A lot of life in ancient Greece was structured and ordered around rituals. Some were fairly simple and happened every day, while others occurred once a year and were very elaborate. These rituals were very important to the ancient Greeks, and lots of effort went into maintaining them....
The pioneering work on this subject was The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East by Henri Frankfort, H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin (University of Chicago Press, 1946, 1977 -- also once ...
Freedom was threatened in early modern times by the emergence of monarchies that might have been able to crush it, but the cause of individual freedom was enhanced by the Protestant Reformation, another upheaval within Christianity arising from its focus on individual salvation, its inheritance...