Part 46

II. AFTER ALEXANDER THE GREAT.--When we review generally the extent to which Hellenism had penetrated the outer world in the middle of the 4th century B.C., it must be admitted that it had not seriously affected any but the more primitive races which dwelt upon the borders of the Hellenic lands, and here it would seem, with the doubtful exception of the Macedonians, to have been an affair rather of the courts than of the life of the people. On the other hand it must be taken into account that Hellenism had as yet only been a very short while in the world. What would have happened had it continued to depend upon its spiritual force only for propagation we cannot say. Everything was changed when by the conquests of Alexander (334-323) it suddenly rose to material supremacy in all the East as far as India, and when cities of Greek speech and constitution were planted by the might of kings at all the cardinal points of intercourse within those lands. The values honoured by the rulers of the world must naturally impress themselves upon the subject multitudes. The Macedonian chiefs found their pride in being champions of Hellenism. Of Alexander there is no need to speak. The courts of his successors in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt were Greek in language and atmosphere. All kings liked to win the good word of the Greeks by munificence bestowed upon Greek cities and Greek institutions. All of them in some degree patronized Greek art and letters, and some sought fame for themselves as authors. Even the barbarian courts, their neighbours or vassals, were swayed by the dominant fashion to imitation. But by the courts alone Hellenism could never have been propagated far. Greek culture had been the product of the city-state, and Hellenism could not be dissevered from the city. It was upon the system of Greek and Macedonian cities, planted by Alexander and his successors, that their work rested, and though their dynasties crumbled, their work remained. Rome, when it stepped into their place, did no more than safeguard its continuance; in the East Rome acted as a Hellenistic power, and if, when the legions had thundered past, the brooding East "plunged in thought again," that thought was largely directed by the Greek schoolmaster who followed in the legions' train. From our present point of view we may therefore regard this work of Hellenism as one continuous process, initiated by the Macedonians and carried on under Roman protection, and ask in the first place what the institution of a Greek city implied.

_The Character of the New Greek Cities._--The citizen bodies at the outset were really of Greek or Macedonian blood--soldiers who had served in the royal armies, or men attracted from the older Greek cities to the new lands thrown open to commerce. To fix their European soldiery upon the new soil was an obvious necessity for the Macedonian chiefs who had set up kingdoms among the barbarians, and the lots of the veterans (except in Egypt) were naturally attached to various urban centres. The cities, of course, drew in numbers beside of the people of the land; Alexander is specially said to have incorporated large bodies of natives in some of the new cities of the Eastern provinces (Arr. iv. 4, 1; Diod. xvii. 83, 2; Curtius ix. 10, 7). It may generally be taken for granted that the lower strata of the city-populations was mainly native; to be included in the city population was not, however, to be included in the citizen body, and it remains a question how far the latter admitted members of other than European origin (Beloch iii. [i.] 414). The statements, for instance, of Josephus that the Jews were given full citizen rights in the new foundations are probably false (Willrich, _Juden und Griechen vor der makkabaischen Erhebung_, 1895, p. 19 f.). The social organization of the citizen-body conformed to the regular Hellenic type with a division into _phylae_ and, in Egypt, at any rate, into _demi_ (Liban. Or. xix. 62; Satyrus, frag. 21 = _F.H.G._ iii. 164; Sir W. M. Ramsay, _Cities and Bishoprics_, i. 60; Kenyon, _Archiv f. Papyr._ ii. 74; Jonguet, _Bull. corr. hell._ xxi., 1897, 184 f.; Liebenam, _Stadteverwaltung_, 220 f.). The cities appear equally Hellenic in their political organs and functions with _boule_ and _demos_ and popularly elected magistrates. Life was filled with the universal Hellenic interests, which centred in the gymnasium and the religious festivals, these last including, of course, not only athletic contests but performances of the classical dramas or later imitations of them. The wandering sophist and rhetorician would find a hearing no less than the musical artist. The language of the upper classes was Greek; and the material background of building and decoration, of dress and furniture, was of Greek design. A greater regularity in the street-plans seems to have distinguished the new cities from the older slowly grown cities of the Greek lands, just as it distinguishes the cities of the New World to-day from those of Europe. Alexandria and Antioch were both traversed from end to end by one long straight street, crossed by shorter ones at right angles; Nicaea was a square from the centre of which all the four gates could be seen at the ends of the intersecting thoroughfares (Strabo xii. 565); similar characteristics are noted in the rebuilt Smyrna (ib. xiv. 646).

Sometimes the Greek city was not an absolutely new foundation, but an old Oriental city, re-colonized and transformed. And in such cases the old name was often replaced by a Greek one. Thus Celaenae in Phrygia became Apamea; Haleb (Aleppo) in Syria became Beroea; Nisibis in Mesopotamia, Antioch; Rhagae (Rai) in Media, Europus. In some cases the old name was left unchallenged, e.g. Thyatira, Damascus and Samaria. Even where there was no new foundation the older cities of Phoenicia and Syria became transformed from the overwhelming prestige of Hellenic culture. In Tyre and Sidon, no less than in Antioch or Alexandria, Greek literature and philosophy were seriously cultivated, as we may see by the great names which they contributed. The process by which Hellenism thus leavened an older city we may trace with peculiar vividness in the case of Jerusalem; we see there the younger generation captivated by its ideals, the appearance of gymnasium and theatre, the eager adoption of Greek political forms (1 Macc. i. 13 f.; 2 Macc. 4., 10 f.).

A. _Characteristics of Hellenism after Alexander._--To the number of Greek city-states existing before Alexander were now therefore added those which extended Hellas as far as India. With the enormous extension of Greek territory a great shifting took place in the old centres of gravity. What changes in the character of Greek culture did the new conditions of the world bring about?

Government.

Hellenism had been the product of the free life of the Greek city-state, and after Chaeronea the great days of the city-state were past. Not that all liberty was everywhere extinguished. Under Alexander himself the Greek states were restive, and Aetolia unsubdued; and, with the break-up of the empire at Alexander's death, there was once more scope for the

## action of the individual cities among the rival great powers. In the

history of the next two or three centuries the cities are by no means ciphers. Rhodes takes a great part in _Weltpolitik_, as a sovereign ally of one or other of the royal courts. In Greece itself the overlordship to which the Macedonian king aspires is imperfect in extent and only maintained to that extent by continual wars. The Greek states on their side show that they are capable even of progressive political development, the needs of the time being met by the federal system, by larger unions of equal members than the leading cities of the past would have tolerated, with their extreme unwillingness to forego the least shred of sovereign independence. The Achaean and Aetolian Leagues are independent powers, which the Macedonian can indeed check by garrisons in Corinth, Chalcis and elsewhere, but which keep a field clear for Hellenic freedom within their borders. Sparta also is a power which can cross swords with the Macedonian king, and Cleomenes III. aspires to unite the Peloponnesus under his headship. As to the cities outside Greece, within or around the royal realms, Seleucid, Ptolemaic or Attalid, their degree of freedom probably differed widely according to circumstances. At one end of the scale, cities of old renown, e.g. Lampsacus or Smyrna, could still make good their independence against Antiochus III. at the beginning of the 2nd century B.C. At the other end of the scale the cities which were royal capitals, e.g. Alexandria, Antioch and Pergamum, were normally controlled altogether by royal nominees. At Pergamum indeed and (at any rate after Antiochus IV.) at Antioch, forms of self-government subsisted upon which, of course, the court had its hand, whilst at Alexandria even such forms were wanting. Between the two extremes there was variation not only between city and city, but, no doubt, in one and the same city at different times. In Syria the independent action of the cities greatly increased during the last weakness of the Seleucid monarchy. With the extension of the single strong rule of Rome over this Hellenistic world, the conditions were changed. Just as the Macedonian conquest, whilst increasing the domain of Greek culture, had straitened Greek liberty, so Rome, whilst bringing Hellenism finally into secure possession of the nearer East, extinguished Greek freedom altogether. Even now the old forms were long religiously respected. Formally, the most illustrious Greek states, Athens, for instance, or Marseilles, or Rhodes, were not subjects of Rome, but free allies. Even in the case of _civitates stipendiariae_ (tribute-paying states), municipal autonomy, subject indeed to interference on the part of the Roman governor, was allowed to go on. _Boule_ and _demos_ long continued to function. The old catchword, "autonomy of the Hellens," was still heard and indeed was solemnly proclaimed by Nero at the Isthmian games of A.D. 67. But during the first centuries of the Christian era, this municipal autonomy, by a process which can only be imperfectly traced in detail, decayed. The _demos_ first sank into political annihilation and the council, no longer popularly elected but an aristocratic order, concentrated the whole administration in its hands. By the end of the 2nd century A.D., claims made by the imperial government upon the municipal senate are more and more changing membership of the order from an honour into an intolerable burden, and financial disorganization is calling on imperial officials in one place after another to undertake the business of government. After Diocletian and under the Eastern Empire the Greek world is organized on the principles of a vast bureaucracy.

Social changes.

With this long process of political decline from Alexander to Diocletian correspond the inner changes in the temper of the Hellenic and Hellenistic peoples. There were, of course, marked differences between one region and another. But certain general characteristics distinguished at once Greek society after the Macedonian conquests from the society of the earlier age. When the vast field of the East was opened to Hellenic enterprise and the bullion of its treasuries flung abroad, fortunes were made on a scale before unparalleled. A new standard of sumptuousness and splendour was set up in the richest stratum of society. This material elaboration of life was furthered by the existence of Hellenistic courts, where the great ministers amassed fabulous riches (e.g. Dionysius, the state secretary of Antiochus IV., Polyb. xxxi. 3, 16; Hermias, the chief minister of Seleucus III., and Antiochus III., Polyb. v. 50. 2; cf. Plutarch, _Agis_ 9), and of huge cities like Alexandria, Antioch and the enlarged Ephesus. It is significant that whereas the earlier Greeks had used precious stones only as a medium for the engraver's art, unengraven gems, valuable for their mere material, now came to be used in profusion for adornment. Already before Alexander pan-hellenic feeling had in various ways overridden the internal divisions of the Greek race, but now, with the vast mingling of Greeks of all sorts in the newly-conquered lands, a generalized Greek culture in which the old local characteristics were merged, came to overspread the world. The gradual supersession of the old dialects by the Koine the common speech of the Greeks, a modification of the Attic idiom coloured by Ionic, was one obvious sign of the new order of things (see GREEK LANGUAGE).

Art and literature.

In its artistic, its literary, its spiritual products the age after Alexander gave evidence of the change. In no department did activity immediately stop; but the old freshness and creative exuberance was gone. Artistic pleasure, grown less delicate, required the stimulus of a more sensational effect or a more striking realism, as we may see by the Pergamene and Rhodian schools of sculpture, by the bas-reliefs with the _genre_ subjects drawn from the life of the countryside, or, in literature by the sort of historical writing which became popular with Cleitarchus and Duris, by the studied emotional or rhetorical point of Callimachus, and by the portrayal of country life in Theocritus. At the same time, artists and men of letters were now addressing themselves in most cases, not to their fellow-citizens in a free city, but to kings and courtiers, or the educated class generally of the Greek world. In those departments of intellectual activity which demand no high ideal faculty, in the study of the world of fact, the centuries immediately following Alexander witnessed notable advance. Scientific research might prosper, just as poetry withered, under the patronage of kings, and such research had now a vast amount of new material at its disposal and could profit by the old Babylonian and Egyptian traditions. The medical schools, especially that of Alexandria, really enlarged knowledge of the animal frame. Knowledge of the earth gained immensely by the Macedonian conquests. The literary schools of Alexandria and Pergamum built up grammatical science, and brought literary and artistic criticism to a fine point. If indeed the earlier ages had been those of creative and spontaneous life, the Hellenistic age was that of conscious criticism and book-learning. The classical products were registered, studied, assorted and commented upon. Men travelled and read more. Books were in demand and were multiplied. Libraries became a feature of the age, the kings leading the way as collectors, of books, especially the rival dynasties of Egypt and Pergamum. The library attached to the Museum at Alexandria is said to have contained at the time of its destruction in 47 B.C. as many as 700,000 rolls (Aul. Gell. vi. 17. 3). Even smaller cities, like Aphrodisias in Caria, had public libraries for the instruction of their youth (Le Bas, III. No. 1618).

With the general decay of ancient civilization under the Roman empire, even scientific research ceased, and though there were literary revivals, like that connected with the new Atticism under the Antonine emperors, these were mainly imitative and artificial, and even learning became at last under the Byzantine emperors a jejune and formal tradition (see GREEK LITERATURE).

Religion and philosophy.

The diffusion of the Greek race far from the former centres of its life, the mingling of citizens of many cities, the close contact between Greek and barbarian in the conquered lands--all this had made the old sanctions of civic religion and civic morality of less account than ever. New guides of life were needed. The Stoic philosophy, with its cosmopolitan note, its fixed dogmas and plain ethical precepts, came into the world at the time of the Macedonian conquests to meet the needs of the new age. Its ideas became popular among ordinary men as the older philosophies had never been. The Stoic or Cynic preacher, attacking the ways of society, in pungent, often coarse, phrase, became a familiar figure of the Greek market-place (P. Wendland, _Beitrage zur Gesch. d. griech. Philosophie_, 1895).

Although the cults of the old Greek deities in the new cities, with their splendid apparatus of festivals and sacrifice might still hold the multitude, men turned ever in large numbers to alien religions, felt as more potent because strange, and the various gods of Egypt and the East began to find larger entrance in the Greek world. Even in the old Greek religion before Alexander there had been large elements of foreign origin, and that the Greeks should now do honour to the gods of the lands into which they came, as we find the Cilician and Syrian Greeks doing to Baal-tars and Baal-marcod and the Egyptian Greeks to the gods of Egypt, was only in accordance with the primitive way of thinking. But it was a sign of the times when Serapis and Isis, Osiris and Anubis began to take place among the popular deities in the old Greek lands. The origin of the cult of Serapis, which Ptolemy I. found, or established, in Egypt is disputed; the familiar type of the god is the invention of a Greek artist, but the name and religion came from somewhere in the East (see discussion under SERAPIS). Before the end of the 2nd century B.C. there were temples of Serapis in Athens, Rhodes, Delos and Orchomenos in Boeotia. Under the Roman empire the cult of Isis, now furnished with an official priesthood and elaborate ritual, became really popular in the Hellenistic world. King Asoka in the 3rd century B.C. sent Buddhist missionaries from India to the Mediterranean lands; their preaching has, it is true, left little or no trace in our Western records. But other religions of Oriental origin penetrated far, the worship of the Phrygian Great Mother, and in the 2nd century A.D. the religion of the Mithras (Lafaye, _Culte des divinites alexandrines_, 1884; Roscher, articles "Anubis," "Isis," &c.; F. Cumont, _Mysteres de Mithra_, Eng. trans., 1903; _Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain_, 1906).

The Jews, too, by the time of Christ were finding in many quarters an open door. Besides those who were ready to go the whole length and accept circumcision, numbers adopted particular Jewish practices, observing the Sabbath, for instance, or turned from polytheism to the doctrine of the One God. The synagogues in the Gentile cities had generally attached to them, in more or less close connexion a multitude of those "who feared God" and frequented the services (Schurer, _Gesch. d. jud. Volks_, iii. 102-135).

Christianity.

Among the religions which penetrated the Hellenistic world from an Eastern source, one ultimately overpowered all the rest and made that world its own. The inter-action of Christianity and Hellenism opens large fields of inquiry. The teaching of Christ Himself contained, as it is given to us, no Hellenic element; so far as He built with older material, that material was exclusively the sacred tradition of Israel. So soon, however, as the Gospel was carried in Greek to Greeks, Hellenic elements began to enter into it, in the writings, for instance, of St Paul, the appeal to what "nature" teaches would be generally admitted to be the adoption of a Greek mode of thought. It was, of course, impossible that speaking in Greek and living among Greeks, Christians should not to some extent use current conceptions for the expression of their faith. There was, at the same time, in the early Church a powerful current of feeling hostile to Greek culture, to the wisdom of the world. What the attitude of the New People should be to it, whether it was all bad, or whether there were good things in it which Christians should appropriate, was a vital question that always confronted them. The great Christian School of Alexandria represented by Clement and Origen effected a durable alliance between Greek education and Christian doctrine. In proportion as the Christian Church had to go deeper into metaphysics in the formulation of its belief as to God, as to Christ, as to the soul, the Greek philosophical terminology, which was the only vehicle then available for precise thought, had to become more and more an essential part of Christianity. At the same time Christian ethics incorporated much of the current popular philosophy, especially large Stoical elements. In this way the Church itself, as we shall see, became a propagator of Hellenism (see Hatch, _Hibbert Lectures_, 1888; Wendland, "Christentum u. Hellenismus" in _Neue Jahrb. f. kl. Alt._ ix. 1902, p. 1 f.; and _Die hellenistisch-romische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zu Judentum u. Christentum_, 1907).

B. _Effect upon non-Hellenic Peoples._--Hellenism secured by the Macedonian conquest _points d'appui_ from the Mediterranean to India, and brought the system of commerce and intercourse into Greek hands. What effect did it produce in these various countries? What effect again in the lands of the West which fell under the sway of Rome?

Greek cities.

Greek art.