GREECE, RELIGION OF.) (4) Arts of Peace and War. Among the Greeks the arts of war and peace were carried to greater perfection than among any earlier peo ple. In navigation they were little behind the Tyrians and Carthaginians; in political foresight they equaled them; in military science, both by sea and land, they were decidedly their superiors; while in the power of reconciling subject-foreign ers to the conquerors and to their institutions, they perhaps surpassed all nations of the world. Their copious, cultivated, and flexible tongue car ried with it no small mental education to all who learned it thoroughly; and so sagacious were the arrangements of the great Alexander throughout his rapidly acquired Asiatic empire, that in the twenty years of dreadful war between his generals which followed his death, no rising of the natives against Greek influence appears to have been thought of. Without any change of population adequate under other circumstances to effect it, the Greek tongue and Greek feeling spread far and sank deep through the Macedonian dominions. Half of Asia Minor became a new Greece; and the cities of Syria, North Palestine, and Egypt, were deeply imbued with the same influence. Yet the purity of the Hellenic stream deteriorated in various places; and some account of the mixture it underwent will be given in the article HELLENISTS (WhiCh see).
(5) Missionary Field. When a beginning had been made of preaching Christianity to the Gentiles, Greece immediately became a principal sphere for missionary exertion. The vernacular tongue of the Hellenistic Christians was under stood over so large an extent of country, as almost of itself to point out in what direction they should exert themselves. The Grecian cities,
whether in Europe or Asia, were the peculiar field for the Apostle Paul ; for whose labors a superintending Providence had long before been providing, in the large number of devout Greeks who attended the Jewish synagogues. Greece Proper was divided by the Romans into two prov inces, of which the northern was called Mace donia, and the southern Achaia (as 2 Cor. ix:2, etc.); and we learn incidentally from Acts xviii. that the proconsul of the latter resided at Corinth.
(6) Cities of Note. Of the cities celebrated in - Greek history, none are prominent in the early Christian times except Corinth. La conia, and its chief town Sparta, had ceased t'o be of any importance: Athens was never eminent as a Christian Church. In Macedonia were the two great cities of Philippi and Thessalonica (formerly called Therme) ; yet of these the for mer was rather recent, being founded by Philip the Great': the latter was not distinguished above the other Grecian cities on the same coast. Nicop olis, on the gulf of Ambracia (or Arta), had been built by Augustus, in memory of his vic tory at Actium, and was, perhaps, the limit of Achaia on the western coasi (Tacitus, Annol. ii. 53). It had risen into some importance in St. Paul's days, and as many suppose, it is to this Nicopolis that he alludes in his epistle to Titus. (See further under ACHAIA and NICOP ous.) F. W. N.