Ancient Greece reached a new and unprecedented level of civilization.
Not only in the realm of politics, where Athens surpassed the
ancient world in developing the theory and practice of democracy,
but in all aspects of human endeavor and aspiration the Greek
achievements set new standards. However, Greek political power
declined, primarily due to imperialist conquest and civil war.
But a culture cannot be invaded and destroyed. It can be borrowed,
stolen or deported, however-and this is precisely what happened
to Greek culture. The less civilized neighbors of Greece noticed
her achievements and reacted to them. In reacting they helped
to spread a Hellenistic style of civilization to other parts of
the Ancient World.
This expansion of Hellenistic civilization began quite early with
traders and colonists who brought Greek ways, ideas and art with
them to the backwoods regions of the Mediterranean world, such
as Scythia, northern Italy and Gaul. closer to the Agean center,
the kingdom of Macedon acquired a somewhat deeper tincture of
the Greek style of life as a prelude to conquering the heartland
of Greek civilization itself. The kingdom of Macedon was barbaric
and primitive compared to he Greek city states south across the
border. But Macedon, like many states in a similar position, was
able to profit by being close to a great militarily strong power,
organized with civilized efficiency, and conquered its smaller
rivals nearer the old center of culture.
Macedonian kings copied Greek manners. The tragedian Euripides,
for example, spent some time as an honored guest at the royal
court of Macedon, and Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. No
doubt the Macedonian kings felt genuine admiration for Greek civilization
for its own sake. But their policy of Hellenization had additional
advantages. Young Macedonian noblemen who came to the kings court
and adopted Greek tastes soon discovered that they could enjoy
these new things only by joining the king's service. This was
so because the Macedonian countryside was populated with a sturdy
and hardy group of peasants whom the noblemen could not exploit
by way of high dues and rents to finance their high style of living.
Thus the noblemen who stayed in the country did not have the cash
to import Greek wares. But the king's income came from royal mines
and the booty of conquered cities near the coast. So he had plenty
of money to import luxuries required to live in a civilized way,
and to distribute them among deserving servants. In this way the
Macedonian kings created a group of loyal and obedient yet proudly
free and noble officers and royal agents.
When such officers of the crown undertook to teach Macedonian
peasants the tactics of Greek phalanx warfare, they quickly created
a very efficient military machine. The Macedonians were numerous,
hardy and tough. They were also used to obeying their superiors,
who now, for the first time, were willing to follow the king and
give up the fierce local feuds which had previously made the Macedonian
nobility utterly ungovernable. King Philip of Macedon (ruled 359-336
BC) was the first to reap the full benefits of the new configuration
of forces within his country. He conquered the neighboring barbarian
lands of Illyria and Thrace and then turned upon Greece. Everywhere
his army met with success, presaging the eve n more brilliant
victories that came to Macedonian arms under his son Alexander
(ruled 336-323 BC) .
Alexander's career directed Hellenism eastward. His army marched
into Persia in 334 BC and everywhere consciously championed Greek
ways. After 330 BC, when the last Persian monarch, Darius III,
was killed by his own followers, Alexander claimed to be the legitimate
successor and avenger of the murdered monarch. Yet, he did not
thereby abandon his role as founder of cities on the Greek model
and exemplar of the Greek heroic ideal. Alexander aspired to conquer
the whole world, and was bitterly disappointed when his weary
troops refused to follow him any further. After subduing the easternmost
reaches of the Persian empire and invading northwestern India,
Alexander was, therefore, forced to give up his march into the
Ganges valley. After a difficult return trip, in the course of
which Alexander and his soldiers followed the Indus to its mouth
and then marched overland to Babylon, the ever-victorious Macedonian
died suddenly of a fever (323 BC).
Alexander's unexpected death, less than twelve years after he
had launched his army on its great venture, became a signal for
the outbreak of strife among his generals. His posthumous son
and heir was among the early victims. Only after nearly half a
century of warfare did three more or less stable monarchies emerge,
each ruled by a Macedonian general's descendant: the Ptolemies
in Egypt, the Seleucids in Asia, and the Antigonids in Macedonia.
Of the three, Ptolemaic Egypt was at first the strongest. As a
sea power the Ptolemies disputed control of the Aegean with the
Antigonids, while on land they quarreled with the Seleucids for
primacy in Palestine and Syria.
Both the Ptolemaic empire and the Seleucid empire depended in
considerable part upon Greek immigrants. Thousands of Greek swarmed
out of their homeland in the wake of Alexander.s conquest in hope
of finding fortunes in foreign parts. Some became government officials
and administrators, others entered military service and some settled
as farmers in special military colonies. But the great majority
became city folk, pursuing hundreds of different occupations both
in government service and in business and the free professions-working
as merchants, doctors, architects, scribes, tax farmers, professional
athletes, actors and the like.
Massive emigration was both a symptom and cause of economic decline
in the Greek homeland. The Greek countryside was full of deserted
villages and abandoned fields. Slaves and .foreigners took the
place of Greeks who had left to look for greener pastures. In
Greece there had always been a close linkage between farmer and
city people which allowed the glowering of Greek culture. But
now an unbridgeable social and psychological gap spawned between
the upper classes sf the towns and the rude peasantry. Almost
as great a gap also divided the poor of the city and the rich
and educated classes, who mere and more dominated the political
as well as the economic scene. So, the economic and social base
of democracy had been destroyed.
Such polarization of society had long been familiar in the Middle
East. It was, indeed, the price of civilization, for technical
limitations upon production and transportation made it necessary
for some men to go without if others were to have the leisure
to acquire and elaborate high culture. The classical age itself
had not really escaped this condition. Athens had been, in its
days of greatness, a predator upon weaker communities all around
the Aegaen and Black Sea coasts. Citizens of Athens collaborated
to exploit their advantage, and used their wealth and leisure
for public display rather than private consumption. But collective
exploitation at a distance is not necessarily milder than the
pressure of a landlord upon peasants close by. A society of cultivated
landlords, with their servants, attendants, educators and providers
of other professional services, is not necessarily less humane
or less civilized than an imperial community of equals whose equality
is dependent in great part upon an increasing flow of tribute,
plunder, and the gains to be had from such services as the administration
of justice among subject peoples.
Once Greek high culture came to be the possession of an urban
upper class whose income depended primarily upon land rents or
government salaries, it became far more exportable. Very special
circumstances were required to produce a city like Athens or Sparta.
But any landlord with enough cash could get a Greek education,
learn Greek manners and become in all respects a Greek without
having to change the social structure of his community as a whole.
As the Greeks penetrated the Middle East, the increasingly urban,
upper-class character of Greek civilization at home, helped to
spread it among the landlords and other upper class men abroad.
The Greek style of life, which included such things as athletics
in the nude and dancing girls as well as philosophy and poetry,
appealed strongly to many of these men. Greeks, as a rule, were
willing to admit such recruits to their circle as soon as the
neophytes acquired a suitable Greek educator and set of manners.
Even the lower classes found it convenient or necessary to learn
Greek, which rapidly became the dominant language of the entire
eastern Mediterranean, displacing Aramaic from that position within
two or three centuries of Alexander's victories.
At first everything seemed to go one way. Middle Eastern peoples
borrowed arts and manners from the Greeks while the conquerors
found little in the life of their subjects to admire or imitate.
But before long cultural borrowing became a two-way street. The
lower classes, for instance, found in Middle Eastern religions
a far more adequate explanation of the world than anything available
to them from the Greek tradition. The worship of the Olympic gods
was tied up with public ceremonies and city-wide celebrations.
But the poor and humble of the great Mediterranean cities needed
a religion that could comfort them in times of personal distress,
and help them hope for a better future.
Leisurely philosophic speculation was no longer much help when
Roman soldiers and governors trampled ones gardens, demanded bigger
taxes, bribes and ransoms than one could pay. Under these circumstances
the upper classes, too, began to feel the need for a more personal
and emotionally vibrant faith.
Several religions combining Greek with Middle Eastern elements
met this need. A few Greeks were attracted to Judaism, which retained
its full vigor and emotional conviction. But the hatred pious
Jews felt for some of the Greek habits and customs-in particular
the nudity of the gymnasium deeply shocked Jewish sensibility-made
any sort of half-way house between the two cultures difficult.
But the cults of Mithra and Serapis proved more flexible and permitted
close marriage of Greek with Middle Eastern ideas and religious
rituals. A general turn toward a theistic interpretation of the
world therefore became evident among the Greeks even before the
Roman conquest drastically altered the political order of the
eastern Mediterranean.
In other fields too there was an interesting interaction between
Greek and Middle Eastern cultures. Greek astronomers learned from
the Babylonians and developed a more advanced theory of the universe.
They worked out a precise mathematical scheme which actually allowed
prediction of planetary motions. The linkage of Greek mathematics
to Babylonian observational records made it possible to calculate
the relative position of the planets at any time--past or future.
Astrologers then applied these skills to events on earth which
they claimed were equally predictable. This was a typical expression
of Hellenistic ''science.'' The center of astrology was in Alexandria,
Egypt.
Other aspects of Hellenistic culture diversified older Greek tradition,
but cut no strikingly new paths. This was true or sculpture and
architecture, city planning and the arts of fortification. Literature
tended to become academic, full of learned references and populated
with silly shepherdesses and the like. History degenerated into
a branch of rhetoric, while the rhetorical masters preferred a
good phrase to a good idea. Such refinements and artificialities
appealed of course only to the educated. The poor and uneducated
found a quasi-literary voice through the mime. This was a form
of popular theater which preserved something of the bawdy tradition
of Athenian comedy.
A new and politically important strand was added to the mixture
of peoples and cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean with the
Roman conquest, first of Macedonia and Greece (146 BC) , then
of Seleucid Asia (64 BC) , and finally of Egypt (30 BC) .
During the long period of the Pax Romanum, which followed the
initial conquests, Hellenistic civilization was transplanted to
Italy, Gaul and Spain. It is true that Latin replaced Greek as
the prevailing language but the culture remained very much the
same. It was now Hellenistic culture in Latin dress which rooted
itself in the western provinces of the Roman Empire.
Sculptors learned to carve with all the skill of their Hellenistic
contemporaries. But Roman taste, emphasizing realistic portraiture,
gave Roman sculpture its own distinctive character. Similarly
in the field of literature, Lucretius (d. 55 BC), Cicero (d. 43
BC), and Virgil (d. 19 BC)-to name only the most distinguished-developed
Latin into a language capable of expressing most of the Greek
philosophic, rhetorical, and poetic refinements. Yet Latin could
never become Greek. Latin letters and thought therefore retained
always a distinctive accent, even when faithfully patterned on
Greek originals or inspired by Greek example.
Within the framework of imperial administration, the provinces
of the empire were organized into a series of city-states, each
with its own public institutions, buildings and governmental procedures
just as in Greek and early Roman times. During the long Roman
peace, provincial cities came to be dominated by local land-owners.
Their progress in the refinements of civilization was made at
the direct cost of the peasants who tilled the soil and paid them
rents. Gentility, but also a certain vapidity and cultural fragility,
were inevitable consequences. Only a few knew or cared much about
the high Greco-Roman culture of the great Mediterranean world,
and these favored few owed their security to the obedience of
distant frontier garrisons to an emperor whom most of the soldiers
had never seen. Under the circumstances it is surprising that
peace lasted as long as it did, and that the privileged social
position of a demilitarized landed class was not challenged until
after AD 193, when civil wars and barbarian invasions once more
began to ravage the empire.
So, the dispersion of Hellenistic civilization over most of the
populated parts of the western world between 500 BC and 200 AD
is a case study in a general tendency-not to say law-of civilization.
It tends to grow and develop to a high level in a particular area
because economic, social and political factors coalesce to make
it possible. It flourished for a few centuries and then begins
to disintegrate.
The reasons for that decline are manifold, but they all seem to
relate to the economic and social foundations in some degree.
When this foundation weakens, by the development of class distinctions
or social and economic disparities, for instance, the high level
of cultural achievement looses vitality and strength. The culture
does not necessarily die and vanish. It tends to be dispersed
first to the barbaric neighbors who invade and then, in turn,
spread it to other parts of the world which they conquered.
In this way Greek culture was spread to the whole Mediterranean
basin by the Macedonians and the Romans, both peoples whose native
cultures were certainly inferior to the subjugated Greeks. Thus,
even barbarians, a term the Greeks invented, play a useful role,
as carriers and disseminators of culture. They fulfill a kind
of world-civilizing mission. For, thanks to the Macedonians and
Romans, Hellenistic civilization, a generalized form of Greek
culture, became an integral part of the classical tradition in
Western Civilization.