Western civilization arose in Greece in the 8th century BC, when some 1,500 city-states emerged from a murky, illiterate, 400-year Dark Age.

That chaos followed the utter collapse of the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece.

But what re-emerged were constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique and free markets — what we know now as the foundation of a unique Western civilization.

The Roman Republic inherited and enhanced the Greek model.

For a millennium, the republic and subsequent Roman Empire spread Western culture, eventually to be inseparable from Christianity.

From the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf and from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara were a million square miles of safety, prosperity, progress and science — until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.

What followed was a second European Dark Age, roughly from 500 to 1000 AD.

Populations declined. Cities eroded.

Roman roads, aqueducts and laws crumbled.

In place of the old Roman provinces arose tribal chieftains and fiefdoms.

Whereas once Roman law had protected even rural people in remote areas, during the Dark Ages, walls and stone were the only means of keeping safe.

Finally, at the end of the 11th century, the old values and know-how of the complex world of Graeco-Roman civilization gradually re-emerged.

The slow rebirth was later energized by the humanists and scientists of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and eventually the 200-year European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th........

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