CHAPTER XX
THE HELLENISTIC AGE
I. THE EXTENT OF GREEK INFLUENCE
Alexander was a great conqueror and he won for himself a mighty empire. But that empire did not last, for his successors were unable to hold it together. It would almost seem as if he had crowded into his short reign of barely thirteen years, hero deeds and marvellous exploits, which however much they may have done to enrich tradition and to appeal to the imagination, were hardly of any great permanent value. Alexander, however, did more than create a passing empire; he did more than any other one man to spread the knowledge of Greek civilization over the world. Wherever he passed with his conquering army he founded cities, where he established colonies of Greeks: men who spoke the Greek tongue, who worshipped the Greek gods, who read and loved Greek literature, and who lived according to Greek ideals. Such cities were founded in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Syria, in Babylonia, in Persia and even in the distant lands till then unknown, further to the mysterious East.
But Alexander did yet more to spread Greek civilization than by the founding of cities. All the great ports of the Eastern Mediterranean were in his hands, which meant that Greek merchants were established there, and that the whole commerce of that region was in the hand of Greeks.
The history of Greek civilization may be divided into two periods. The first lasted until the days of Alexander; it included the early experiments made by Greek states in the art of governing themselves, the repulse of the Barbarian, the great days of Athens, the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Through all this period Greece was learning how to do things. She was in the making and was creating what was to live as long as men should love what was great, but she was living for herself. This period is called the Hellenic Period.
Beginning with Alexander, Greek civilization stepped out into a new age. Greece was no longer living for herself, she was living for the world. Greek civilization had been far-flung over Asia; the Barbarian was adopting Greek customs, Greece was the teacher of the world, in science, in art, and in all that was meant by civilized living. This period lasted from the time of Alexander until Greece became part of the Roman Empire in 146 B.C., and is known as the Hellenistic Age. The centre of Greek civilization was now no longer in Athens, but in Alexandria, the city in Egypt founded by Alexander, and which from its situation was the natural link between the East and the West.
Alexandria had not been founded for very many years before she was the rival of Carthage, that powerful commercial city founded by the Phoenicians, as mistress of the Mediterranean, and in the Eastern Mediterranean, known as the Levant, she held undisputed sway. From that time to the present day Alexandria has been the door through which the commerce of the East and the West has passed.
In the Hellenistic Age, Alexandria developed into a very beautiful city. Temples and all kinds of public buildings, great palaces and gardens, docks and warehouses were built. At the entrance to the harbour stood a great lighthouse, called the Pharos from the island on which it stood, and which was considered so great a marvel that it was numbered amongst the Seven Wonders of the ancient World.
This period was in many ways like a more modern one. Greek civilization had stepped out into a new world. The conquering armies of Alexander, going out to the ends of the earth, had made communication possible between places that had hitherto hardly known of each other's existence. Science had made such remarkable strides that man's power over nature had been enormously increased, and the increase of scientific knowledge was affecting the old religious beliefs in the gods. Nothing seemed to be quite the same as it had hitherto been, and then, as at all such times, the minds of men were affected by the changes. Some became more conservative than before and wanted nothing changed, because to them the old was necessarily the best, and there was only evil in what was new. Others went to the other extreme and wanted everything changed, because to them the new must necessarily be better than the old. But quietly in between these two extremes were the thinkers, those who were keeping alive that Greek spirit which knew that the vision of the whole truth had not yet been given to any man, and that the way to progress was not by destroying the old, but by building upon it in order to go on from a firm foundation to a fuller knowledge of the truth. Not to Thales, nor to Socrates, nor to Aristotle, nor yet to the men of the twentieth century has the complete vision of the truth of all things been vouchsafed, but to those who follow the quest in the spirit of the Greeks of old is granted to add a little to the progress of human knowledge.
It was in the Museum at Alexandria that the thinkers worked. This Museum was founded by Ptolemy Soter, one of the rulers of Egypt after the break-up of Alexander's empire, and very much developed by his son, Ptolemy Philadelphus. This Museum, the Temple of the Muses, was what today would be called a university. It had lecture halls where mathematicians, astronomers, poets and philosophers taught; courts and porches where men walked and talked, houses where the men of learning lived. Above all, it had a Library, which contained several thousand books. This library was catalogued by Callimachus, the first librarian of whom there is any record, and there were a hundred and twenty books of his catalogue. Book, however, is a wrong word to use for the collection in the Alexandrian Library, for there were no books then, as we know them. Rolls took the place of books, and Callimachus soon found that the big rolls were very inconvenient. It is said that he complained that "a big book is a big nuisance," and that it was when he was librarian that the plan of dividing the large rolls into a number of smaller ones was thought of. These were easier to handle, but one work required a great many of the smaller rolls, and thirty-six were required for the Iliad and the Odyssey.
As the fame of the Library spread, students from all over the Greek world came to Alexandria, and there was a great demand for additional copies of the works in the Library. For more than three centuries, Alexandria was the great book-producing mart in the world. The Museum possessed a good collection of the best known copies of the works of the classic writers, and Ptolemy Philadelphus very much enlarged this collection. He bought every copy of all existing Greek works he could find, and as he paid very high prices for them, there was a steady flow of books to Alexandria from all over the civilized world. It is said that he refused to send food to the Athenians at a time of famine unless they agreed to give him certain copies they still possessed of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. He paid liberally for them, not only in the promised shipment of corn but also in silver.
As more and more copies of the classic writers were wanted, a regular publishing trade arose in Alexandria. Callimachus was not only the Librarian of the Library, but a publisher of the works of classic writers. Large numbers of copyists were employed whose business it was to make careful and accurate copies of the works required. This accounts for the fact that in certain works of ancient literature it is sometimes difficult to know what is the really original form of certain lines or passages, because in spite of their care, the copyists made mistakes, and unfortunately many original copies of the classics were lost in the great fire which destroyed the Library in the last century B.C. The Alexandrian school of copyists was a very famous one, and Alexandrian Editions of the classics were considered the very best to be had.
Not only were Greek works copied, but other literature was translated into Greek and then copied. It was in Alexandria that the oldest manuscript of the Old Testament we possess was transcribed. It was a translation of the whole of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, made, according to tradition, by a group of seventy Jewish scholars, whence comes its name, the Septuagint. These scholars were encouraged to undertake this work by the King, who is said to have provided the means for their support whilst they were engaged on the translation, and who gave them a special quarter of the city in which to live.
III. SCIENCE IN THE HELLENISTIC AGE
Greek science had been born in Ionia, and during the Hellenic Period of Greek civilization, it had gone hand in hand with philosophy. The earliest days of pure science came in the Hellenistic Age, and its home was in Alexandria. Amongst the many names of men of this time who contributed something of value to science, there are two which must be remembered: those of Euclid and Archimedes.
Euclid lived in Alexandria. He was a mathematician and wrote a great work on geometry. No scientific work in the world has lived in quite the same way as has this book of Euclid, for since the time that the Elements of Euclid were written, it was used as a school text book without interruption until a very few years ago.
Archimedes was probably the greatest of the Greek scientific thinkers of the third century B.C. He did not live in Alexandria; he was a native of Syracuse in Sicily, but he was in close touch with all the scientific work that was being done there. He was a great scientific investigator, the inventor of many practical and ingenious devices and discovered the principle of moving heavy bodies by means of pulleys and levers. An extraordinarily large ship was made for the King of Syracuse, a ship of marvel to that age. It contained a gymnasium, gardens of most wonderful beauty and full of rich plants, a temple to Aphrodite, a drawing-room with its walls and doors of boxwood, having a bookcase in it, a bath-room with three brazen vessels for holding hot water, and a fish-pond. All the furnishings were of the most exquisite craftsmanship, and all the rooms had floors of mosaic, in which the whole story of the Iliad was depicted in a most marvellous manner. There were doors of ivory, beautiful couches, and it was full of pictures and statues, goblets and vases of every form and shape imaginable. But the ship was so large that no one could move it. Archimedes, however, we are told, launched it by himself with the aid of only a few people. For having prepared a helix (probably some mechanical contrivance with pulleys), he drew this vessel, enormous as it was, down to the sea. And it was said that Archimedes was the first person who ever invented this helix.[1]
Archimedes believed it possible to move greater bodies even than the ship, and he is said to have boasted: "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth."
This great inventor did other things which struck the imagination of the men amongst whom he lived, for of some of them they had never seen the like before. During the siege of Syracuse by the Romans, in 212 B.C., Archimedes invented marvellous war-engines: strange grappling hooks which, it was said, could seize an enemy's ship and overturn it in the sea, and he showed the Syracusans how to set up a water pump in their ships, so that should water get into the hold, it could be pumped out and the ship saved from sinking. He is also said to have made some arrangement of mirrors and burning glass by means of which the Roman ships were set on fire. But in spite of all these inventions, the Romans took the city, and Archimedes was killed. He was found by a Roman soldier, sitting in his house and paying no heed to any danger, but intent on drawing mathematical diagrams on the ground. Looking up and seeing the enemy, all he said was: "Stand away, fellow, from my diagram." The soldier, not knowing who he was, killed him.
IV. THE END OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE AND
THE POWER FROM THE WEST
It is said that on his deathbed Alexander bequeathed his empire "to the strongest," but there was no one general able enough or strong enough to succeed him, and for about fifty years after his death, his empire was torn by strife and bloodshed. At last some kind of peace and order was restored, but the one great empire of Alexander had disappeared, and the civilized world was broken up into a number of independent states, of which the most important were the Kingdoms of Syria, Egypt and Macedonia. During the long wars which had preceded this settlement, many battles had been fought on Greek soil. The Greeks were not strong enough to prevent this and neither were they able to maintain their independence when Macedonia became a kingdom. She was too powerful and strong a neighbour and Greece fell under her rule. Tyrants were established in the Greek cities, a deep humiliation to the freedom-loving Greek.
But once more the old Greek spirit flared up and the tyrants were driven out. From time to time in the history of Greece, states had joined together in various leagues and alliances, but the inability of the Greeks to combine for long, even when their very life demanded it, had prevented such leagues from lasting any great length of time. But in 281 B.C. when once again the independence of Greece was threatened, one of these old leagues was revived, the Achaean League. It lasted for nearly a century and is of the greatest interest to modern times, for until the union of the American states, about two thousand years later, there was nothing in the history of the world like it again.
The Achaean League was not an alliance, but a real federation of states, with one central government. Each separate state kept its own sovereign rights over all its domestic affairs, but questions of war and peace, the support of the army, and all relations with foreign states were controlled by the federal government. It was the only experiment in ancient times of real federal government.
The head of the League was called the General, and it was under the general Aratus that it became very powerful. Almost all the more important of the Greek states entered the League, with the exception of Athens and Sparta. Neither by persuasion, nor by force, unless she might be recognized as head of the League, would Sparta consent to become a member, and so powerful was she in the Peloponnesus that Aratus begged the aid of Macedonia to subdue her. Sparta was conquered, but Macedonia regained her supremacy in Greece, and the power of the Achaean League was broken.
The old Greece of history no longer existed. Greek civilization had spread over the Mediterranean world, but the free and independent city-state had disappeared and nothing lasting had taken its place. Alexander himself, and still more his successors, had failed to create an empire which gave to those who belonged to it any sense of citizenship in it. The Hellenistic world was a Greek civilization, but it failed to arouse in men of Greek birth that patriotism which the city-state had inspired.
The creation of a world state of which men were to be proud to call themselves citizens and for which they would gladly die, was to be the work of another great power, which even as the old Greece was passing, was growing strong in the West. Rome was steadily conquering the civilized world. Already she ruled over Italy and was extending her power over the Eastern Mediterranean. She conquered Macedonia, and one by one the old free states of Greece and those of the Achaean League lost their independence, until in 146 B.C. Corinth, rich, commercial, gay Corinth, was taken by Rome, and Greece became a Roman province. The citizens of this great state, which was to include, not only Greece and the Levant, but the whole Mediterranean and lands far beyond its shores, were to be proud of the name of Roman. Yet Rome, destined to be the Mistress of the World, and in political power an empire, succeeding where Greece had failed, owed all that was most worth while in the things of the higher intellectual life of the mind to Greece. The Greek spirit was never to die.