The Hellenic period covers the span of Archaic Greece to the end of Classical Age in Greece with the death of Alexander the Great and the slow fading of the orderly reign he brought to both Greece and what would later become Anatolia. Starting with numerous small communities mainly centered around agriculture and/or fishing, the Greek civilization began humble, with the sluggish shakedown of the effects in the Greek Dark Ages from 1100 B.C. up until 750 B.C. just at the beginning of Greek Archaic Ages where the alphabet was developed, earliest forms of Greek literature was produced, politics and economics were coined. 

The Classical Age of Greece was started with the advent of democracy in the prominent city state of Athens which also would later possess the largest navy the peninsula had ever seen. They would later battle the Spartans which had been their biggest ally against the invasion of the Persians. Many forms of arts were developed further into their own scientific branches such as philosophy, mathematics, physics, music etc. Hellenic Period ended with the death of Alexander the Great just at the edge of the known world near the River Indus, busy creating the largest kingdom world had ever seen.

The conquest of Alexander starting with his crossing of the Hellespont, would also bring many colonists and immigrants to the conquered lands, people of whom would go on to be the “architects” of the Hellenistic Period in the mediterranean. While the word Hellenic referred to the natural-born Greeks and their achievements or deeds on the peninsula, Hellenistic period would be about how the cultures of these newly-conquered lands and of the mainlands Greeks would intertwine and give life to new works of society that would later on be the basis of today’s western culture.

    The main aspect that made the Hellenistic period as “golden” was the fact that under the sense of stability that Alexander’s conquest brought, different peoples were allowed to intermingle and give rise to new and much better forms of cultural expressions. Examples of these would be found in how the pursuit of truth in philosophy was more rationalized, how mathematics, geometry and physics were further developed with Euclid and Archimedes and how art was centered around naturalism where rather than creating the ideal iterations, artist were concerned with truth in the works. All in all, the Western understanding of civilization is ennobling and protective of collective culture, that is, the achievement of humanity as a whole. The epitome of Western civilization’s ancestor being the Hellenistic Period, is logically deemed as a period akin to gold.