Separated by language, history, and several hundred miles of the Mediterranean Sea, two of the world's greatest cultures matured and advanced simultaneously in the centuries before the birth of Christianity. In the northern Aegean, the Hellenic Greeks flourished around their crown jewel, Athens, while the eastern Holy City of Jerusalem witnessed the continued development of Jewish tradition. Although they shared adjacent portions of the globe and timeline, these two civilizations grew up around completely different ideologies. The monotheistic piety of Judaism that developed in the Jewish lands was in stark contrast to the Greek cult of the polytheistic Olympian gods, a religion that often tended more toward the rational and philosophical than toward long-standing Jewish piety. In the spirit of this division appear the two works under examination, the rather secular Phaedo of the Greek luminary Plato and its counterpart among the sacred pages of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes. Although the age of each cannot be determined with certainty, most scholarly hypotheses place their births within a century and a half of each other. The Greek text was probably written soon after Socrates' death in 399 BC and the Hebrew text was probably composed around 250 BC, leaving an insignificant difference compared to the overall scale of antiquity. This reasonably close proximity between the authors can be clearly seen in the way these two works consider the fundamental and eternal questions of life, but for every link between the two a difference also abounds. Plato, author of the Phaedo, was the second member of the brilliant philosophical flowering of ancient Athens that began with Socrates, continued through him, and then culminated with Aristotle. You... middle of paper... and you complain about Socrates' stupid waste of his life in preparation for an empty and eternal death. Can we really decide who to side with: Socrates' abstention or Koheleth's indulgence? As usually seems to be the case, many would probably avoid such extremes to opt for moderation, but the question is actually invalid since these works are not presented as a guide on "how to live". These precious pieces of classic literature are examples of the answers that two men found to the eternal questions, questions that every individual must face and investigate for themselves. Works Cited Plato, Phaedo, In: The Collected Dialogues Of Plato Inclusive The Letters, Editors: E . Hamilton and H. Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1961. The Hebrew Bible. "Ecclesiastes". Ed. Gottwald, Norman K. Fortress Press, 1985