Preamble

First, a quote:

The advent of the polis, the birth of philosophy—the two sequences of phenomena are so closely linked that the origin of rational through must be seen as bound up with the social and mental structures peculiar to the Greek city….Greek reason was not so much the product of human commerce with things as of the relations of human beings with one another. It developed less through the techniques that apply to the work than through those that give one person a hold over others, and whose common instrument is language: the art of the politician, the rhetorician, the pedagogue. Greek reason is that reason which makes it possible to act practically, deliberately, and systematically on human beings, not to transform nature. In its limitations as in its innovations, it is a creature of the city.
–Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (1994: 130, 132)

It is imperative we understand the context out of which the ideas were emerging.