Ever feel like things are getting worse? Afraid your values are for yesterday and that all the power is in the hands of tyrants?
Fear not! It has been worse. . . imagine being a Greek or a Jew at the end of the fourth century . . .
Socrates begat Plato, Plato begat Aristotle, Aristotle begat Alexander and the world of the classical Greeks came to an end. Alexander destroyed the old order but replaced it with nothing stable. The Mediterranean world entered a strange shadow time in the period from 323 BC to 30 BC almost waiting for the coming of the Romans to reunite and give direction to its history.
Alexander from Macedonia was not an ethnic Greek, but his father Philip had worked hard to make him culturally Greek. 
His father had also laid the foundation for the conquest of the Greek city-states that had proved impossible for the mighty Persian Empire. Alexander completed this project and prepared to strike against Persia. In this way he could compensate the Greeks for their relative lack of freedom by helping them strike against their ancient enemy. In his short career, Alexander swept away Persia and ended the pattern of one eastern empire succeeding the next to power in Mesopotamia. For the first time the center of cultural gravity had plainly shifted to the West.
Alexander was successful at everything except his own life. He died still young, but already showing signs of the tyrannical fever that brings down so many would be god-men. 
Fortunately for the Jews, and for the birth of Christianity, he died before he could really begin his plan to unite the ancient world into one culture centered in his own syncretism of Greece and Persia. He was replaced with at least four warring miniature empires, none of which could gain power over the others. There philosophy continued and for the first time was aware of itself.
Philosophers knew that they were doing philosophy for others in their profession and that the discussion would likely go on past them. However, there intellectual speculations often seem remote from the smashing of kingdoms that came after Alexander.
These Eastern empires gradually lost influence to a new power rising in the West: Rome. Rome would find the East united by a common language, Greek, and with an educated class that valued the Classical Greek culture that the Romans so admired and emulated. Rome did not end philosophical development and some great thinkers contributed during her long sway. But the period of her power was also the time when intellectual excitement for the first time began to drift toward a new religious group: the Christians. By the time John wrote his gospel, the Jews and Romans were four hundred years from the time of Plato. There was little left of the old intellectually curious and questing mind. Alexander had helped shift interests in different directions.
The rigorous logic of Aristotle and the passionate dialectic of Plato were not enough to preserve reason from the erotic. It was just as Plato had feared in the Symposium. Alcibiades had not been tamed. Instead, this latter Alcibiades, Alexander, had swept away Plato’s world and declared himself a god . . . a nearly unthinkable act of hubris to the philosophers. Of course Alexander did not destroy philosophy directly. Far from it, like many tyrants he posed as the friend of philosophy possible even sending biological specimens to his former tutor Aristotle. However, Alexander worked hard to develop a cult of personality and a mix of Eastern religious ideas, Homer, and philosophy into a strange brew of quasi-philosophical religious mysticism. Plato’s texts became quote books from which to develop new dogmas. Aristotle was used as an encyclopedia, but his actual task of expanding knowledge nearly died with him. One thing was certain: Greek became the language of education and Greek myths and ideas became the template through which even more ancient cultures were understood by the educated.
Delphi had triumphed over philosophy.
The cosmos of Greek religion was vast, only slightly organized, and diverse. It found its seminal thoughts in the writing of Hesiod and Homer and these great works provided a common backbone of ideas. Its greatest classical shrine was at Delphi. Though there were many great shrines in the ancient world, there was none to compare to Delphi which could draw kings from all over the Mediterranean world to seek for wisdom.
Delphi itself, as a physical shrine, declined with the power of the Greeks. It never really recovered from the destruction of traditional Greek city-state culture by Alexander. Each of the warring Hellenistic empires that followed the god-like Alexander attempted to develop their own religious centers. Eventually, like Greece herself, the spirit and power of Delphi was transferred to Rome. The Romans would occasionally try to suppress superstition, but rationalism without religion was powerless to defeat the oracles that sprang up all over the Empire. These oracles, especially those of the Sybil, had great power over the minds of every class of society. Still it seems valid to speak of the entire complex of ancient paganism, that strange mix of philosophy and myth, of reason and eroticism as Delphic. It was here that the synthesis between philosophy and Homeric religion was perfected. It was here, as well as at Athens and the great city that Alexander built Alexandria that scholars could mix with priests in a triumphant mix of religion and reason.
One exception to the triumph of Greek thought existed in the tiny city of Jerusalem. There the Jews were tempted by Alexander’s grand compromise, but Moses had left them their own great idea: monotheism. The God of the Jews and the ideas found in their Bible were more than a match for Delphi. The Maccabees were even able to rebel against the Alexandrian empires and gain a brief period of Jewish independence. One reason for the rebellion was resistance to Hellenism. Though the Maccabee writings show some Greek influence on Jewish thought, Jerusalem was able to maintain a fairly independent intellectual tradition.
Some Jews were more deeply influenced by Hellenism. Jews in Alexandria translated the Bible into Greek masterfully in a translation called the Septuagint. This translation became the Bible used by the apostles and most of the leaders of the New Testament era. It is still the basic text used by the Eastern churches. By the time of the New Testament era, the brilliant Philo of Alexandria had taken the process too far by nearly merging Platonism with traditional Judaism in a manner that gave up too much room to the neo-Platonists. Oddly, Philo had a continued fascination for Christianity, some of whom like Eusebius claimed his as a Church leader, and much less influence on Judaism. For the most part, the Jews retained their religion and norms in the Hellenistic world despite temptations to do otherwise.
If you are a Christian today, then you owe it to these faithful Jews who defied the way the history was going. If you serve God and not the state, you owe it to these faithful Jews who died for liberty to follow God before King. History does not always turn on the actions of the great and powerful. . . never forget a stable held one greater than Alexander who could come because a few remained true in a dark time.