The Greek World After Alexander 323–30 BC

Graham Shipley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134065387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Greek World After Alexander 323–30 BC examines social changes in the old and new cities of the Greek world and in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms.

An appraisal of the momentous military and political changes after the era of Alexander, this book considers developments in literature, religion, philosophy, and science, and establishes how far they are presented as radical departures from the culture of Classical Greece or were continuous developments from it.

Graham Shipley explores the culture of the Hellenistic world in the context of the social divisions between an educated elite and a general population at once more mobile and less involved in the political life of the Greek city.

1

APPROACHES AND SOURCES

The period and its problems

The period name ‘hellenistic’ is one of the most frequently discussed terms in the study of the ancient world.¹ It derives from the ancient Greek verb hellênizô, ‘I behave like a Greek’, ‘I adopt Greek ways’, or ‘I speak Greek’, and therefore ultimately from the Greeks’ name for themselves, Hellênes. It is however, a modern coinage, based on the term Hellenismus, which the mid-nineteenth-century Prussian historian J. G. Droysen employed to describe the period when the spread of Greek culture to parts of the non-Greek world was given new impetus by the invasion of Asia by Alexander.² Droysen’s work focused attention on the period as a distinctive phase of Greek culture;³ sweeping views of a distinctive, unified hellenistic world-culture appear in more or less explicit forms in such magisterial treatments as those by Kaerst⁴ and Beloch,⁵ and are occasionally met with even now.⁶

In the period after Alexander the Great’s conquests, hellênizô and cognate terms appear only rarely in documents, and usually with the limited meanings above. No ancient author refers to the Orient ‘going Greek’, as the modern term would seem to suggest, though Plutarch describes Alexander as having brought civilization to the peoples he conquered (On the Fortune or Courage of Alexander the Great, i,⁷ 328 c–f, Austin 19). The search for an overall characterization of Greek–non-Greek interaction tends to presuppose a unified ‘oriental’ culture, quite at odds with reality.⁸ Few, if any, scholars now suppose that the peoples of the Near East universally adopted Greek language and customs; there is no evidence that this happened. They prefer to paint a variegated picture of co-existence, interaction, and sometimes confrontation between newly settled Greeks and indigenous populations (some of whom had themselves migrated from elsewhere), and in a dynamic rather than static social context. Occasionally there is evidence of the active promotion of cultural interchange by rulers, but no single explanation fits all cases and each must be examined on its merits. The boundaries defining what it was to be Greek, or to be (as presumably a Greek would view it) non-Greek, were negotiable, not fixed, and had to be renegotiated as society changed – not least when generations of inter-marriage in Asia or Egypt raised issues of who was Greek and who was not.

What we call the ‘Greek world’ was never restricted to the area of the modern Greek state. In earlier times the Greek city-states had planted colonial settlements around the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, particularly in Sicily and southern Italy. Alexander conquered the Persian empire comprising Egypt and western Asia, but his short-lived empire was divided among his successors, eventually giving rise to three large kingdoms. Macedonia (including the Greek peninsula as far as the Isthmus, which Philip II had conquered in 338, but not all of the Peloponnese) was ruled by the Antigonid monarchs; Egypt by the Ptolemies; Asia (sometimes called Syria) by the Seleukids. The last was partly an agglomeration of separate principalities (such as Armenia and Cappadocia), as it had been under Persian rule. A fourth kingdom, Pergamon in north-western Asia Minor, broke from the Seleukids in the mid-third century BC, and various Seleukid territories became semi-independent or independent at different times (notably Baktria in the far east from the mid-third century on).

Pre-existing Greek city-states were incorporated into the kings’ territories by a variety of methods, some of them remaining notionally independent even if informally subordinate. Within this new political context, Greeks were probably numerically dominant only within towns and cities, particularly in Alexander’s new capital of Egypt, Alexandria, which became the largest city in the Greek world and distinctively multi-ethnic. From the late third century on, the rising power of Rome was increasingly influential; the Romans defeated Macedonia for the first time in 197 BC, expelled the Seleukid armies from Europe and imposed a damaging peace treaty (188), abolished the kingdom of Macedonia (168), defeated the confederation of southern Greek cities (146), and by stages took over the rest of the hellenistic world, notably gaining Egypt in 30 at the end of the Roman civil wars.

Despite the problems associated with the name ‘hellenistic’, it remains a convenient and clear label for the period beginning with Alexander, usually with his death in 323 BC but sometimes at other dates (notably the battle of Ipsos in 301 BC). The term is retained in this book, but purely as a chronological marker. Like all ‘periods’ in history, the hellenistic is a largely arbitrary construct. There is a particular difficulty in assigning a terminal date, and no attempt to do so can be completely convincing. Greek rule (which itself meant a variety of things) came to an end, generally in favour of Roman rule, at different dates in different places between 168 BC and AD 72; even then, the distinctive city-based culture of the Greeks, modified by centuries of interaction with non-Greek cultures, continued to evolve in new ways for many more centuries. With justification did A. H. M. Jones choose the thousand years beginning with Alexander as the chronological scope for his study of the later Greek city, which persisted long into the Christian era and after the division of the Roman empire into east and west.⁹

Given these difficulties, or fluidities, of definition – and particularly in view of the shorter definitions of the period that might be upheld (such as 301–146 BC) – it must be asked whether there is anything inherently distinctive about the period after Alexander. Given the plethora of alternative political or military events that could be chosen as termini, such an answer would better be framed in terms of society, economy, and culture. Provided we do not seek to torture the evidence in the search for fixed chronological boundaries or overnight transformations, the question can be treated as an investigation of the effects of Macedonian conquest upon Greece and the Near East. In addition, as subsequent chapters will reveal, the period beginning with Alexander saw an acceleration of contact of all kinds between different communities in and around the Mediterranean, in areas such as trade, travel, diplomacy, and the exchange of ideas.

A number of major issues have attracted the attention of historians in recent years. How did the classical city-state fare, and how did common people fare economically and in terms of political rights, within a world of monarchical military powers? How did Macedonia itself develop after the break-up of Alexander’s empire, and what impact did rule by monarchs of Macedonian descent have upon Egypt and western Asia? How well did traditional forms of religion survive in Greece, and what changes took place in modes of religious practice and ethical systems? Outside Greece, in what ways did Greek culture and social organization interact with other societies? How did people, both in Greece and outside, deal with issues of gender and ethnicity in new social and political circumstances? What intellectual activities took place, and how far did they interact with, and contribute to, social life at large?

Evidence, from many angles, presents us with a period of rapid change. Despite earlier anxieties on the part of scholars, a consensus is growing that the Greek polis (city-state) continued to exist and in some respects to flourish and prosper; it seems clear that more cities were in some sense democratic than before, but that their freedom of action was limited. Many cities (poleis) had to come to terms with a new position of subordination to a king; but this was not a wholly new experience, for many had previously had to cope with rule by Athens or Persia. There are more worrying trends, however: in the Greek homeland at least, survey archaeology possibly indicates a gradual, though never total, drift away from small farmsteads to urban employment, perhaps supported by larger-scale estate farming in the countryside, carried out by increasingly rich landed aristocrats – though the evidence is not conclusive (p. 31).

There are also signs of social transformations, if gradual ones. Women are seen to play more prominent roles in public life, albeit within a maledominated value system; certainly literature and public documents show signs of a more sophisticated view of women as persons.¹⁰ There were new options in religion, especially in the areas of ruler-cult and newly introduced additional non-Greek cults in Greek lands, with greater prominence for healing cults and those concerned with individual destiny or salvation. In philosophy, there is an emphasis upon ethics and a person’s role within a community. Literature, which had never stopped evolving (the alleged pinnacle of achievement in the fifth and fourth centuries only represents one snapshot), developed along new lines. Poetry is especially characteristic of the age, with its emphasis on the individual’s life and his or her emotional and psychological states, rather than, as in classical Athens, an almost exclusive focus upon the citizen’s duty towards his city. Finally, there were by any measure huge advances in scientific understanding, though not, as today, from a utilitarian or industrial point of view. Science was a cultural – almost philosophical and religious – activity, even a pastime for a leisured élite.

Every historical period can be seen to some extent as a mirror of our own, since it is the story of how people who were in most respects like us dealt with the problems they faced. The hellenistic period is no exception, and many writers have seen it as holding a key to the issues of their own day. W. W. Tarn, writing mainly between the two world wars in the heyday of the League of Nations, focused on the issues of racial and cultural confrontation facing Alexander and his successors, and on the nature of colonial rule in western Asia.¹¹ Mikhail Rostovtzeff, who left Russia to avoid the revolution, gave us a hellenistic world whose most important feature was the rise of a capitalist bourgeoisie (Alexander’s successors are even ‘self-made men’).¹² Arnaldo Momigliano, an Italian Jew writing before and after the second world war, focused on intellectual history as an autonomous project, and also on problems of mutual understanding between races.¹³

More recently, in 1950s’ New York, Moses Hadas painted an optimistic picture of the synthesis of cultures.¹⁴ F. W. Walbank, a historian taking a materialist approach, writes in terms of political-military power and class relations.¹⁵ Claire Préaux, a papyrologist whose work is informed by a social-historical approach, explores the economic system of Egypt and, in her later work, the interaction between kings and cities and between different cultures, taking a generally pessimistic view of the latter.¹⁶ Others (such as the Quaker John Ferguson and the lifelong iconoclast Peter Green), writing in the age of late twentieth-century liberalism, have tended to see the hellenistic period in terms of (either healthy or déraciné) individualism, the breakdown of convention, and experiments with new modes of living and thinking comparable to those of the past thirty years in the capitalist West; Green, in particular, reflects a postmodern disillusionment with all institutions and political processes.¹⁷

Though some of these approaches have a stronger foundation in evidence than others, many of them could be shown to be historically relative, while some are excessively judgemental, selective, or exaggerated. Recent scholars are less often tempted to advance sweeping historical schemes.¹⁸ It is important to understand the period using as many methodologically neutral terms as possible – wealth, groups, power, and so on – and, when using more determinate terms of analyses such as imperialism or economy, to define them closely. We can thus avoid imposing a rigid or judgemental scheme on what is surely the most complex of all periods of Greek history, and try to allow the diversity of cultures, social forms, and landscapes to emerge.

The literary sources

As soon as we try to understand the period we are faced with the problem of how to approach and interpret the data, which have a rather different character from those available for the preceding classical period.¹⁹

‘Fragments’

A term often encountered when reading about hellenistic history, but rarely explained, is ‘fragment’. Sometimes a fragment is just that, a broken piece of papyrus or the torn page of a medieval manuscript on parchment or vellum. Much more often, however, ‘fragment’ is used to describe a quotation or summary of a lost author in the works of a surviving author. The reason why these quotations are so important is that for some of the period after Alexander there is no contemporary, continuous narrative. Some works of history disappeared because they were re-read and copied less often in an age when a Roman reading public preferred ...