Chapter 1. Introduction: East and West in Hellenism
Any portrayal of the Hellenistic era must begin with Alexander the Great. His conquest of the East (334-323 b.c.) marks a turning point in the history of the ancient world. Out of the conditions it created grew a cultural unity larger than any that had existed before, a unity which was to last for almost a thousand years until destroyed in its turn by the conquests of Islam. The new historical fact made possible, and indeed intended, by Alexander was the union of West and East. "West" means here the Greek world centered around the Aegaean; "East," the area of the old oriental civilizations, stretching from Egypt to the borders of India. Although Alexander's political creation fell apart with his death, the merging of cultures proceeded undisturbed through the succeeding centuries, both as regional processes of fusion within the several kingdoms of the Diadochi and as the rise of an essentially supra-national, Hellenistic, culture common to them all. When finally Rome dissolved the separate political entities in the area and transformed them into provinces of the Empire, she simply gave form to that homogeneity which in fact had long prevailed irrespective of dynastic boundaries.
In the larger geographical framework of the Roman Empire, the terms "East" and "West" assume new meanings, "East" being the Greek and "West" the Latin half of the Roman world. The Greek half, however, comprised the whole Hellenistic world, in which Greece proper had become a minor part; that is, it comprised all that part of Alexander's heritage which had not slipped back into "barbarian" control. Thus in the enlarged perspective of the Empire the East is constituted by a synthesis of what we first distinguished as the Hellenic West and the Asiatic East. In the permanent division of Rome from the time of Theodosius into an Eastern and a Western Empire, the cultural situation finds final political expression: under Byzantium the unified eastern half of the world came at last to form that Greek empire which Alexander
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had envisioned and which Hellenism had made possible, although the Persian renascence beyond the Euphrates had diminished its geographical scope. The parallel division of Christendom into a Latin and a Greek Church reflects and perpetuates the same cultural situation in the realm of religious dogma.
It is this spatio-cultural unity, created by Alexander and existing in turn as the kingdoms of the Diadochi, as the eastern provinces of Rome, as the Byzantine Empire, and concurrently as the Greek Church, a unity bound together in the Hellenistic-oriental synthesis, which provides the setting for those spiritual movements with which this book is concerned. In this introductory chapter we have to fill in their background by saying something more about Hellenism in general and by clarifying on the one hand some aspects of its two components, namely, Hellas and Asia, and on the other the manner of their meeting, marriage, and common issue.
(a) THE PART OF THE WEST
What were the historical conditions and circumstances of the development we have indicated? The union which Alexander's conquest initiated was prepared for on both sides. East and West had each progressed previously to the maximum degree of unification in its own realm, most obviously so in political terms: the East had been unified under Persian rule, the Greek world under the Macedonian hegemony. Thus the conquest of the Persian monarchy by the Macedonian was an event involving the whole "West" and the whole "East."
No less had cultural developments prepared each side, though in a very different manner, for the roles they were destined to play in the new combination. Cultures can best mix when the thought of each has become sufficiently emancipated from particular local, social, and national conditions to assume some degree of general validity and thereby become transmissible and exchangeable. It is then no longer bound to such specific historical facts as the Athenian polis or the oriental caste society but has passed into the freer form of abstract principles that can claim to apply to all mankind, that can be learned, be supported by argument, and compete with others in the sphere of rational discussion.
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Greek Culture on the Eve of Alexander's Conquests
When Alexander appeared, Hellas had, both in point of fact and in its own consciousness, reached this stage of cosmopolitan maturity, and this was the positive precondition of his success, which was matched by a negative one on the oriental side. For more than a century the whole evolution of Greek culture had been leading in this direction. The ideals of a Pindar could hardly have been grafted onto the court of a Nebuchadnezzar or an Artaxerxes and the bureaucracies of their realms. Since Herodotus, "the father of history" (fifth century B.C.), Greek curiosity had interested itself in the customs and opinions of the "barbarians"; but the Hellenic way was conceived for and suited to Hellenes alone, and of them only those who were freeborn and full citizens. Moral and political ideals, and even the idea of knowledge, were bound up with very definite social conditions and did not claim to apply to men in general—indeed, the concept of "man in general" had for practical purposes not yet come into its own. However, philosophical reflection and the development of urban civilization in the century preceding Alexander led gradually to its emergence and explicit formulation. The sophistic enlightenment of the fifth century had set the individual over against the state and its norms and in conceiving the opposition of nature and law had divested the latter, as resting on convention alone, of its ancient sanctity: moral and political norms are relative. Against their skeptical challenge, the Socratic-Platonic answer appealed, not indeed to tradition, but to conceptual knowledge of the intelligible, i.e., to rational theory; and rationalism carries in itself the germ of universalism. The Cynics preached a revaluation of existing norms of conduct, self-sufficiency of the private individual, indifference to the traditional values of society, such as patriotism, and freedom from all prejudice. The internal decline of the old city-states together with the loss of their external independence weakened the particularistic aspect of their culture while it strengthened the consciousness of what in it was of general spiritual validity.
In short, at the time of Alexander the Hellenic idea of culture had evolved to a point where it was possible to say that one was a Hellene not by birth but by education, so that one born a barbarian
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could become a true Hellene. The enthroning of reason as the highest part in man had led to the discovery of man as such, and at the same time to the conception of the Hellenic way as a general humanistic culture. The last step on this road was taken when the Stoics later advanced the proposition that freedom, that highest good of Hellenic ethics, is a purely inner quality not dependent on external conditions, so that true freedom may well be found in a slave if only he is wise. So much does all that is Greek become a matter of mental attitude and quality that participation in it is open to every rational subject, i.e., to every man. Prevailing theory placed man no longer primarily in the context of the polis, as did Plato and still Aristotle, but in that of the cosmos, which we sometimes find called "the true and great polis for all." To be a good citizen of the cosmos, a cosmopolites, is the moral end of man; and his title to this citizenship is his possession of logos, or reason, and nothing else— that is, the principle that distinguishes him as man and puts him into immediate relationship to the same principle governing the universe. The full growth of this cosmopolitan ideology was reached under the Roman Empire; but in all essential features the universalistic stage of Greek thought was present by Alexander's time. This turn of the collective mind inspired his venture and was itself powerfully reinforced by his success.
Cosmopolitanism and the New Greek Colonization
Such was the inner breadth of the spirit which Alexander carried into the outward expanses of the world. From now on, Hellas was everywhere that urban life with its institutions and organization flourished after the Greek pattern. Into this life the native populations could enter with equal rights by way of cultural and linguistic assimilation. This marks an important difference from the older Greek colonization of the Mediterranean coastline, which established purely Greek colonies on the fringes of the great "barbarian" hinterland and envisaged no amalgamation of colonists and natives. The colonization following in the footsteps of Alexander intended from the outset, and indeed as part of his own political program, a symbiosis of an entirely new kind, one which though most obviously a Hellenization of the East required for its success a certain reciprocity. In the new geopolitical area the Greek element no
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longer clung to geographic continuity with the mother country, and generally with what had hitherto been the Greek world, but spread far into the continental expanses of the Hellenistic Empire. Unlike the earlier colonies, the cities thus founded were not daughter cities of individual metropoles but were fed from the reservoir of the cosmopolitan Greek nation. Their main relations were not to one another and to the distant mother city but each acted as a center of crystallization in its own environment, that is, in relation to its indigenous neighbors. Above all, these cities were no longer sovereign states but parts of centrally administered kingdoms. This changed the relation of the inhabitants to the political whole. The classical city-state engaged the citizen in its concerns, and these he could identify with his own, as through the laws of his city he governed himself. The large Hellenistic monarchies neither called for nor permitted such close personal identification; and just as they made no moral demands on their subjects, so the individual detached himself in regard to them and as a private person (a status hardly admitted in the Hellenic world before) found satisfaction of his social needs in voluntarily organized associations based on community of ideas, religion, and occupation.
The nuclei of the newly founded cities were as a rule constituted by Greek nationals; but from the outset the inclusion of compact native populations was part of the plan and of the charter by which each city came into being. In many cases such groups of natives were thus transformed into city populations for the first time, and into the populations of cities organized and self-administering in the Greek manner. How thoroughly Alexander himself understood his policy of fusion in racial terms as well is shown by the famous marriage celebration at Susa when in compliance with his wishes ten thousand of his Macedonian officers and men took Persian wives.
The Hellenization of the East
The assimilating power of such an entity as the Hellenistic city must have been overwhelming. Participating in its institutions and ways of life, the non-Hellenic citizens underwent rapid Hellenization, shown most plainly in their adoption of the Greek language: and this in spite of the fact that probably from the beginning the
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non-Hellenes outnumbered the born Greeks or Macedonians. The tremendous subsequent growth of some of these cities, like Alexandria or Antioch, can be explained only by the continual influx of native oriental populations, which yet did not change the Hellenistic character of the communities. Finally, in the Seleucid kingdom, in Syria and Asia Minor, even originally oriental cities transformed themselves through the adoption of Hellenic corporative constitutions and the introduction of gymnasia and other typical institutions into cities of the Greek type and received from the central government the charter granting the rights and duties of such cities. This was a kind of refounding, evidence of the progress of Helleni-zation and at the same time a factor adding momentum to it. Besides the cities, the Greek-speaking administration of the monarchies was of course also a Hellenizing agent.
The invitation suggested in the formula that one is a Hellene not by birth but by education was eagerly taken up by the more responsive among the sons of the conquered East. Already in the generation after Aristotle we find them active in the very sanctuaries of Greek wisdom. Zeno, son of Mnaseas (i.e., Manasseh), founder of the Stoic school, was of Phoenician-Cypriote origin: he learned Greek as an adopted language, and throughout his long teaching career at Athens his accent always remained noticeable. From then until the end of antiquity the Hellenistic East produced a continual stream of men, often of Semitic origin, who under Greek names and in the Greek language and spirit contributed to the dominant civilization. The old centers of the Aegaean area remained in existence, but the center of gravity of Greek culture, now the universal culture, had shifted to the new regions. The Hellenistic cities of the Near East were its fertile seedbeds: among them Alexandria in Egypt was pre-eminent. With names generally Hellenized, we can mostly no longer determine whether an author from Apameia or Byblos in Syria, or from Gadara in Trans-Jordan, is of Greek or Semitic race; but in these melting-pots of Hellenism the question finally becomes irrelevant—a third entity had come into being.
In the newly founded Greek cities the result of the fusion was Greek from the outset. In other places the process was gradual, and continued into the period of late antiquity: people became converted to Hellenism as one might change one's party or creed, and this was
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still going on at a time when movements of renascence of national languages and literatures were already under way. The earliest, indeed anachronistic, example of such a situation is provided by the familiar events of the Maccabaean period in Palestine in the second century b.c. Even as late as the third century a.d., after five hundred years of Hellenistic civilization, we observe a native of the ancient city of Tyre, Malchus son of Malchus, becoming a prominent Greek philosophic writer and at the instance of his Hellenic friends changing (or suffering them to change) his Semitic name first to the Greek Basileus,1 then to Porphyrius,2 thereby symbolically declaring his adherence to the Hellenic cause together with his Phoenician extraction. The interesting point in this case is that at the same time the counter-movement was gathering momentum in his native country—the creation of a Syrian vernacular literature associated with the names of Bardesanes, Mani, and Ephraem. This movement and its parallels everywhere were part of the rise of the new ...
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