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From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.
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Page 21
If the gradual loss of a sense of community, the decreasing opportunity to play a decisive part in public life, meant more freedom for the intellectual to indulge in the secluded pursuits of study and research, it also induced a widespread feeling of uneasiness, loss of direction, homelessness. In earlier, more compact polities the individual was first and foremost a citizen, with comprehensible rights and duties and a niche of his own in society. The largest community known to him was one in which he himself was widely known. All other communities were foreign, to be encountered only in the course of diplomacy or war. His world, like Aristotle's universe, was organically disposed. It had a centre and a circumference. As the Hellenistic age advanced, he became more like a Democritean atom, aimlessly adrift in an infinite void. Under this sense of strangeness, the common accidents of poverty, exile, slavery, loneliness and death took on more frightening shapes and were brooded over more anxiously. One result of this, especially in the later Hellenistic period, was an increase in the popularity of mystery-religions, both Greek and foreign, which in one form or another promised 'salvation'. Cults of this sort, from Egypt and the Asiatic countries, not unknown to Greeks before, gained adherents from all ranks of society. Philosophy also was naturally not unaffected. New systems arose to meet the new needs, systems whose declared goal was the attainment of ataraxia, undisturbed calm, or autarkeia, self-sufficiency.
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=21
