The Hellenistic World

4. The Hellenistic World:A Homogeneous Culture?

I

Towards the middle of the third century the inhabitants of a Greek city lying at the site of Ai Khanum beside the river Oxus (mod. Amu Darya) on the northern frontier of Afghanistan (its name is unknown) erected in a shrine in the middle of the city a pillar inscribed with a list of some 140 moral maxims copied from a similar pillar which stood near the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, over 3000 miles away. An adjoining verse inscription reads:

These wise words of famous men of old are consecrated in holy Pytho. Thence Clearchus took them, copying them with care, to set them shining from afar in the sacred enclosure of Cineas (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422 = Austin, 192).

Cineas – his name suggests that he was probably a Thessalian – will have been the city’s founder to whom the shrine was dedicated, and Clearchus has been identified by Robert as the Aristotelian philosopher, Clearchus of Soli, a man with an interest both in Delphi and in the religion and philosophy of the Indian gymnosophists, the Persian magi and the Jewish priests. If this Clearchus was indeeed he, we have here our first indication that he made a journey to the far east and there found distant Greek communities ready to hear him lecture and, at his prompting, to inscribe an authenticated copy of Delphic wisdom in the shrine of the city’s founder. To set up Delphic maxims, often in a gymnasium, was a common practice. Examples are known from Thera (IG, xii 3, 1020) and Miletopolis in Mysia (Syll., 1268). The list at Ai Khanum is fragmentary and in fact only five maxims now survive, but comparable lists elsewhere enabled the French epigraphist, Louis Robert, to reconstitute the whole collection – a striking illustration of how an inscription, of which the greater part is lost, can occasionally be restored with virtual certainty. An interesting feature of the Ai Khanum inscription is that despite the remoteness of this city the lettering is not at all crude or provincial. It is of the highest quality and in the best tradition of the Greek lapicide’s craft, worthy of the kingdom of Bactria, which also produced some of the finest Greek coins of the hellenistic period.

This inscription was discovered in 1966, and nearby, in the gymnasium of Ai Khanum, was another, containing a dedication by two brothers, ‘Triballus and Strato, sons of Strato, to Hermes and Heracles’ (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422), who were the patron gods of the gymnasium. Subsequent excavation has revealed the full plan of the gymnasium itself, which incidentally contained a sundial of a type known, but not hitherto found. There was also a theatre holding 5000 spectators and, dating from about 150, a large administrative centre of palatial proportions, in which were found storing vessels labelled in Greek, a mosaic 5.7 metres square and, most remarkable of all, from what was evidently its library, imprinted on fine earth formed from decomposed wall-bricks, the traces of a still partially legible text from a now perished piece of papyrus, which was evidently a page in a philosophical work which appears to have been written by a member of the Aristotelian school (of which Clearchus himself was a member). These finds confirm the picture of a city in which, despite its later isolation, Greek traditions continued strong right down to the time of its destruction by the nomads of the steppes in the second half of the second century.

But Ai Khanum was not the first site to furnish epigraphical evidence for a strong hellenic presence in Bactria, for only a few years earlier two Greek inscriptions, one with an Aramaic counterpart, had been found at Kandahar (see Schlumberger, CRAI (1964), 126–40). These contained fragments of the moralizing edicts of the Mauryan king Asoka and they too were elegantly carved and in an excellent Greek, which betrayed an intimate knowledge of the vocabulary of Greek philosophy and considerable skill in adapting it to render the thoughts of a Buddhist convert. Anxious to convey his lessons to those living in what now formed part of his dominions, Asoka used Aramaic, the official language of the Persian empire, and of course Greek. More recently a further Greek inscription has been found in Kandahar and more can be expected.

This use of Greek, in the popular cosmopolitan form called the koine, the ‘common tongue’, is characteristic of the whole vast area covered by Alexander’s conquests. It pays no heed to the later frontiers and serves to bind the whole into a single cultural continuum. Its prevalence is the result not merely of political domination, but also of a great movement of colonization which began under Alexander and continued in full spate until about 250, after which it slackened off. Ai Khanum has provided clear evidence of this, for a study of the traces of habitation in a wide area around this city has shown it to be virtually unpopulated under the Achaemenid kings, but with a dense population in hellenistic times.

II

Under Alexander the agents of colonization were largely mercenaries whom he left behind to hold strategic points. Conditions were rough and lacking in civilized amenity and so (as we saw, p. 44) provoked revolt. But the finds on the Oxus and at Kandahar are not the only evidence that by the mid-third century or even earlier conditions had improved. The growth in the number of colonists had brought with it a deepening of Greek civilization, not least in Bactria, and we can occasionally trace the process. A decree passed by the assembly of Antioch-in-Persis, recognizing the international character of the festival of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, recalls the kinship existing between the two peoples, for when Antiochus I (281–261) was anxious to reinforce the population of Antioch, the Magnesians had responded to his invitation by sending ‘men sufficient in number and outstanding in merit for the purpose’ (OGIS, 233, 1. 18). A generation later the bond was still remembered. As in the great European emigration to the United States in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries many went out in groups but others would have gone individually to try their fortune in new lands. The new cities of the east contained a mixture of Greeks from all parts, a motley throng from every sort of environment and social class, from the main centres of civilization and from the fringe areas.

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.