Post by Emperor AAdmin on Jul 30, 2005 19:11:48 GMT -5
Hellenistic Civilization -- an almost Modern World
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HELLENISTIC CIVILIZATION
.Alexander's Empire Disintegrates
.Interstate Commerce, Cooperation and Hellenism
.Diffusion of Religions
.Hellenism and the Jews
.Misery and Dreams of Revolution
.Hellenistic Philosophies: Search for a Way of Life
-----------------------------------------------------------
Alexander's Empire Disintegrates
An unreliable account of Alexander as he neared death describes him as offering rule to his generals. Another account describes him as putting the hand of one of his generals, Perdiccas, with the hand of his wife Roxana and naming Perdiccas as his heir. Perdiccas apparently did not wed Roxana -- who was pregnant with Alexander's child. Perdiccas did favor making this child Alexander's heir if the child was to be a son. To some Macedonians, however, it was unthinkable that their king should be the son of a "barbarian" woman from central Asia. This was the beginning of the break-up of Alexander's empire and the spilling of much more blood. It was another failure that was to plague monarchies through antiquity. It was a failure that would leave the Hellenistic civilization that followed Alexander weak and vulnerable to a power that was rising in the west: Rome.
Those opposed to Roxana's child as Alexander's heir favored Alexander's half brother, Philip III, a simpleminded and illegitimate son of Philip II and one of Philip's mistresses. When Roxana gave birth to Alexander's son, Alexander IV, the different opinions about who should succeed Alexander intensified, and civil war appeared imminent. But war was averted by a compromise in which it was agreed that Philip III and Alexander IV would reign jointly while each was supervised by a general.
In Epirus, Alexander's mother, Olympias, supported her grandchild, Alexander IV, and was hostile toward Philip III. With Perdiccas also favoring her grandson, she sought an alliance with Perdiccas and offered Perdiccas marriage to her daughter -- Alexander's full sister.
Another actor in this grand drama was Alexander's general and former bodyguard, Ptolemy, who was at the head of a significant number of Alexander's former troops. Conveniently for his ambitions, he believed that he and his fellow generals would be unable to keep Alexander's empire unified, and he proposed that they divide the empire among themselves. Less than a year after Alexander died, Ptolemy murdered the man Alexander had put in charge of Egypt: Cleomenes. And in the place of Cleomenes, Ptolemy, with his army, took power in Egypt.
Alexander's generals and governors made a show of their devotion to Alexander's memory, and, except for Ptolemy, they spoke of the need to keep the empire unified. But between them came rivalry. The aged Antipater and those Alexander had assigned to govern various parts of his empire resented and feared Perdiccas' power. And Antipater, who governed Macedonia and Greece, joined with two other generals, Antigonus and Craterus, and prepared for war against Perdiccas. Power rivalry was again manifesting itself as one of the bigger sins of all time.
War erupted first over Alexander's bones, which Ptolemy is reported to have buried in the Egyptian city of Memphis. Perdiccas went with an army into Egypt against Ptolemy, but when Perdiccas needlessly lost many of his troops crossing the Nile it angered his troops, and they mutinied. A group of Perdiccas' officers assassinated him in his tent. And with the elimination of Perdiccas, the remaining generals agreed that Antipater should be regent to both Alexander's son and to Philip III. A military officer named Seleucus -- who had led the mutiny against Perdiccas -- was chosen to govern Babylon, and Antigonus was chosen commander-in-chief of what had been Alexander's army in the east.
Antigonus Fails to Unite the Empire
Antigonus took command of the most powerful naval forces in the Aegean, and in eastern Asia Minor (Cappadocia) he warred against and executed the man Alexander had assigned there as governor. Meanwhile, in 319, Antipater died of natural causes. His son, Cassander, replaced him as the ruling general in Macedonia and Greece, and the hostility between Olympias and Antipater became a feud between her and Cassander. Olympias had raised an army and claimed rule over Macedonia. Philip III, aware that Olympias opposed his sharing rule with her grandson, allied himself with Cassander. Feeling threatened by this, Olympias had Philip III, his wife and a hundred friends of Cassander executed. Cassander then marched from Greece into Macedonia with his army. He won battles there against Olympias' armies. He had Olympias executed, and he put Roxana and Alexander IV under guard.
It was Antigonus who controlled Alexander's great treasury in West Asia, and he hoped that by asserting his power he could unite Alexander's empire. Fearing his power, the other generals united against him. Seleucus fled from Babylon to Egypt and allied himself with Ptolemy. Cassander also allied himself with Ptolemy; as did a Macedonian general named Lysimachus who governed Thrace. In 315, with mercenaries of many nationalities, Antigonus and Ptolemy fought each other, and Antigonus forced Ptolemy out of Syria. Then Antigonus cited Cassander for crimes against Olympias and sent his troops to Greece, while in 313 Antigonus' son, Demetrius, fought and lost to Ptolemy at Gaza.
In 312, Ptolemy moved against Antigonus by sending Seleucus with a small army back to Babylon. In 311, Cassander had Alexander IV and his mother, Roxana, executed. The struggle between Antigonus and the alliance of Seleucus, Ptolemy, Cassander and Lysimachus continued for ten years, to 301 BCE, when the alliance against Antigonus triumphed, Antigonus losing the battle of Ipsus in Asia Minor and his life.
Seleucus emerged as nominal ruler of territory from Syria to Bactria. Lysimachus ruled Thrace, and in name he became ruler of Asia Minor. Cassander continued to rule in Macedonia and much of Greece. Ptolemy formally declared Egypt as his independent kingdom. And Antigonus' son, Demetrius, was left with command of a powerful Greek navy and the support of only a few island cities in the Aegean Sea. Demetrius thought of himself as carrying on his father's struggle to unify Alexander's empire, but reasonable hope for unification had come to an end.
The New Monarchies
The new rulers made themselves monarchs in the Macedonian tradition. Drawing from the Alexander legend, they attempted to have a striking personal appearance. They wore headbands similar to the one Alexander had worn, which became a symbol of monarchy, and they continued Alexander’s use of the title “king.” In meeting visitors they postured haughtily, while visitors were obliged to gesture submission, respect and deference.
The new monarchs sought support in religion, pretending that their bloody wars were the will of the gods. As had Alexander, they claimed themselves divine. Ptolemy claimed that he was descended from Heracles and Dionysus. He attempted to appeal to the glory of Egypt’s ancient past, and he portrayed himself as a new pharaoh, but he staffed his administration with Greeks rather than Egyptians, and many Egyptians continued to view his rule as foreign.
Seleucus claimed lineage that extended back to the god Apollo, and he claimed that his rule was under the special protection of both Apollo and Zeus. Zeus, he claimed, resided at a temple in his capital city, Antioch, and Apollo resided in a temple at Daphne, just outside Antioch.
More Wars, a Celtic Invasion, and New Boundaries and Dynasties
Alexander's prestige had rested on his military conquests, and the new monarchs believed that military prowess was a part of their prestige. They would fight one another for territory and make war a way of life in their time. Armies as large as sixty to eighty thousand would go into battle -- to be thought the maximum size for armies as late as the eighteenth century.
Cassander apparently died of an illness, and his enemy Demetrius extended his rule in Greece, Demetrius taking power in Athens and starving the city into surrender. By 294, after more warring, he won control over Macedonia and named himself its king. But in 288, Seleucus and Lysimachus drove him out. In 285 Demetrius surrendered to Seleucus, and he died two years later.
Friction developed between Lysimachus and Seleucus over who would succeed Demetrius as king of Macedonia. Seleucus proclaimed himself king of Macedonia, but Lysimachus extended his rule there, and Seleucus invaded Lysimachus' territory in Asia Minor. In 281, Seleucus defeated Lysimachus at a battle in which Lysimachus died. And this left Greece and Macedonia open to a series of wars and power struggles.
Celts to the northwest of Greece and Macedonia heard of the anarchy in Greece and Macedonia, and they had heard stories of gold and silver offerings to Greek gods in temples there. They invaded, and in Macedonia they defeated, captured and executed a newly crowned king. In Greece they burned and looted as they went. They invaded Thrace and Asia Minor. Seleucus' son, Antiochus I -- the first successor in a long line of Seleucid kings-- was unable or unwilling to send a force against them, and cities in Asia Minor had to defend themselves as best they could. Antigonus II -- Demetrius' son and the grandson of the once heroic Macedonian general, Antigonus I -- rallied a force against the Celts and drove them from Thrace and Macedonia.
Antiochus ruled from Syria. He had given up hope of ruling Macedonia, and he befriended Antigonus II, taking support where he could find it. Not having the power base in Macedonia and Greece that Alexander had, and not having Alexander's reputation, Antiochus' hold on what had been Alexander's empire to Bactria was tenuous at best. He allowed some Celts to settle in central Asia Minor. But he lost control over western and northwestern Asia Minor, where Pergamum, with financial help from Ptolemy II, won its independence and detached neighboring cities. Ptolemy II sent troops into Asia Minor and took the coastal city of Eupheus, while the Seleucid dynasty also lost a large part of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor.
The East Fragments and is Invaded by the Parthians
The region in southwestern Persia called Persis (which included the city of Persepolis) had become an independent collection of tribal monarchies that remembered the glorious past of the Persian emperors Darius the Great and Artaxerxes. Bactria was ruled by a governor whom the Seleucids ignored. Territories east of Bactria were conquered by India's first great empire, under Chandragupta. And the Seleucids did little if anything to stop the migrations into northern Persia by a people called Parthians, whom the Seleucids saw as no significant threat. From steppe lands east of the Caspian Sea, the Parthians were settling down in northern Persia and absorbing Persian culture. They founded their own towns, and around the year 250 BCE a Parthian chief founded a Persian-style hereditary monarchy called the Arsacids. Then in 246, the governor of Bactria formally declared Bactria's independence, and he allied Bactria with the empire of Chandragupta's Buddhist grandson: Asoka.
Drawing mainly from Greek and Macedonian support, the Seleucids continued to control Syria, Mesopotama, Palestine and parts of Persia. Colonies that Alexander had founded in Persia and Bactria remained Greek islands in a sea of eastern peoples. And in these colonies, Greek and Macedonian ways were being diluted by the taking of Asian women as wives.
----
Interstate Commerce, Cooperation and Hellenism
Power rivalries, war and authoritarian rule left the world much as it had been before Alexander, but in some other respects the world had changed. The trade and commerce that Alexander stimulated continued to expand. This expansion was stimulated by arms production and a demand for iron, by the building of new roads that made transport easier, by the creation of a common currency, and by Greek as the common language of business from the border of India to as far west as what is now the French port city of Marseille.
With an increase in trade came expanded mining, manufacturing and ship building. Freight carrying ships were built much larger, as much as five tons, using methods of construction first applied to warships. Egypt's port city of Alexandria became a center of imports and manufacturing. The Egyptians and Phoenicians produced and traded cotton cloth, and the Egyptians produced silk, paper, glass, jewelry, cosmetics, salt, wine and beer. In West Asia, large workshops appeared alongside the small family stores that were common there. The manufacture of woolens increased in West Asia, along with asphalt, petroleum, carpets, perfumes, bleach and pain relieving drugs.
Across what had been Alexander's empire, some privately owned businesses grew into large enterprises. With the increase in circulation of money, credit became more sophisticated. Money-changing grew into banking. Private banks began making loans. The use of checks appeared, and people could deposit their savings for safekeeping and collect interest, which was around ten to twelve percent annually. Many aristocrats -- traditionally landowners -- gave up their contempt for trade and enterprise and enthusiastically joined in the money making.
The Spread of Hellenism
With Alexander's conquests also came significant cultural change. In West Asia and North Africa, well-to-do tradesmen, intellectuals and aristocrats who were neither Greek or Macedonian, including those who were Jews, had begun developing an interest in things Greek -- to the annoyance of those who believed that the old ways were best. From Marseille to India, Greek became the language of intellectuals. The Greek gymnasium became popular. It was a place for bathing and physical exercise -- without clothes for the sake of freedom of movement in their exercises. The gymnasium was also a place for training in grammar, rhetoric and poetry. And those who passed through training at the gymnasium acquired a status similar to a modern college degree.
The increase in trade and travel enhanced an awareness of distance places. An increase in migrations from city to city and from the countryside to city cut people off from their old tribal ties and increased individualism. So too did the increase in commerce. A new cosmopolitanism was rising. Among city governments came a greater desire for cooperation with other cities, such as offering other cities freedom from import and export duties to encourage trade. Cities began offering other cities exchanges of citizenship. This occurred first between Athens and Rhodes, then between the Peloponnesian cities of Messene and Phigalea. The island of Paros offered an exchange of citizenship, and such exchanges arose between Pergamum, Temnos, Miletus and others. Conflicts that previously might have erupted into war were now more inclined to be arbitrated, with the arbiters most often being a commission from a third city.
Common legal formalities appeared among various cities, and in place of trial by local juries an inter-city system developed in which commissions came from other cities to hear cases and settle lawsuits that would otherwise have been subject to local prejudices, politics and passions.
Learning and the Arts
In Greek cities in Italy and cities in West Asia and North Africa arose a new interest in science, art and literature -- interests that remained largely unrestricted by those rulers who had succeeded Alexander, not because these rulers were libertarians but because they saw little threat in it to their rule. Some people read seriously, and many, including wives of the wealthy, read escapist works about what they believed were the good-old-days: a rural life that was idealized, with shepherds, shepherdesses, wooded valleys and true love.
Libraries collected serious works and grew in number. Pergamum had a great library. The library at Alexandria, Egypt, became the most famous. It accumulated as many as four hundred thousand scrolls and several thousand original works and copies, and it had a scientific museum that attracted people from afar. The academy that Plato had founded still flourished, and Athens remained a famous center of philosophy, but Pergamum and Alexandria eclipsed Athens as intellectual and commercial centers.
The observation of fact was becoming widely recognized as important, and science was studied divorced from philosophy and metaphysics. People trained for various professions, including engineering and medicine. In medicine corpses were dissected and studied. Doctors discovered the difference between motor nerves and sensory nerves, and for various parts of the body they created names that would still be used into modern times. Specialists advanced the study of plants and herbs. Manuals were written on agriculture and farm management. And, in mathematics, Euclid contributed to geometry by creating a system of proofs based on deduction.
Stimulated by what had been Alexander's expedition into Asia, map making and a study of geography improved. Pytheas of Marseille voyaged up the coast of Britain to Norway or Jutland and became the first Greek to hear of what today is called the Arctic Sea. One mapmaker, Eratosthenese, described the world as round and gave a reasonable figure as its circumference.
Philosophers and common folk continued to believe that the sun revolved around the earth, that the earth was at the center of the movement of heavenly bodies, but Hellenized astronomers began challenging these views. Astronomers calculated the movements of the sun, moon and planets with greater accuracy. Heraclides of Pontu discovered that the planets Venus and Mercury revolved around the sun. Then Aristarchus of Samos concluded that the sun was much larger than the earth, that the earth revolved around the sun and that the distance to the stars was enormous compared to the diameter of the earth's orbit around the sun. And other astronomers confirmed his views.
In the field of mechanics, Aristotle's school made advances in understanding levers, balances and wedges. And in the mid 200s a Greek from Syracuse named Archimedes worked on the relative densities of bodies and the theoretical principles of levers. He invented the ratio pi. 28 And he invented numerous mechanical contrivances, including machines used in war.
Formal Schooling
Professions that required education belonged mainly to the sons of the wealthy. But a part of Hellenism was education for the poor as well as the rich. In the more progressive Hellenized cities of West Asia and North Africa, elementary schools for the children of common folk were established. Children learned reading, writing and arithmetic. They memorized lessons about the glories of Greek culture. They were taught "civilized" behavior -- and, as in Greece centuries before, educators saw physical punishment as their only recourse against inadequate effort by their pupils.
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HELLENISTIC CIVILIZATION
.Alexander's Empire Disintegrates
.Interstate Commerce, Cooperation and Hellenism
.Diffusion of Religions
.Hellenism and the Jews
.Misery and Dreams of Revolution
.Hellenistic Philosophies: Search for a Way of Life
-----------------------------------------------------------
Alexander's Empire Disintegrates
An unreliable account of Alexander as he neared death describes him as offering rule to his generals. Another account describes him as putting the hand of one of his generals, Perdiccas, with the hand of his wife Roxana and naming Perdiccas as his heir. Perdiccas apparently did not wed Roxana -- who was pregnant with Alexander's child. Perdiccas did favor making this child Alexander's heir if the child was to be a son. To some Macedonians, however, it was unthinkable that their king should be the son of a "barbarian" woman from central Asia. This was the beginning of the break-up of Alexander's empire and the spilling of much more blood. It was another failure that was to plague monarchies through antiquity. It was a failure that would leave the Hellenistic civilization that followed Alexander weak and vulnerable to a power that was rising in the west: Rome.
Those opposed to Roxana's child as Alexander's heir favored Alexander's half brother, Philip III, a simpleminded and illegitimate son of Philip II and one of Philip's mistresses. When Roxana gave birth to Alexander's son, Alexander IV, the different opinions about who should succeed Alexander intensified, and civil war appeared imminent. But war was averted by a compromise in which it was agreed that Philip III and Alexander IV would reign jointly while each was supervised by a general.
In Epirus, Alexander's mother, Olympias, supported her grandchild, Alexander IV, and was hostile toward Philip III. With Perdiccas also favoring her grandson, she sought an alliance with Perdiccas and offered Perdiccas marriage to her daughter -- Alexander's full sister.
Another actor in this grand drama was Alexander's general and former bodyguard, Ptolemy, who was at the head of a significant number of Alexander's former troops. Conveniently for his ambitions, he believed that he and his fellow generals would be unable to keep Alexander's empire unified, and he proposed that they divide the empire among themselves. Less than a year after Alexander died, Ptolemy murdered the man Alexander had put in charge of Egypt: Cleomenes. And in the place of Cleomenes, Ptolemy, with his army, took power in Egypt.
Alexander's generals and governors made a show of their devotion to Alexander's memory, and, except for Ptolemy, they spoke of the need to keep the empire unified. But between them came rivalry. The aged Antipater and those Alexander had assigned to govern various parts of his empire resented and feared Perdiccas' power. And Antipater, who governed Macedonia and Greece, joined with two other generals, Antigonus and Craterus, and prepared for war against Perdiccas. Power rivalry was again manifesting itself as one of the bigger sins of all time.
War erupted first over Alexander's bones, which Ptolemy is reported to have buried in the Egyptian city of Memphis. Perdiccas went with an army into Egypt against Ptolemy, but when Perdiccas needlessly lost many of his troops crossing the Nile it angered his troops, and they mutinied. A group of Perdiccas' officers assassinated him in his tent. And with the elimination of Perdiccas, the remaining generals agreed that Antipater should be regent to both Alexander's son and to Philip III. A military officer named Seleucus -- who had led the mutiny against Perdiccas -- was chosen to govern Babylon, and Antigonus was chosen commander-in-chief of what had been Alexander's army in the east.
Antigonus Fails to Unite the Empire
Antigonus took command of the most powerful naval forces in the Aegean, and in eastern Asia Minor (Cappadocia) he warred against and executed the man Alexander had assigned there as governor. Meanwhile, in 319, Antipater died of natural causes. His son, Cassander, replaced him as the ruling general in Macedonia and Greece, and the hostility between Olympias and Antipater became a feud between her and Cassander. Olympias had raised an army and claimed rule over Macedonia. Philip III, aware that Olympias opposed his sharing rule with her grandson, allied himself with Cassander. Feeling threatened by this, Olympias had Philip III, his wife and a hundred friends of Cassander executed. Cassander then marched from Greece into Macedonia with his army. He won battles there against Olympias' armies. He had Olympias executed, and he put Roxana and Alexander IV under guard.
It was Antigonus who controlled Alexander's great treasury in West Asia, and he hoped that by asserting his power he could unite Alexander's empire. Fearing his power, the other generals united against him. Seleucus fled from Babylon to Egypt and allied himself with Ptolemy. Cassander also allied himself with Ptolemy; as did a Macedonian general named Lysimachus who governed Thrace. In 315, with mercenaries of many nationalities, Antigonus and Ptolemy fought each other, and Antigonus forced Ptolemy out of Syria. Then Antigonus cited Cassander for crimes against Olympias and sent his troops to Greece, while in 313 Antigonus' son, Demetrius, fought and lost to Ptolemy at Gaza.
In 312, Ptolemy moved against Antigonus by sending Seleucus with a small army back to Babylon. In 311, Cassander had Alexander IV and his mother, Roxana, executed. The struggle between Antigonus and the alliance of Seleucus, Ptolemy, Cassander and Lysimachus continued for ten years, to 301 BCE, when the alliance against Antigonus triumphed, Antigonus losing the battle of Ipsus in Asia Minor and his life.
Seleucus emerged as nominal ruler of territory from Syria to Bactria. Lysimachus ruled Thrace, and in name he became ruler of Asia Minor. Cassander continued to rule in Macedonia and much of Greece. Ptolemy formally declared Egypt as his independent kingdom. And Antigonus' son, Demetrius, was left with command of a powerful Greek navy and the support of only a few island cities in the Aegean Sea. Demetrius thought of himself as carrying on his father's struggle to unify Alexander's empire, but reasonable hope for unification had come to an end.
The New Monarchies
The new rulers made themselves monarchs in the Macedonian tradition. Drawing from the Alexander legend, they attempted to have a striking personal appearance. They wore headbands similar to the one Alexander had worn, which became a symbol of monarchy, and they continued Alexander’s use of the title “king.” In meeting visitors they postured haughtily, while visitors were obliged to gesture submission, respect and deference.
The new monarchs sought support in religion, pretending that their bloody wars were the will of the gods. As had Alexander, they claimed themselves divine. Ptolemy claimed that he was descended from Heracles and Dionysus. He attempted to appeal to the glory of Egypt’s ancient past, and he portrayed himself as a new pharaoh, but he staffed his administration with Greeks rather than Egyptians, and many Egyptians continued to view his rule as foreign.
Seleucus claimed lineage that extended back to the god Apollo, and he claimed that his rule was under the special protection of both Apollo and Zeus. Zeus, he claimed, resided at a temple in his capital city, Antioch, and Apollo resided in a temple at Daphne, just outside Antioch.
More Wars, a Celtic Invasion, and New Boundaries and Dynasties
Alexander's prestige had rested on his military conquests, and the new monarchs believed that military prowess was a part of their prestige. They would fight one another for territory and make war a way of life in their time. Armies as large as sixty to eighty thousand would go into battle -- to be thought the maximum size for armies as late as the eighteenth century.
Cassander apparently died of an illness, and his enemy Demetrius extended his rule in Greece, Demetrius taking power in Athens and starving the city into surrender. By 294, after more warring, he won control over Macedonia and named himself its king. But in 288, Seleucus and Lysimachus drove him out. In 285 Demetrius surrendered to Seleucus, and he died two years later.
Friction developed between Lysimachus and Seleucus over who would succeed Demetrius as king of Macedonia. Seleucus proclaimed himself king of Macedonia, but Lysimachus extended his rule there, and Seleucus invaded Lysimachus' territory in Asia Minor. In 281, Seleucus defeated Lysimachus at a battle in which Lysimachus died. And this left Greece and Macedonia open to a series of wars and power struggles.
Celts to the northwest of Greece and Macedonia heard of the anarchy in Greece and Macedonia, and they had heard stories of gold and silver offerings to Greek gods in temples there. They invaded, and in Macedonia they defeated, captured and executed a newly crowned king. In Greece they burned and looted as they went. They invaded Thrace and Asia Minor. Seleucus' son, Antiochus I -- the first successor in a long line of Seleucid kings-- was unable or unwilling to send a force against them, and cities in Asia Minor had to defend themselves as best they could. Antigonus II -- Demetrius' son and the grandson of the once heroic Macedonian general, Antigonus I -- rallied a force against the Celts and drove them from Thrace and Macedonia.
Antiochus ruled from Syria. He had given up hope of ruling Macedonia, and he befriended Antigonus II, taking support where he could find it. Not having the power base in Macedonia and Greece that Alexander had, and not having Alexander's reputation, Antiochus' hold on what had been Alexander's empire to Bactria was tenuous at best. He allowed some Celts to settle in central Asia Minor. But he lost control over western and northwestern Asia Minor, where Pergamum, with financial help from Ptolemy II, won its independence and detached neighboring cities. Ptolemy II sent troops into Asia Minor and took the coastal city of Eupheus, while the Seleucid dynasty also lost a large part of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor.
The East Fragments and is Invaded by the Parthians
The region in southwestern Persia called Persis (which included the city of Persepolis) had become an independent collection of tribal monarchies that remembered the glorious past of the Persian emperors Darius the Great and Artaxerxes. Bactria was ruled by a governor whom the Seleucids ignored. Territories east of Bactria were conquered by India's first great empire, under Chandragupta. And the Seleucids did little if anything to stop the migrations into northern Persia by a people called Parthians, whom the Seleucids saw as no significant threat. From steppe lands east of the Caspian Sea, the Parthians were settling down in northern Persia and absorbing Persian culture. They founded their own towns, and around the year 250 BCE a Parthian chief founded a Persian-style hereditary monarchy called the Arsacids. Then in 246, the governor of Bactria formally declared Bactria's independence, and he allied Bactria with the empire of Chandragupta's Buddhist grandson: Asoka.
Drawing mainly from Greek and Macedonian support, the Seleucids continued to control Syria, Mesopotama, Palestine and parts of Persia. Colonies that Alexander had founded in Persia and Bactria remained Greek islands in a sea of eastern peoples. And in these colonies, Greek and Macedonian ways were being diluted by the taking of Asian women as wives.
----
Interstate Commerce, Cooperation and Hellenism
Power rivalries, war and authoritarian rule left the world much as it had been before Alexander, but in some other respects the world had changed. The trade and commerce that Alexander stimulated continued to expand. This expansion was stimulated by arms production and a demand for iron, by the building of new roads that made transport easier, by the creation of a common currency, and by Greek as the common language of business from the border of India to as far west as what is now the French port city of Marseille.
With an increase in trade came expanded mining, manufacturing and ship building. Freight carrying ships were built much larger, as much as five tons, using methods of construction first applied to warships. Egypt's port city of Alexandria became a center of imports and manufacturing. The Egyptians and Phoenicians produced and traded cotton cloth, and the Egyptians produced silk, paper, glass, jewelry, cosmetics, salt, wine and beer. In West Asia, large workshops appeared alongside the small family stores that were common there. The manufacture of woolens increased in West Asia, along with asphalt, petroleum, carpets, perfumes, bleach and pain relieving drugs.
Across what had been Alexander's empire, some privately owned businesses grew into large enterprises. With the increase in circulation of money, credit became more sophisticated. Money-changing grew into banking. Private banks began making loans. The use of checks appeared, and people could deposit their savings for safekeeping and collect interest, which was around ten to twelve percent annually. Many aristocrats -- traditionally landowners -- gave up their contempt for trade and enterprise and enthusiastically joined in the money making.
The Spread of Hellenism
With Alexander's conquests also came significant cultural change. In West Asia and North Africa, well-to-do tradesmen, intellectuals and aristocrats who were neither Greek or Macedonian, including those who were Jews, had begun developing an interest in things Greek -- to the annoyance of those who believed that the old ways were best. From Marseille to India, Greek became the language of intellectuals. The Greek gymnasium became popular. It was a place for bathing and physical exercise -- without clothes for the sake of freedom of movement in their exercises. The gymnasium was also a place for training in grammar, rhetoric and poetry. And those who passed through training at the gymnasium acquired a status similar to a modern college degree.
The increase in trade and travel enhanced an awareness of distance places. An increase in migrations from city to city and from the countryside to city cut people off from their old tribal ties and increased individualism. So too did the increase in commerce. A new cosmopolitanism was rising. Among city governments came a greater desire for cooperation with other cities, such as offering other cities freedom from import and export duties to encourage trade. Cities began offering other cities exchanges of citizenship. This occurred first between Athens and Rhodes, then between the Peloponnesian cities of Messene and Phigalea. The island of Paros offered an exchange of citizenship, and such exchanges arose between Pergamum, Temnos, Miletus and others. Conflicts that previously might have erupted into war were now more inclined to be arbitrated, with the arbiters most often being a commission from a third city.
Common legal formalities appeared among various cities, and in place of trial by local juries an inter-city system developed in which commissions came from other cities to hear cases and settle lawsuits that would otherwise have been subject to local prejudices, politics and passions.
Learning and the Arts
In Greek cities in Italy and cities in West Asia and North Africa arose a new interest in science, art and literature -- interests that remained largely unrestricted by those rulers who had succeeded Alexander, not because these rulers were libertarians but because they saw little threat in it to their rule. Some people read seriously, and many, including wives of the wealthy, read escapist works about what they believed were the good-old-days: a rural life that was idealized, with shepherds, shepherdesses, wooded valleys and true love.
Libraries collected serious works and grew in number. Pergamum had a great library. The library at Alexandria, Egypt, became the most famous. It accumulated as many as four hundred thousand scrolls and several thousand original works and copies, and it had a scientific museum that attracted people from afar. The academy that Plato had founded still flourished, and Athens remained a famous center of philosophy, but Pergamum and Alexandria eclipsed Athens as intellectual and commercial centers.
The observation of fact was becoming widely recognized as important, and science was studied divorced from philosophy and metaphysics. People trained for various professions, including engineering and medicine. In medicine corpses were dissected and studied. Doctors discovered the difference between motor nerves and sensory nerves, and for various parts of the body they created names that would still be used into modern times. Specialists advanced the study of plants and herbs. Manuals were written on agriculture and farm management. And, in mathematics, Euclid contributed to geometry by creating a system of proofs based on deduction.
Stimulated by what had been Alexander's expedition into Asia, map making and a study of geography improved. Pytheas of Marseille voyaged up the coast of Britain to Norway or Jutland and became the first Greek to hear of what today is called the Arctic Sea. One mapmaker, Eratosthenese, described the world as round and gave a reasonable figure as its circumference.
Philosophers and common folk continued to believe that the sun revolved around the earth, that the earth was at the center of the movement of heavenly bodies, but Hellenized astronomers began challenging these views. Astronomers calculated the movements of the sun, moon and planets with greater accuracy. Heraclides of Pontu discovered that the planets Venus and Mercury revolved around the sun. Then Aristarchus of Samos concluded that the sun was much larger than the earth, that the earth revolved around the sun and that the distance to the stars was enormous compared to the diameter of the earth's orbit around the sun. And other astronomers confirmed his views.
In the field of mechanics, Aristotle's school made advances in understanding levers, balances and wedges. And in the mid 200s a Greek from Syracuse named Archimedes worked on the relative densities of bodies and the theoretical principles of levers. He invented the ratio pi. 28 And he invented numerous mechanical contrivances, including machines used in war.
Formal Schooling
Professions that required education belonged mainly to the sons of the wealthy. But a part of Hellenism was education for the poor as well as the rich. In the more progressive Hellenized cities of West Asia and North Africa, elementary schools for the children of common folk were established. Children learned reading, writing and arithmetic. They memorized lessons about the glories of Greek culture. They were taught "civilized" behavior -- and, as in Greece centuries before, educators saw physical punishment as their only recourse against inadequate effort by their pupils.