Genius

Read this in my Roman Civ textbook and couldn't pass it by:

"Every man has his own customs and his own religious practices. Similarly, the divine mind has given to different cities different religious rites which protect them. And, just as each man receives at birth his own soul, so, too, does each nation receive a genius [guardian spirit] which guides its destiny."
-Symmachus, Dispatches to the Emperor

That passage was written in the year 384, as part of a protest against Christianity's rising dominance in Rome.
It caught my eye because Symmachus mentions the idea of national spirits, which the Bible mentions in passing in Daniel:
"I have come to answer your prayer. But for twenty-one days the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia blocked my way. Then Michael, one of the archangels, came to help me, and I left him there with the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia." -Daniel 10:12/13

One subject that I have always wanted to learn more about is the intersection between Judaism and Greek culture/religion. Because I think that it must exist somewhere. Here we have a late-era Roman senator fighting against Christianity, and using language that we generally don't accept in Western thought, but that would have made perfect sense in Daniel's time.

Daniel presents us with the idea that nations are alive, that they have representatives outside of the physical world, and that they fight each other.
This is very much like Greek and even the Roman view of the gods.

I continue to believe that modern christianity has lost the vast nuance of ancient understanding somewhere in our quest for systematic theology.