When Alexander the Great died in Babylon on June 11 323 BC, few could have known the prospects for the Macedonians and the Greeks. In the last twelve years they had accomplished marvelous conquests, that brought under their sway more than ten times the territory Alexander had begun with in Greece. It was to be the beginning of the Hellenistic Age, a time of unique cultural and political developments, that brought about a synthesis of old and new.
Why the 'Hellenistic Age'?
The Ancient Greeks called themselves Hellenes, so it was partially a natural progression in semantics, when they had conquered the Persian Empire and the known world, that the 19th century historian Droysen should have named the period after these conquests the 'Hellenistic' Age. Literally it signifies a 'Greekish' age, a time when Greek culture made contact and active discourse with others, and provided a political order for many different peoples.
Alexander the Great had effectively brought under Macedonian aegis the lands from Greece to India, but the period after him hasn't since been known as the Macedonian Age. It was to be the Greeks, the Macedonians' first victims, who would define the culture, language and thought of the Hellenistic Age.
Hellenistic Kings and Hellenistic Culture
The Hellenistic Age was an age of kings, and kingdoms. These were Macedonian, and Greek as to their use of language in administration, but, by and large, kings. Alexander the Great had conquered the vast Persian Empire, which had consisted of many satrapies (fiefdoms akin to medieval feudal states), which were reconfigured and combined under his successors to form kingdoms.
Three were outstandingly dominant - that of his generals Seleucus (who formed the Seleucid Empire), centred in Syria, of Ptolemy (who incepted Ptolemaic rule in Egypt), and Antigonus (who established a line of kings in Macedonia). It took a look while, and many years, but by 270 BC, some fifty years after Alexander's death, these were the three that ran much of Hellenistic history.
With kings who spoke Greek, came Greek culture. We know it as the 'Hellenistic Age' because this was the period when Greek people settled in the conquered realms of the Near East and Persia, bringing with them their literature, philosophy, and language. Famous libraries, like those at Alexandria and Lergamum, were established, and many famous scholars emerged to order knowledge in a new, universal, setting - men like Erastothenes the geographer, Euclid the mathematician, Callimachus the poet. They blended old Greek traditions and notions with their new setting. This was the essence of the Hellenistic Age.
The Legacy of the Hellenistic Age in the Roman Empire
When Droysen had named this period of antiquity the age of 'Hellenismus' he was referring primarily to the use of hellenismos in the New Testament. Early Christianity, as it came to be, was formed in no other an environment than that of the Hellenistic world.
Droysen was thinking in terms of the Greek influence on the development of Christianity, and this was no doubt the greatest legacy the Hellenistic world would confer on later generations. It was within a Jewish speaking community that Jesus grew up, but widely Greek ones in which St Paul had to spread the Gospel.
It was the Greek language that was the language of early Christianity, and also of high culture and belles-lettres, in the age after the Hellenistic kings. Numerous philosophers and learned men emerged in the Roman Empire steeped in Greek culture, with figures like Plutarch and Philostratus, while even Romans found it indispensable. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the 2nd century AD, had to write his Meditations in Greek. The imperial Roman world heralded the so-called 'Second Sophistic', a time when the old traditions of Greek high culture that had existed in 5th century Athens were revived and re-lived.
With Greek providing the spiritual aspect to the material form of the Roman Empire, its influence on the development of Christianity extended also to the development of doctrine. The numerous and contentious Christological debates of the 4th and 5th centuries were much informed by the argumentation of Greek philosophy.
Further Reading:
Green, P. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age University of California Press 1993
Green, P. The Hellenistic Age New York 2007
Marcus Chin - I write about various things, and in the main out of that simple human emotion - interest and, correspondingly, passion. Knowledge stems ...
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