Among the Greeks the arts of war and peace were carried to greater perfection than among any earlier pzople. In navigation they were little behind the Tyrians and Carthaginians ; in politicai foresight they equalled them ; in military science, both by sea and land, they were decidedly their superiors ; while in the power of reconciling sub. ject-foreigners to the conquerors and to their insti tutions, they perhaps surpassed all nations of the world. Their copious, cultivated, and flexible tongue carried with it no small mental education to all who learned it thoroughly ; and so sagacious were the arrangements of the g-,reat Alexander throughout his rapidly acquired Asiatic empire, that in the twenty years of dreadful war among his generals which followed his death, no rising of the natives against Greek influcnce 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.
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 understood 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 labours a superin tending Providence had long before been provid ing, in the large number of devout Greeks who attended the Jewish synagogues. Greece proper
was divider' by the Romans into two provinces, of which the northern was called Macedonia, and the southern Achaia (as in 2 Cor. ix. 2, etc.) ; and we learn incidentally from Acts xviii. that the pro consul of the latter resided at Corinth. To deter mine the exact division between the provinces is difficult ; nor is the question of any importance to a Biblical student. Achaia, however, had probably very nearly the same frontier as the kingdom of modern Greece, which is limited by a line reach ing from the gulf of Volo to that of Arta, in great part along the chain of Mount Othrys. Of the cities celebrated in Greek history, none are promi nent in the early Christian times except Corinth. Laconia, and its chief town Sparta, had ceased to be of any importance : Athens was never eminent as a Christian church. In Macedonia were the two great cities of Philippi and Thessalonica (for merly called Thenne) ; yet of these the former was rather recent, being founded by Philip the Great ; the latter was not greatly distinguished above the other Grecian cities on the same coast. Nicopolis, on the gulf of Ambracia (or Arta), had been built by Augustus, in memory of his victory at Actium, and was, perhaps, the limit of Achaia on the western coast (Tacitus, Annal. 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 NrcoPous.)—F. W. N.