The Hellenistic World

Once in their new homes these Greeks and Macedonians sank their many differences to become the new master race – for Alexander’s notion of a joint Greco-Persian ruling class never took hold. From the outset these newcomers formed the governing minority in the areas where they settled. One of the great problems of the period is to define and analyse the shifting relations between this minority and the peoples whose lands they shared. It was not always a hostile relationship. Strabo (xi, 14, 12) describes how Cyrsilus of Pharsalus and Medius of Larissa, officers in Alexander’s army, set out to trace a cultural relationship between Armenia and Media and their native Thessaly. Their attitude was clearly open and friendly but what they were hoping to do was not to understand these people in their own environment but to prove that they were really some sort of Greeks. This, as we shall see (p. 228), is precisely what some Greeks tried to do when brought up against the phenomenon of Rome. Occasionally, especially in the early days, osmosis occurs between the different cultures. A dedication by ‘Diodotus, son of Achaeus, to King Ptolemy Soter’ (OGIS, 19) is bilingual, in Greek and demotic Egyptian, and we shall look at further similar evidence later (p. 117). It suggests some cultural interchange, but this is scanty and its importance must not be exaggerated nor is it safe to use material from one area to make generalizations applying to others. It is noteworthy that the inscription from Antioch-in-Persis mentions the sending of men from Magnesia, but not of women, presumably because they would find women on arrival, Greek or more likely barbarian. Ai Khanum too will certainly have contained a substantial proportion of non-Greeks, and probably their numbers increased with the passing of time. But it seems fairly clear, given the attitudes which led to the setting-up of the Delphic precepts by Clearchus, that in the early-third century at any rate native Bactrians will not have been admitted to the gymnasium and that, faced with a large non-Greek group around them, the usual reaction of Greeks and Macedonians was to close ranks and emphasize the Greek institutions of government, religion and education, in short their Greekness.

III

Greekness expressed itself primarily through the gymnasium, but there were also other institutions which catered for the private and social life of the citizens of hellenistic cities, both new and old. These were especially important in the new cities with their mixed populations and absence of traditions but they were also an integral part of life in the older cities. These associations are known as eranoi, thiasoi, and also by special names, such as Poseidoniastai, linking them with some particular deity worshipped as the patron of the association and the strong feeling of devotion to such bodies by their members comes out clearly from the inscriptional evidence. Here is an example from second-century Rhodes:

In the priesthood of Theophanes, the chief eranistes being Menecrates son of Cibyratas, on the 26th day of Hyacinthius, the following eranistai promised contributions for the rebuilding of the wall and the monuments which fell down in the earthquake: Menecrates son of Cibyratas [undertook] to rebuild the wall and monuments at his own expense. The money coming from the [other] sums promised will be at the society’s disposal. . . [Dion]jydus 10 . . . (here the inscription breaks off) (Syll., 1116).

The ‘walls’ are those of the clubhouse, the ‘monuments’ the graves of past members, for such guilds frequently combined the functions of a friendly society, dining club and burial club. In a city like Rhodes they were an important element in private life and in the new centres of the far east they were a means of building new loyalties in what was at first a rather drab and alien world. What is more, they were far less exclusive and purely ‘hellenic’ than the gymnasia. Though their structure and procedures often seem to imitate those of the city, they were catholic in their membership, and frequently included both Greeks and barbarians, free men and slaves, men and women. They gave opportunities for mixing which were less easy within the framework of the city institutions.

In public life the Greeks and Macedonians formed the ruling class. They were a closed circle to which natives gained access only gradually and in very small numbers – and then usually only by the difficult method of turning themselves culturally into Greeks. The creation of this ruling class was the direct outcome of the decisions taken by the armies and generals of Alexander, who after his death decisively rejected his policy of racial fusion and very soon expelled all Medes and Persians from positions of authority. The setting-up of the monarchies did not alter this attitude. It has been calculated that even in the Seleucid kingdom, which faced the greatest problems of cultural conflict, after two generations there were never more than 2.5 per cent of natives in positions of authority (out of a sample of several hundred names) and most of this 2.5 per cent were officers commanding local units (see p. 125). This was not due to incompetence or reluctance to serve on the part of the easterners, as some have argued, but to the firm determination of the Greeks and Macedonians to enjoy the spoils of victory.

When therefore we speak of the unity and homogeneity of hellenistic culture, it is of this Greco-Macedonian class we are speaking, a minority in every state made up of men from many parts of the Greek world, springing from various social origins which could be conveniently forgotten in the new environment. These immigrants, like Americans today, maintained lively memories of where they or their parents had come from but these origins had little significance, other than in sentiment, compared with the reality of their new homes and new status. The old frictions between city and city, class and class, were ironed out in the solidarity of life as a Greek minority in this new milieu. Their importance sprang from the fact that the hellenistic kings depended upon this Greco-Macedonian minority to provide them with their administration at the higher levels. Their role in Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia will be our concern later, when we consider these states in greater detail. But first it is convenient to glance at those features and institutions of the hellenistic world which held the Greeks together in the alien environment of Egypt and across the vast spaces of Asia, and made them more and more indistinguishable from each other as time passed.

IV

Two points should perhaps be noted at the outset. First, the special problems presented by a Greek minority in an alien environment did not arise in continental Greece and Macedonia, in the cities of the Aegean or (any more than they always had) in the cities of western Asia Minor. These areas continued to serve as a reservoir of Greek culture as well as of manpower (so long as the wave of emigration lasted). The Greeks living in the monarchies were still in contact with the world of city-states which had hitherto furnished the background for all Greek civilization. Secondly, though Alexander’s conquests had resulted in a vast extension of hellenism over central Asia, by 303 Seleucus had ceded Gandhara, eastern Arachosia and Gedrosia to Chandragupta (above, p. 54) and subsequently Bactria became independent of the Seleucids. Hence, although Greek culture continued to survive in the eastern provinces and re-established itself in India in the second century, politically the Seleucid empire became relatively more Mediterranean-based and Antioch began to take precedence over Seleuceia-on-the-Tigris as the main Seleucid centre. The Bactrian Greeks and that branch of them who set up a kingdom in India after the fall of the Mauryan empire were increasingly cut off from the mainstream of hellenistic life, especially after the rise of the Parthians in the later second century. It seems likely that in these circumstances and in response to the threats from the marauders of the steppes there was a closer collaboration between Greeks and natives there than elsewhere. By the second century the great centres of Greek culture were located on or close to the Mediterranean – Pergamum, Alexandria, Athens, Antioch. Thus the Mediterranean Sea was itself a factor making for homogeneity in hellenistic culture, since it facilitated movement and intercommunication.

Ease of travel between the various parts of the hellenistic world was both a cause and a result of the common civilization which Greeks now shared; far more than in the past travellers of all kinds were constantly on the move. Perhaps the most obvious groups were the mercenaries. They formed an appreciable part of every hellenistic army and as the prosopography drawn up by Launey (Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, pp. 1111—271) makes clear, they came from all parts of Greece, from Macedonia and the Balkan peninsula generally, from Asia Minor, from Syria, Palestine and Arabia, from central Asia and India, from north Africa and from Italy and the west. Of the Greeks the Cretans were perhaps the most prominent. In an account of the career of his great-grandfather, whom he describes as a military expert, Strabo relates how

because of his experience in military affairs, he was appointed (sc. by Mithridates Euergetes, the king of Pontus) to enlist mercenaries and often visited not only Greece and Thrace, but also the mercenaries of Crete, that is before the Romans were yet in possession of that island, and while the number of mercenary soldiers in the island, from whom the piratical bands were also wont to be recruited, was large (Strabo, x 4, 10).

It is noteworthy that for many men piracy and mercenary service were alternative means of livelihood; we shall look at the conditions which encouraged both of these below (p. 163). But for the moment our concern is with the effects of mercenary service, which kept large numbers of more or less rootless people constantly on the move wherever wars called for their assistance. Sometimes they settled down if they could find a city ready to replenish its reduced numbers with men whom its citizens had got to know. An inscription set up probably in 219 at Dyme in western Achaea introduces a list of fifty-two names with this statement:

The following were created citizens by the city having shared in the fighting during the war and having helped to save the city; each man was selected individually (Syll., 529).

Dyme stood in an exposed position near the border with Elis and the war was evidently that against Aetolia (220–217). It is probable that the names are those of mercenaries, though they could be part of a Macedonian garrison, for one of the names, Drakas, is Macedonian. In either case the enrolment of citizens – which can be paralleled two years later from Larissa in Thessaly (Syll., 543) and may likewise have been instigated by Philip V of Macedonia, who was in close alliance with Achaea at the time – illustrates the greater possibilities now available, not only in new areas, for resettlement. As we shall see, citizenship was more flexible.

Mercenaries were the most noteworthy but by no means the only travellers. In the spring of 169 Antiochus IV of Syria invaded Egypt and the authorities in Alexandria decided

to send the Greek envoys then present at Alexandria to Antiochus to negotiate for peace. There were then present two missions from the Achaeans, one consisting of Alcithus of Aegium, son of Xenophon, and Pasiadas, which had come to renew friendly relations and another on the subject of the games held in honour of Antigonus Doson. There was also an embassy from Athens headed by Demaratus about a present (i.e. to give one or to thank Ptolemy for one) and there were two sacred missions, one headed by Callias the pancratiast (i.e. a competitor in a sort of all-in wrestling) on the subject of the Panathenaean games, and another, the manager and spokesman of which was Cleostratus, about the mysteries. Eudemus and Hicesius had come from Miletus and Apollonides and Apollonius from Clazomenae (Polybius, xxviii, 19, 2–5).

Thus we learn, quite by chance, that at this particular moment seven separate embassies or sacred delegations were present in Alexandria. If we multiply this figure to take account of all the Greek states and the important centres of Greece and the hellenistic world generally, we can form some impression of what was involved in the constant diplomatic interchanges which went on without abatement both before and after the Romans arrived on the scene. From the early-second century onwards, however, it was increasingly to Rome or to Roman generals in the field that the major embassies were directed.

Two of the embassies mentioned by Polybius as present in Alexandria in 169 were concerned with festivals. And where these included the holding of theatrical performances, they involved the participation of professional actors, the so-called ‘artistes (technitai) of Dionysus’, who regularly moved on circuit. These technitai were organized in guilds centred in Athens, at the Isthmus of Corinth, and in Teos, a city for some time under the control of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamum, and their function was to provide the specialists needed for the holding of festivals. Officially the guild at Teos was a religious body. As an inscription puts it,

Craton (sc. the recipient of an honorary decree passed by the guild) did everything pertaining to the honour and repute of Dionysus and the Muses and Pythian Apollo and the other gods and the kings and the queens and the brothers of King Eumenes (Durrbach, Choix, 75, II.11–13 = Austin, 123).

The power and influence of the guild were such that it operated almost like an independent state within the small city of Teos and after a stormy history of quarrels and despite an attempt at mediation by Eumenes II recorded on a long, but now fragmentary, inscription set up at Pergamum (Welles, R.C., no. 53), the technitai were forced to flee to Ephesus and later were removed by Attalus III to Myonnesus. They had an evil reputation and a school exercise is recorded on the theme: ‘Why are the technitai of Dionysus mostly scoundrels?’ (Aristotle, Problems, 956b, 11). Stage people leading irregular lives were naturally viewed with suspicion by the steady citizens who only set eyes on them at festival times, for indeed they moved from one festival to another, to the Delphic Pythia and Soteria, to the Museia at Thespiae, the Heracleia at Thebes, the Dionysia at Teos, the festival of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia. Like a city they sent sacred delegates (theoroi) to the mysteries at Samothrace as well as holding their own festival. Whatever their morals, they were clearly a channel of cultural interchange between city and city.

So far we have been considering mainly organized groups, but many individuals also travelled in pursuit of their trade or profession. Traders and their importance will be looked at in more detail in Chapters 9 (#litres_trial_promo) and 11 (#litres_trial_promo) but travellers also included philosophers, like Clearchus of Soli, whose name we have seen recorded on the banks of the Oxus (p. 60), and doctors, many of whom were trained at Cos, with its associations with the great medical teacher Hippocrates and its famous temple of Asclepius, but might respond to requests for help from other friendly states. Thus an inscription dating to the late-third century found in the Asclepieum at Cos records the thanks conveyed by the people of Cnossus in Crete for the loan of a doctor to Gortyn. It provides an interesting picture of conditions in that turbulent island, where at that time, as a result of civil strife (Polybius, iv, 54, 7–9), Gortyn had come under the control of her old rival Cnossus.

The kosmoi and the city of the Cnossians greet the council and people of the Coans. Whereas the people of Gortyn sent an embassy to you about a doctor and you, with a generous show of haste, dispatched the doctor Hermias to them, and civil strife having then broken out in Gortyn and we, in accordance with our alliance having come to share in the battle which took place among the Gortynians in the city, it came about that some of our citizens and others who accompanied our side to the battle were wounded and many became exceedingly ill as a result of their wounds, whereupon Hermias, being a man of worth, on that occasion made every effort on our behalf and saved many of them from great peril and subsequently continued unhesitatingly to fulfil the needs of those who called upon him, and when a further battle took place near Phaestus and many suffered wounds and likewise many were critically ill, he made every effort in tending them and saved them from great peril, and subsequently showed himself zealous to those who called upon him (Syll., 528 = Austin, 124).

Here the somewhat repetitive account breaks off but the context of the battles described can be filled out from the record of this war in Polybius, iv, 54–5. Another example of a city honouring a doctor is the grant by Ilium to Metrodorus of Amphipolis mentioned below ( p. 149). The provision of doctors was a public responsibility in many cities. At Samos, for example, the assembly makes the appointment, and in several towns a special ‘medical tax’ (iatrikon) was levied to pay the doctor’s salary (cf. Syll., 437)

V

The central role of the gymnasium in Greek communities went with a long-standing passion for athletics and athletes of all ages also travelled around the Greek world bringing fame to their cities and themselves if they carried off prizes at international festivals. An example is provided by a late-second-century inscription found on the site of Cedreae, a small city lying under what is now Şehir Ada in the Ceramic Gulf in south-western Turkey, which at that time belonged to Rhodes.

The Confederation (or Guild) of the peoples of the Chersonese salutes Onasiteles the son of Onesistratus, victor in the furlong-race three times in the boys’ category at the Isthmia, in the beardless category at the Nemea and at the Asclepieia in Cos, in the men’s category at the Dorieia at Cnidus, at the Dioscureia and at the Heracleia, in the boys’ and ephebes’ category at the Tlapolemeia, victory in the furlong-race and the two-furlong-race in the boys’ category at the Dorieia in Cnidus, in the ephebes’ category at the Poseidania, in the furlong-race and the race in armour at the Heracleia and in the long race in the men’s category twice, in the torch-race ‘from the first point’ (?) in the men’s category at the great Halieia and twice in the small Halieia, twice at the Dioscureia, twice at the Poseidania, in the furlong-race and race in armour in the men’s category (Syll., 1067).

This record could be reproduced again and again, for victors in athletics contests, especially in the festivals adjudged ‘equal to the Olympic games’ (isolympia), were highly honoured for the prestige which they brought to their native cities.

Among professional men whose careers took them to many cities and even more to the royal courts, where the hope of employment was higher, were engineers, architects and teachers at all levels. Musicians and poets (and poetesses) too might wander from place to place in the expectation of patronage, adapting their verses to suit the place of performance. Thus a Tean envoy, Menecles, seeking concessions for his city in Crete is praised at Cnossus for giving frequent performances, during his stay there, on the cithara (a stringed instrument), singing the songs of Timotheus and Polyidus and other ancient poets ‘in a manner befitting an educated man’ and at Priansus in addition he performed a ‘Cretan cycle’ about the gods and heroes of the island, collected from many poets and historians. The Priansians accorded him special praise for his regard for culture (SGDI