He survived as a legendary hero in the Mohammedan religion, and to this day petty chieftains in the Himalayas claim to be descended from him.†No other fully historical hero has ever furnished such a perfect opportunity for the mythopoeic faculty.
At Alexander’s death, there was an attempt to preserve the unity of his empire. But of his two sons, one was an infant and the other was not yet born. Each had supporters, but in the resultant civil war both were thrust aside. In the end, his empire was divided between the families of three generals, of whom, roughly speaking, one obtained the European, one the African, and one the Asiatic parts of Alexander’s possessions. The European part fell ultimately to Antigonus’s descendants; Ptolemy, who obtained Egypt, made Alexandria his capital; Seleucus, who obtained Asia after many wars, was too busy with campaigns to have a fixed capital, but in later times Antioch was the chief city of his dynasty.
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* This is not historically true.
â Perhaps this is no longer true, as the sons of those who held this belief have been educated € at Eton.
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Both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids (as the dynasty of Seleucus was called) abandoned Alexander’s attempts to produce a fusion of Greek and barbarian, and established military tyrannies based, at first, upon their part of the Macedonian army strengthened with Greek mercenaries. The Ptolemies held Egypt fairly securely, but in Asia two centuries of confused dynastic wars were only ended by the Roman conquest. During these centuries, Persia was conquered by the Parthians, and the Bactrian Greeks were increasingly isolated.
In the second century B.C. (after which they rapidly declined) they had a king, Menander, whose Indian Empire was very extensive. A couple of dialogues between him and Buddhist sage have survived in Pali, and, in part, in a Chinese translation. Dr. Tarn suggests that the first of these is based on a Greek original; the second, which ends with Menander abdicating and becoming a Buddhist saint, is certainly not.
Buddhism, at this time, was a vigorous proselytizing religion. Asoka (264-28), the saintly Buddhist king, records, in a still extant inscription, that he sent missionaries to all the Macedonian kings: «And this is the chiefest conquest in His Majesty’s opinion—the conquest by the Law; this also is that effected by His Majesty both in his own dominions and in all the neighboring realms as far as six hundred leagues—even to where the Greek king Antiochus dwells, and beyond that Antiochus to where dwell the four kings severally named Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexander . . . and likewise here, in the king’s dominions, among the Yonas» * (i.e. the Greeks of the Punjab). Unfortunately no western account of these missionaries has survived.
Babylonia was much more profoundly influenced by Hellenism. As we have seen, the only ancient who followed Aristarchus of Samos in maintaining the Copernican system was Seleucus of Seleucia on the Tigris, who flourished about 150 B.C. Tacitus tells us that in the first century A.D. Seleucia had not «lapsed into the barbarous usages of the Parthians, but still retained the institutions of Seleucus, †its Greek founder. Three hundred citizens, chosen for their wealth or wisdom, compose as it were a Senate; the populace too have their share of power.» ‡ Throughout Mesopotamia, as further West, Greek
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* Quoted in Bevan, House of Seleucus, Vol. I, p. 298n.
€ The king, not the astronomer.
â
€ Annals, Book VI, Ch. 42. ¡
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became the language of literature and culture, and remained so until the Mohammedan conquest.
Syria (excluding Judea) became completely Hellenized in the cities, in so far as language and literature were concerned. But the rural populations, which were more conservative, retained the religions and the languages to which they were accustomed. * In Asia Minor, the Greek cities of the coast had, for centuries, had an influence on their barbarian neighbours. This was intensified by the Macedonian conquest. The first conflict of Hellenism with the Jews is related in the Books of the Maccabees. It is a profoundly interesting story, unlike anything else in the Macedonian Empire. I shall deal with it at a later stage, when I come to the origin and growth of Christianity. Elsewhere, Greek influence encountered no such stubborn opposition.
From the point of view of Hellenistic culture, the most brilliant success of the third century B.C. was the city of Alexandria. Egypt was less exposed to war than the European and Asiatic parts of the Macedonian domain, and Alexandria was in an extraordinarily favoured position for commerce. The Ptolemies were patrons of learning, and attracted to their capital many of the best men of the age. Mathematics became, and remained until the fall of Rome, mainly Alexandrian. Archimedes, it is true, was a Sicilian, and belonged to the one part of the world where the Greek City States (until the moment of his death in 212 B.C.) retained their independence; but he too had studied in Alexandria. Eratosthenes was chief librarian of the famous library of Alexandria. The mathematicians and men of science connected, more or less closely, with Alexandria in the third century before Christ were as able as any of the Greeks of the previous centuries, and did work of equal importance. But they were not, like their predecessors, men who took all learning for their province, and propounded universal philosophies; they were specialists in the modern sense. Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes, and Apollonius, were content to be mathematicians; in philosophy they did not aspire to originality.
Specialization characterized the age in all departments, not only in the world of learning. In the self-governing Greek cities of the fifth and fourth centuries, a capable man was assumed to be capable of
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* See Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. VII, pp. 194-5.
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everything. He would be, as occasion arose, a soldier, a politician, a lawgiver, or a philosopher. Socrates, though he disliked politics, could not avoid being mixed up with political disputes. In his youth he was a soldier, and (in spite of his disclaimer in the Apology) a student of physical science. Protagoras, when he could spare time from teaching scepticism to aristocratic youths in search of the latest thing, was drawing up a code of laws for Thurii. Plato dabbled in politics, though unsuccessfully. Xenophon, when he was neither writing about Socrates nor being a country gentleman, spent his spare time as a general. Pythagorean mathematicians attempted to acquire the government of cities. Everybody had to serve on juries and perform various other public duties. In the third century all this was changed. There continued, it is true, to be politics in the old City States, but they had become parochial and unimportant, since Greece was at the mercy of Macedonian armies. The serious struggles for power were between Macedonian soldiers; they involved no question of principle, but merely the distribution of territory between rival adventurers. On administrative and technical matters, these more or less uneducated soldiers employed Greeks as experts; in Egypt, for example, excellent work was done in irrigation and drainage. There were soldiers, administrators, physicians, mathematicians, philosophers, but there was no one who was all these at once.
The age was one in which a man who had money and no desire for power could enjoy a very pleasant life—always assuming that no marauding army happened to come his way. Learned men who found favour with some prince could enjoy a high degree of luxury, provided they were adroit flatterers and did not mind being the butt of ignorant royal witticisms. But there was no such thing as security. A palace revolution might displace the sycophantic sage’s patron; the Galatians might destroy the rich man’s villa; one’s city might be sacked as an incident in a dynastic war. In such circumstances it is no wonder that people took to worshipping the goddess Fortune, or Luck. There seemed nothing rational in the ordering of human affairs. Those who obstinately insisted upon finding rationality somewhere withdrew into themselves, and decided, like Milton’s Satan, that
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
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Except for adventurous self-seekers, there was no longer any incentive to take an interest in public affairs. After the brilliant episode of Alexander’s conquests, the Hellenistic world was sinking into chaos, for lack of a despot strong enough to achieve stable supremacy, or a principle powerful enough to produce social cohesion. Greek intelligence, confronted with new political problems, showed complete incompetence. The Romans, no doubt, were stupid and brutal compared to the Greeks, but at least they created order. The old disorder of the days of freedom had been tolerable, because every citizen had a share in it; but the new Macedonian disorder, imposed upon subjects by incompetent rulers, was utterly intolerable—far more so than the subsequent subjection to Rome.
There was widespread social discontent and fear of revolution. The wages of free labour fell, presumably owing to the competition of eastern slave labour; and meantime the prices of necessaries
