Chapter 4: Life in the Hellenistic World

Alexander’s Conquests and Their Political Legacy

Alexander (r. 336–323 b.c.e.) proclaimed to the Greek world that the invasion of Persia was to be a mighty act of revenge for Xerxes’s invasion of Greece in 480 b.c.e.
Macedonian kings established dynasties and Greek culture spread in this Hellenistic era.

Military Campaigns

In 334 b.c.e. Alexander led an army of Macedonians and Greeks into Persian territory in Asia Minor.
Alexander intended not only a military campaign but also an expedition of discovery.
In the next three years Alexander moved east into the Persian Empire, winning major battles at the Granicus River and Issus.
He moved into Syria and took most of the cities of Phoenicia and the eastern coast of the Mediterranean without a fight.
Alexander was proclaimed pharaoh, the legitimate ruler of the country.
He founded a new capital, Alexandria, on the coast of the Mediterranean, which would later grow into an enormous city.
Alexander left Egypt after less than a year and marched into Assyria, where at Gaugamela he defeated the Persian army.
In 330 b.c.e. he took Ecbatana, the last Persian capital, and pursued the Persian king Darius III to his death.
With his Macedonian soldiers and Greek mercenaries, he set out to conquer more of Asia.
It took his soldiers four additional years to conquer Bactria (in today’s Afghanistan) and the easternmost parts of the now-defunct Persian Empire.
In 326 b.c.e. Alexander crossed the Indus River and entered India.
Alexander turned south to the Arabian Sea, and he waged a bloody and ruthless war against the people of the area.
The army and those who supported the troops with supplies suffered fearfully, and many soldiers died along the way.
Nonetheless, in 324 b.c.e. Alexander returned to Susa in the Greek-controlled region of Assyria.
He died the next year in Babylon from fever, wounds, and excessive drinking.
The most common view today is that Alexander was a brilliant leader who sought personal glory through conquest, and who tolerated no opposition.

The Political Legacy

Alexander’s general Ptolemy (ca. 367–ca. 283 b.c.e.) was given authority over Egypt, and after fighting off rivals, established a kingdom and dynasty there, called the Ptolemaic.
In 304 b.c.e. he took the title of pharaoh, and by the end of his long life he had a relatively stable realm to pass on to his son.
For these successes he was later called Ptolemy Soter, “Ptolemy the Savior.”
The Ptolemaic dynasty would rule Egypt for nearly three hundred years, until the death of the last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII, in 30 b.c.e.
Seleucus (ca. 358–281 b.c.e.), another of Alexander’s officers, carved out a large kingdom, the Seleucid, that stretched from the coast of Asia Minor to India, for which he was later called Seleucus Nicator, “Seleucus the Victor.”
He was assassinated in 281 b.c.e. on the order of the ruler of the Ptolemaic kingdom.
His son succeeded him, founding a dynasty that also lasted for centuries, although the kingdom itself shrank as independent states broke off in Pergamum, Bactria, Parthia, and elsewhere.
Antigonus I (382–301 b.c.e.), a third general, became king of Macedonia and established the Antigonid dynasty, which lasted until it was overthrown by the Romans in 168 b.c.e.
Hellenistic rulers amassed an enormous amount of wealth from their large kingdoms, and royal patronage provided money for the production of literary works and the research and development that allowed discoveries in science and engineering.
Hellenistic kingship was hereditary, which gave women who were members of royal families more power than any woman had in democracies such as Athens, where citizenship was limited to men.
Greece itself changed politically during the Hellenistic period.
To enhance their joint security, many poleis organized themselves into leagues of city-states, of which the two most extensive were the Aetolian League in western and central Greece and the Achaean League in southern Greece.
In terms of political stability and peace, these forms of government were no improvement on the Greek polis.

Building a Hellenized Society

Alexander’s most important legacy was the spread of Greek ideas and traditions across a wide area, a process scholars later called Hellenization.
To maintain contact with the Greek world as he moved farther eastward, he founded new cities and military colonies and expanded existing cities, settling Greek and Macedonian troops and veterans in them.

Urban Life

In many respects the Hellenistic city resembled a modern city.
It was a cultural center with theaters, temples, and libraries.
The Hellenistic city was also an economic center that provided a ready market for grain and produce raised in the surrounding countryside.
To the Greeks, civilized life was unthinkable outside of a city, and Hellenistic kings often gave cities all the external trappings of a polis.
A Hellenistic city differed from a Greek polis in other ways as well.
The Greek polis had one body of law and one set of customs.
In the Hellenistic city Greeks represented an elite class.
Natives and non-Greek foreigners who lived in Hellenistic cities usually possessed lesser rights than Greeks and often had their own laws.
The city of Pergamum in northwestern Anatolia is a good example of an older city that underwent changes in the Hellenistic period.
Previously an important strategic site, Pergamum was transformed by its new Greek rulers into a magnificent city complete with all the typical buildings of the polis, including gymnasia, baths, and one of the finest libraries in the entire Hellenistic world.
The Bactrian city of Ay Khanoum on the Oxus River, on the border of modern Afghanistan, is a good example of a brand-new city where cultures met.
Along with this very public display of Greek ideals, the city also had temples to local deities and artwork that blended Greek and local styles.

Greeks in Hellenistic Cities

The Hellenistic monarchy, unlike the Greek polis, did not depend solely on its citizens to fulfill its political needs, but instead relied on professionals.
Greeks also found ready employment in the armies and navies of the Hellenistic monarchies.
Hellenistic kings were reluctant to arm the local populations or to allow them to serve in the army, fearing military rebellions among their conquered subjects.
The result was the emergence of professional armies and navies consisting primarily of Greeks.
Hellenistic kings paid them well, often giving them land or leasing it to them as an incentive to remain loyal.
Hellenistic kingdoms and cities recruited Greek writers and artists to create Greek literature, art, and culture.
Increased physical and social mobility benefited some women as well as men.
More women learned to read than before, and they engaged in occupations in which literacy was beneficial, including care of the sick.
During the Hellenistic period women continued to be required to have male guardians to buy, sell, or lease land; to borrow money; and to represent them in other commercial transactions.
Because of the opportunities the Hellenistic monarchies offered, many people moved frequently.
Linguistic changes further facilitated the ease with which people moved.
Instead of the different dialects spoken in Greece itself, a new Greek dialect called the koine, which means “common,” became the spoken language of traders, the royal court, the bureaucracy, and the army across the Hellenistic world.
As long as Greeks continued to migrate, the kingdoms remained stable and strong.

Greeks and Non-Greeks

Everyone, Greek or non-Greek, who wanted to find an official position or compete in business had to learn Greek.
Cities granted citizenship to Hellenized local people and sometimes to Greek-speaking migrants.
Even a few women received honorary citizenship in Hellenistic cities because of aid they had provided in times of crisis.
Being Greek became to some degree a matter of culture, not bloodlines.
Few Greeks learned a non-Greek language, unless they were required to because of their official position.
Hellenistic kingdoms were never entirely unified in language, customs, and thought.
The principal reason for this phenomenon is that Greek culture generally did not extend far beyond the reaches of the cities.
Many urban residents adopted the aspects of Hellenism that they found useful, but people in the countryside generally did not embrace it, nor were they encouraged to.
Ptolemies tied local people to the land more tightly than they had been before, making it nearly impossible for them to leave their villages.
The Ptolemies maintained separate legal systems for Greeks and Egyptians.
The bureaucracy of the Ptolemies was relatively efficient, and the indigenous population was viciously and cruelly exploited.
The situation was somewhat different in the booming city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander to be a new seaport, where there had been a small village earlier.
The ruling elite was primarily Greek, and the Ptolemies tried to keep the Greek and Egyptian populations apart, but this was not always possible.
In about 280 b.c.e. the Ptolemies founded a library in Alexandria that both glorified Greek culture and sponsored new scholarship.
It came to contain hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls of Greek writings, including copies of such classic works as the poems of Homer, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, and the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle, as well as newer accounts of scientific discoveries.
Greek culture spread more deeply in the Seleucid kingdom than in Egypt.
The kings of Bactria and Parthia spread Greek cul- ture even further.
Some of these rulers converted to Buddhism, and the Buddhist ruler of the Mauryan Empire in northern India, Asoka (ca. 269–233 b.c.e.), may have ordered translations of his laws into Greek for the Greek-speaking residents of Bactria and Parthia.
In the second century b.c.e., after the collapse of the Mauryan Empire, Bactrian armies conquered part of northern India, establishing several small Indo-Greek states where the mixing of religious and artistic traditions was particularly pronounced worked.
Cities flourished, but many people who lived in rural areas were actually worse off than they had been before, because of higher levels of rents and taxes.
The spread of Greeks throughout the Near East and Egypt created new markets and stimulated trade.

The Economy of the Hellenistic World

Agriculture and Industry

Much of the revenue for the Hellenistic kingdoms was derived from agricultural products, rents paid by the tenants of royal land, and taxation of land.
Trying to improve productivity, the rulers sponsored experiments on seed grain, selecting seeds that seemed the most hardy and productive.
Egypt had a strong tradition of central authority dating back to the pharaohs, which the Ptolemies inherited and tightened.
Technology was applied to military needs, but not to those of food production.
As with agriculture, although demand for goods increased during the Hellenistic period, no new techniques of production appear to have developed.
Apart from gold and silver, which were used primarily for coins and jewelry, bronze continued to be used for shields.
Iron was utilized for weapons and tools.
Pottery remained an important commodity, and most of it was produced locally.
Potters often portrayed heroic episodes, such as battles from the Iliad, or gods, such as Dionysus at sea.
Pottery thus served as a means of cultural exchange — of ideas as well as goods — among people scattered across huge portions of the globe.

Commerce

Commerce itself was a leading area where Greeks and non-Greeks met on grounds of common interest.
Trade was facilitated by the coining of money.
Most of the great monarchies coined their money according to a uniform system, which meant that much of the money used in Hellenistic kingdoms had the same value.
Overland trade was conducted by caravan, and the backbone of this caravan trade was the camel—a shaggy, ill-tempered, but durable animal ideally suited to the harsh climate of the caravan routes.
Due to the prosperity of the period, more people could afford to buy gold, silver, ivory, precious stones, spices, and a host of other easily transportable goods.
In return the Greeks and Macedonians sent east manufactured goods, especially metal weapons, cloth, wine, and olive oil.
The durability and economic importance of the caravan routes are amply demonstrated by the fact that the death of Alexander, the ensuing wars of his successors, and later regional conflicts had little effect on trade.
More economically important than the trade in luxury goods were commercial dealings in essential commodities like raw materials and grain and such industrial products as pottery.
Most trade in bulk commodities was seaborne, and the Hellenistic merchant ship was the workhorse of the day.
Maritime trade provided opportunities for workers in other industries and trades: sailors, shipbuilders, dockworkers, accountants, teamsters, and pirates.
Piracy was always a factor in the Hellenistic world, so ships’ crews had to be ready to defend their cargoes as well as transport them.
Cities in Greece often paid for their grain by exporting olive oil and wine.
Later in the Hellenistic period, Greek oil and wine, shipped in mass-produced pottery jugs called amphoras, found a lucrative market in Italy and throughout the Mediterranean.
Another significant commodity was fish, which for export was salted, pickled, or dried.
Slaves were a staple of Hellenistic trade, traveling in all directions on both land and sea routes.
War provided prisoners for the slave market; to a lesser extent, so did kidnapping and capture by pirates, although the origins of most slaves are unknown.
Slaves were to be found in the cities and temples of the Hellenistic world; in the shops, fields, armies, and mines; and in the homes of wealthier people.
Their price varied depending on their age, sex, health, and skill level, and on market conditions.
Large-scale warfare increased the number of slaves available, so the price went down; during periods of relative peace, fewer people were enslaved through conquest, so the price went up.

Religion and Philosophy in the Hellenistic World

Religion and Magic

When Hellenistic kings founded cities, they also built temples, staffed by priests and supported by taxes, for the Olympian gods of Greece.
Along with the traditional Olympian gods, Greeks and non-Greeks in the Hellenistic world also honored and worshipped deities that had not been important in the Hellenic period or that were a blend of imported Greek and indigenous gods and goddesses.
Tyche, for example, was a new deity, the goddess and personification of luck, fate, chance, and fortune.
Temples to her were built in major cities of the eastern Mediterranean, including Antioch and Alexandria, and her image was depicted on coins and bas-reliefs.
Tyche could be blamed for bad things that happened, but Hellenistic people did not simply give in to fate.
Instead they honored Tyche with public rituals and more-private ceremonies, and they also turned to professionals who offered spells for various purposes.
We generally make a distinction between religion and magic, but for Greeks there was not a clear line.
Thus these people would write spells using both ordinary Greek words and special “magical” language known only to the gods.
Thousands of such spells survive, many of which are curse tables, intended to bring bad luck to a political, business, or athletic rival; or binding spells, meant to force a person to do something against his or her will.
Hellenistic kings generally did not suppress indigenous religious practices.
Some kings limited the power of existing priesthoods, but they also subsidized them with public money.
Some Hellenistic kings intentionally sponsored new deities that mixed Egyptian and Greek elements.
When Ptolemy I Soter established the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, he thought that a new god (Serapis) was needed who would appeal to both Greeks and Egyptians.
His worship spread as intentional government policy, and he was eventually adopted by Romans as well, who blended him with their own chief god, Jupiter.
Increasingly, many people were attracted to mystery religions, so called because at the center of each was an inexplicable event that brought union with a god and was not to be divulged to anyone not initiated into them.
Mystery religions incorporated aspects of both Greek and non-Greek religions and claimed to save their adherents from the worst that fate could do.
Among the mystery religions the Egyptian cult of Isis spread widely.
In Egyptian mythology Isis brought her husband Osiris back to life, and during the Hellenistic era this power came to be understood by her followers as extending to them as well.
She promised to save any mortal who came to her, and her priests asserted that she had bestowed on humanity the gift of civilization and founded law and literature.
Devotion to Isis, and to many other mystery religions, later spread to the Romans as well as to the Greeks and non-Greeks who lived in Hellenistic cities.

Hellenism and the Jews

Jews in Hellenistic cities were generally treated the same as any other non-Greek group.
At first they were seen as resident aliens.
As they grew more numerous, they received permission to form a political corporation, a politeuma, which gave them a great deal of autonomy.
The Seleucid king Antiochus III (ca. 242–187 b.c.e.), for instance, recognized that most Jews were loyal subjects, and in his efforts to solidify his empire he endorsed their religious customs and ensured their autonomy.
Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–ca. 164 b.c.e.) broke with this pattern.
He expanded the Seleucid kingdom and nearly conquered Egypt, but while he was there a revolt broke out in Judaea, led by Jews who opposed the Hellenized Jewish leader he had designated for them.
Antiochus attacked Jerusalem, killing many, and restored his leader.
According to Hebrew scripture, he then banned Jewish practices and worship, ordered copies of the Torah burned, and set up altars to the Greek gods in Jewish temples.
This sparked a widespread Jewish revolt that began in 166 b.c.e., called the Revolt of the Maccabees after the name of one of its leaders.
The Maccabees fought Syrian troops who were fighting under Seleucid commanders, retook Jerusalem, and set up a semi independent state in 164 b.c.e.
Jews living in Hellenistic cities often embraced many aspects of Hellenism.
So many Jews learned Greek, especially in Alexandria, that the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek and services in the synagogue there came to be conducted in Greek.
Citizenship would have allowed them to vote in the assembly and serve as magistrates, but it would also have obliged them to worship the gods of the city — a practice few Jews chose to follow.

Philosophy and the People

Philosophy during the Hellenic period was the exclusive province of the wealthy and educated, for only they had leisure enough to pursue philosophical studies.
During the Hellenistic period, however, although philosophy was still directed toward the educated elite, it came to touch the lives of more men and women than ever before.
First, much of Hellenistic life seemed unstable and without venerable traditions.
Second, traditional religions had declined and there was a growing belief that one could do relatively little to change one’s fate.
Philosophers themselves became much more numerous and several new schools of philosophical thought caught the minds and hearts of many contemporary Greeks and some non-Greeks.
One of these was Epicureanism, a practical philosophy of serenity in an often-tumultuous world.
Epicurus (340–270 b.c.e.) was influenced by the atomic theory developed by the Pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus.
Epicurus used observation and logic to study the world, and also to examine the human condition.
The writings of Epicurus survive only in fragments, but the third-century-c.e. biographer Diogenes Laertes quotes several of his letters.
Epicurus also taught that individuals could most easily attain peace and serenity by ignoring the outside world and looking into their personal feelings and reactions.
Epicureanism taught its followers to ignore politics and issues, for politics led to tumult, which would disturb the soul.
Zeno (335–262 b.c.e.), a philosopher from Cyprus, advanced a different concept of human beings and the universe.
Zeno first came to Athens to form his own school, the Stoa, named after the covered walkways where he preferred to teach, and his philosophy, Stoicism , in turn, came to be named for his school.
Zeno and his followers considered nature an expression of divine will.
They stressed the unity of humans and the universe, stating that all people were obliged to help one another.
Unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics taught that people should participate in politics and worldly affairs.
They believed that people should do their duty to the state in which they found themselves.
The Stoics’ most significant practical achievement was the creation of the concept of natural law.
They concluded that because all people were kindred, partook of divine reason, and were in harmony with the universe, one law governed them all.
Thus natural law was an abstract matter of ethics, and applicable everywhere, not something that applied to everyday political or social life.
Individualistic and individualized themes emerge in Hellenistic art and literature as well as in philosophy.
As had Athens in the classical period, Hellenistic cities offered theater performances to their residents, paid for by the government.
This was provided by Menander (ca. 342–291 b.c.e.), whose more than one hundred comedies poked fun at current philosophies and social trends, including love, luck, money, and marriage.

Hellenistic Science and Medicine

Science

The main advances in Hellenistic science came in astronomy, geography, and mechanics.
The most not- able of the Hellenistic astronomers was Aristarchus of Samos (ca. 310–230 b.c.e.).
He argued against the common sense observation, which Aristotle had supported, that the earth was the center of the universe.
Instead, Aristarchus developed the heliocentric theory — that the earth and planets revolve around the sun.
Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 90–ca. 168 c.e.) returned to an earth-centered universe.
Aristarchus’s heliocentric theory was resurrected in the sixteenth century c.e. by the brilliant Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
In geometry Hellenistic thinkers discovered little that was new, but Euclid (ca. 300 b.c.e.), a mathematician who lived in Alexandria, compiled a valuable textbook of existing knowledge.
His Elements of Geometry rapidly became the standard introduction to geometry.
The greatest thinker of the Hellenistic period was Archimedes (ca. 287–212 b.c.e.), a native of Syracuse who was interested in nearly everything.
A clever inventor, he devised new artillery for military purposes.
He also invented the compound pulley to lift heavy weights.
He founded the science of hydrostatics (the study of fluids at rest) and discovered the principle that the volume of a solid floating in a liquid is equal to the volume of the liquid displaced by the solid.
Eratosthenes traveled to Athens, where he studied philosophy and mathematics.
Eratosthenes used mathematics to further the geographical studies for which he is most famous.
He concluded that the earth was a spherical globe and calculated the circumference of the earth geometrically, estimating it as about 24,675 miles.
Other Greek geographers also turned their attention southward to Africa.
As the new artillery devised by Archimedes indicates, Hellenistic science was used for purposes of war as well as peace.
Theories of mechanics were used to build machines that revolutionized warfare.
The catapult became the first and most widely used artillery piece, shooting ever-larger projectiles.
Over time, Hellenistic generals built larger, more complex, and more effective machines.
If these new engines made waging war more efficient, they also added to the misery of the people, as war often directly involved the populations of cities.

Medicine

Doctors as well as scientists combined observation with theory during the Hellenistic period.
Herophilus accepted Hippocrates’s theory of the four humors and approached the study of medicine in a systematic, scientific fashion: he dissected dead bodies and measured what he observed.
He was the first to accurately describe the nervous system, and he differentiated between motor and sensory nerves.
Herophilus also studied the brain, which he considered the center of intelligence, and discerned the cerebrum and cerebellum.
His younger contemporary Erasistratus also conducted research on the brain and nervous system and improved on Herophilus’s work.
Herophilus and Erasistratus dissected corpses, and may even have dissected living criminals, provided for them by the Egyptian kings.
They were probably the only scientists in antiquity to dissect human bodies, though animal dissection became very common in the Roman period.
Because Herophilus and Erasistratus followed the teachings of Hippocrates, later writers on medicine labeled them “Dogmatists” or the “Dogmatic school,” from the Greek word dogma, or philosophical idea.
Opposing them was an “Empiric school” begun by a student of Herophilus, doctors who held observation and experiment to be the only way to advance medical knowledge and viewed the search for hidden causes as useless.
Whether undertaken by Dogmatists or Empiricists, medical study did not lead to effective cures for the infectious diseases that were the leading cause of death for most people, however, and people used a variety of ways to attempt to combat illness.
People invoked Asclepius, the god of medicine, in healing rituals, or focused on other deities who were understood to have power over specific illnesses.
People in the Hellenistic world may have thought that fate determined what would happen, but they also actively sought to make their lives longer and healthier.