Philosophy in a Changed World.

Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 B.C.E., having radically changed the Greek world through a series of conquests that unified Greece and brought Persia into the Hellenistic world. The word "Hellenistic" comes from the Greek hellenizein which means "to speak Greek," and with the Greek language, to acquire a smattering of Greek culture. The Hellenistic world embraced regions that had been foreign to the Greeks of the classical period in the fifth century B.C.E. and it is significant that non-Greeks developed the dominant philosophy of the Hellenistic world and the Roman world after it: Stoicism. While the pre-Socratic philosophers had focused on abstract questions on the nature of goodness and aspects of society, the burning questions on the minds of the philosophers in this day and age focused...