Hellenistic Age

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"Laocoön," marble sculpture attributed to Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of … (credit: Canali Photo Bank, Milan/SuperStock)

In the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the period between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) and the conquest of Egypt by Rome (30 BC). Alexander and his successors established Greek monarchies that controlled the area from Greece to Afghanistan. The Macedonian Antigonid kingdom, the Middle Eastern Seleucid kingdom, and the Egyptian Ptolemaic kingdom spread Greek culture, mixed Greek and non-Greek populations, and fused Greek and Oriental elements. They produced effective bureaucracies and a common, creative culture based at Alexandria. A great flowering of the arts, literature, and science occurred particularly in the period 280 – 160. The decline of the Hellenic states occurred as Rome gained strength and won wars against Macedonia and against Mithradates VI Eupator, turning the kingdoms and their allies into Roman provinces. Egypt was the last to fall, after having been drawn into the civil war between Mark Antony and Octavian (Augustus).

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Hellenistic age the period of Greek culture which may be said to start from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and which ended with Rome's absorption of Greece and the Greek East in the latter part of the first century BC (the conventional terminal date is often put at 31 BC—the Battle of Actium—or 27 BC—when Augustus became the first Roman emperor). Before Alexander, Greek culture had little influence outside Hellas; after his conquest of the Persian empire, important centres of Greek civilization and economy were to be found in Egypt and Asia, and the dominant culture of the East was Greek. The new city of Alexandria in Egypt was its focus, whence the period is sometimes known as the Alexandrian age, but the cities of Pergamum (north-west Asia Minor), Antioch (in Syria on the river Orontes), and Athens were cultural rivals.

What remains of Hellenistic literature is only a small and unrepresentative fraction of the vast amount produced by the age. Out of hundreds of histories only five books of Polybius survive entire; important histories such as those of Timaeus, Hieronymus of Cardia, and Posidonius survive only in fragments. Such literature as survives is largely in verse. Even so, almost nothing remains of the scores of tragic poets, not even of the so-called Pleiad. Comedy retained its vigour at Athens in the early years of the Hellenistic age, in the so-called New Comedy of Menander and Philemon (see COMEDY, GREEK 6); although it cannot be said to have survived in manuscript to the present day, our knowledge of it has been considerably enhanced by substantial papyrus discoveries made in the twentieth century (see PAPYROLOGY). Among other poetry which has perished are the works of poets who considerably influenced later Latin literature, like Philetas of Cos and Euphorion; but they seem to have resembled, in small scale and exquisite refinement, the surviving works of their contemporaries Callimachus and Theocritus. By contrast Apollonius of Rhodes wrote an epic about the voyage of the Argonauts (which survives), and there is a tradition that Callimachus quarrelled violently with him over his use of this genre, outdated in its large scale. Didactic poetry was popular on a variety of topics such as geography, astronomy, and fishing; the Phaenomena of Aratus is the chief example of the class. A novel Greek literary form, the mime, came to light when eight of these miniature dramas by Herodas turned up on a papyrus discovered at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the second and first centuries BC the rise of Rome, accompanied by constant wars and widespread destruction in the Greek world, brought about the decline of science and literature. But early in the first century BC the poet Meleager published an anthology of epigrams from Archilochus (seventh century BC) to his own day, called ‘the Garland’ (Stephanos), the first large critical anthology of poems of which we have knowledge; each of the fifty or so poets represented was likened to a flower. By now the oratory of the city-state, which largely depended on political stimulus, had died (with the exception of a few political speeches), but rhetoric, outliving it, had become the chief tool of education. It flourished in Greek Asia, where particularly exaggerated importance was attached to form and to a mannered and florid style (‘Asianism’; see ORATORY 1) against which later Greeks (and some Romans; see BRUTUS) were to react.

With the decline of the city-state and the loosening of the bond which united its citizens, philosophies arose that gave support to people as individuals and aimed to bring them peace of mind. The Hellenistic age saw the rise of two new systems, that of Epicurus and that of Zeno and the Stoics; the doctrine of the latter exerted an immense influence not only on the Greek world but later on Rome and ultimately on Christianity. The other schools occupied from now onwards a secondary position. After Aristotle's death (322 BC) the Peripatetics under Theophrastus and his successor Strato continued his interest in problems of natural science, but their importance thereafter came to an end. Plato's Academy was likewise eclipsed, until under Arcesilaus and Carneades it resumed some prominence by its adoption of Scepticism.

The Hellenistic age saw a striking advance in scholarship and scientific knowledge, the Library and Museum at Alexandria being great centres of study and research. The leading names in this area were Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace. Hellenistic achievements in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, biology, and medicine are known to us mainly through the works of later writers. The great names in mathematics and astronomy are Aristarchus of Samos, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Euclid, and the polymaths Eratosthenes and Posidonius. In biology and medicine the two great names were Herophilus and Erasistratus.

The period from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 b.c. to the middle of the first century b.c. It was marked by Greek and Macedonian emigration to areas conquered by Alexander and by the spread of Greek civilization from Greece to northern India. (See Alexandria.)