declined and caused more people to ignore the traditional explanations of the world of nature. The Greeks were dissatisfied with supernatural and mythical explanations of reality and began questioning their destiny. This is when philosophy arose.
             The Greek philosophy may not only of effected us directly, but the Greeks paved the way to modern development. They gave us knowledge from the field of math through Pythagoras and his theorem on the right triangle, and science through Aristotle's study of biology, and Democritus' study of atoms. However some philosophies may seem incapable, but Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates changed the way people think. These three Greek philosophers questioned the most basic and widely accepted ideas based on virtue and moral excellence.
             The first of the Hellenic philosophers was Socrates, the revolutionary thinker. Although Socrates opposed everything the Sophists stood for, he shared the rejection of philosophizing about nature, focus on human problems, and desire to empower individuals to make their own moral choices. As curious as he was, Socrates was always questioning what things are and searching for definitions. He would ask people such questions as "what is friendship?", "what is justice?". By asking these questions people became annoyed, but Socrates was not just looking for the definition but also the essence to understand the knowledge of the world (History P39).
             Socrates core of ethics was virtue. It's the "deepest and most basic propensity of man. And virtue is knowledge" (History P40). A famous statement of Socrates was "a bad man is a bad man through ignorance" (History P40). This means a person who knows the truth will not commit evil deeds and those who do wrong, do so out of ignorance. ...