Characteristics of Hellenism After Alexander

CHARACTERISTICS OF HELLENISM AFTER ALEXANDER Hellenism had been the product of the free life of the Greek city-state, and after the Macedonian conquest the great days of the city-state were past. Not that all liberty was everywhere extinguished. 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 by con tinual 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. The Achaean and Aetolian leagues are independent powers, which keep a field clear for Hellenic freedom within their borders. As to the cities out side Greece, within or around the royal realms, Seleucid, Ptole maic or Attalid, their degree of freedom probably differed widely t.ccording to circumstances. At one end of the scale, cities of old renown could still make good their independence. At the other end of the scale the cities which were royal capitals, e.g., Alex andria, Antioch and Pergamum, were normally controlled alto gether by royal nominees. 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. With the extension of the single strong rule of Rome over this Hellenistic world, the condi tions 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 alto gether. 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 tribute-paying states, municipal auton omy, subject indeed to interference on the part of the Roman governor, was allowed to go on. But during the first centuries of the Christian era, this municipal autonomy 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. After Diocletian and under the Eastern empire the Greek world was organized on the prin ciples of a vast bureaucracy.

Social Changes.

With this long process of political decline correspond the inner changes in the temper of the Hellenistic peoples. 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, and of huge cities like Alexandria, Antioch and the enlarged Ephesus. With the mingling of Greeks of all sorts in the newly-conquered lands, a generalized Greek culture, in which the old local characteristics were merged, overspread the world. The gradual supersession of the old dialects by the koine the common speech of the Greeks, 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 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. Artists and men of letters were now addressing themselves not to their fellow-citizens in a free city, but to kings and courtiers, or the educated class generally of the Greek world. In the study of the world of fact, the centuries immediately following Alexander witnessed notable advance. Sci entific research might prosper under the patronage of kings, and such research had now a vast amount of new material at its dis posal and could profit by the old Babylonian and Egyptian tra ditions. 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 sci ence, and brought literary and artistic criticism to a fine point. The classical products were registered, studied and commented upon. Libraries became a feature of the age; the one attached to the Museum at Alexandria is said to have contained 700,000 rolls.

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 learning became under the Byzantine emperors a formal tradition. (See GREEK LITERATURE.) Religion and Philosophy.—The mingling of citizens of many cities and the close contact between Greek and barbarian in the conquered lands had made the old sanctions of civic religion and morality of less account. New guides of life were needed. The Stoic philosophy, with its cosmopolitan note, its fixed dogmas and plain ethical precepts came into the world to meet the needs of the new age. Its ideas became popular among ordinary men as the older philosophies had never been.

Although the cults of the old Greek deities in the new cities might still hold the multitude with their splendid apparatus, men turned ever in large numbers to alien religions, and the various gods of Egypt and the East began to find larger entrance in the Greek world. Before the end of the and century B.C. there were temples of Serapis in Athens, Rhodes, Delos and elsewhere. Under the Roman empire the cult of Isis became popular in the Hellenistic world. Other religions of oriental origin penetrated far, the worship of the Phrygian Great Mother (see GREAT MOTHER OF THE GODS), and in the and century A.D. the religion of Mithras (q.v.). The Jews, too, by the time of Christ were dis covering in many quarters an open door. Besides those who were ready to 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 a multitude of those "who feared God" and frequented the services.

Christianity.

Among the religions which penetrated the Hellenistic world from an Eastern source, Christianity ultimately overpowered all the rest and made that world its own. The teach ing 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 of St. Paul the appeal to what "nature" teaches would be generally admitted to be a Greek mode of thought. There was, at the same time, in the early church a powerful current of feeling hostile to Greek culture. 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 Chris tians should appropriate, was a vital question to them. The School of Alexandria represented by Clement and Origen effected a dur able alliance between Greek education and Christian doctrine. In proportion as the Christian Church had to go deeper into meta physics in the formulation of its beliefs, the Greek philosophical terminology, which was the only vehicle then available for precise thought, had to become more and more an essential part of Chris tianity. At the same time Christian ethics incorporated much of the current popular philosophy, especially Stoical elements. In this way the Church itself became a propagator of Hellenism.