Hellenistic period

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hellenistic period begins with a death. On the 10th of June, 323 BC, Alexander the Great died in Babylon, leaving behind an empire that stretched from Greece to the borders of modern India. He had no chosen successor. What followed was nearly three centuries of cultural explosion, political fragmentation, and the slow absorption of Greek civilization into something the world had never quite seen before. How did a Greek language born in Athens become the common tongue of Egypt, Persia, and central Asia? What happened when Greek sculptors, philosophers, and merchants collided with the ancient traditions of the Near East? And what does it mean when an empire falls apart and yet its culture somehow spreads even further? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Term From the Nineteenth Century

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  The word Hellenistic did not exist in ancient Greece. Johann Gustav Droysen, a German historian working in the nineteenth century, coined it in his work Geschichte des Hellenismus to describe the era when Greek culture spread into non-Greek territories after Alexander's conquest. The word itself derives from the Ancient Greek Hellas, the name for Greece, and the Greek Hellēnistēs, meaning one who uses the Greek language. Droysen's term proved useful but also imprecise. The spread of Greek culture was not a uniform wave washing equally over all conquered territories. Some regions absorbed Greek customs deeply; others only adopted superficial elements. The Greek settlers who moved east were frequently a minority among native populations, and Greek and local communities did not always mix. Matthew Arnold later used Hellenism in his work Culture and Anarchy, setting it against Hebraism as a conceptual contrast, demonstrating how far the term had traveled beyond its original historical function. Scholars today are even divided on when the Hellenistic period ends, with proposed closing dates ranging from 146 BC, when Rome defeated the Greek heartlands following the Achaean War, all the way to AD 330, when the emperor Constantine moved the Roman capital to Constantinople. The most widely accepted endpoint is 31 or 30 BC, the years of the Battle of Actium and the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt.

• 3. The Wars of the Successors

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  Perdiccas, Alexander's leading cavalry commander, was murdered by his own generals Peithon, Seleucus, and Antigenes somewhere between the 21st of May and the 19th of June, 320 BC, during his invasion of Egypt. That killing captures the character of the decades that followed Alexander's death. The men who carved up Alexander's empire, his generals known as the Diadochi or Successors, spent those years fighting, betraying, and murdering one another in a sequence of conflicts that reads like a dynastic soap opera written at battlefield scale. A compromise reached in Babylon had placed Alexander's half-brother Arrhidaeus on the throne as Philip III, to rule jointly with Roxana's unborn child. But Perdiccas, made regent, quickly had his lieutenant Meleager and the infantry leaders killed and seized full control, only to face the same fate himself three years later. By the time Antigonus I raided the royal treasuries at Ecbatana, Persepolis, and Susa, making off with 25,000 talents, the pretense of a unified empire was finished. The decisive break came at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BC, where Seleucus' war elephants proved the turning point. Antigonus was killed on that field. In the following decades the tripartite division that would define the Hellenistic world settled into place: Macedon under Antigonus II Gonatas, who defeated an 18,000-strong Gallic force in Thrace in 277 BC to secure his throne; the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt under Ptolemy II; and the Seleucid empire under Antiochus I Soter.

• 4. Egypt Under the Ptolemies

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  Ptolemy, one of Alexander's seven bodyguards, was appointed satrap of Egypt after Alexander's death and declared himself King Ptolemy I in 305 BC. He earned the title Soter, meaning saviour, for his role in supplying the Rhodians during their famous siege. His dynasty would rule Egypt until Cleopatra VII's death in 30 BC, making the Ptolemies one of the longest-lasting of the successor kingdoms. Alexandria became the kingdom's center of gravity: Egypt's first great port city and its main grain exporter in the Mediterranean. The Library of Alexandria drew scholars like Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Theocritus, transforming the city into the intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world. Ptolemy I even manufactured a new god, Serapis, combining the Egyptian deities Apis and Osiris with attributes drawn from Greek religion, a vivid example of the cultural fusion the Ptolemies pursued at every level. They adopted pharaonic customs, appeared in Egyptian dress on public monuments, and married siblings; Ptolemy II was the first to practice that last custom. The administrative machine they built was formidably efficient, extracting revenue through tariffs, excise duties, fines, and taxes via a vast class of petty officials and tax farmers. Egyptian papyri, preserved by the country's arid climate, have kept a remarkable record of Ptolemaic daily life that the Seleucid kingdom entirely lacks. Interestingly, papyri from the reign of Ptolemy I are scarce, while documents from Ptolemy II's reign are far more plentiful, in part because large quantities of papyri were stuffed into human and animal mummies during his rule. When the dynasty finally fell after the Battle of Raphia in 217 BC exposed the limits of Ptolemaic military power, and after the native Egyptian soldiers who had been trained as phalangites revolted and set up a breakaway state in the Thebaid between 205 and 186 or 185 BC, the institution had already been corroding from within for decades.

• 5. Greek Culture at the World's Edge

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  Diodotus, governor of Bactria, Sogdiana, and Margiana, declared himself king sometime between 255 and 246 BC, breaking from the Seleucid empire to found what would become the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in territory covering most of present-day Afghanistan. The distance from Athens to Bactria is roughly five thousand kilometers, yet Greek temples, Greek coins, and the Greek language took root there and survived for generations. According to Strabo, the Greco-Bactrians had contacts with Han China through Silk Road trade routes, and there is material evidence of technology exchange in the form of copper-nickel metal alloys previously unknown to the West. Demetrius, son of Euthydemus, invaded northwestern India around 180 BC after the collapse of the Mauryan Empire, beginning an even more isolated Greek kingdom in India. The most celebrated of the Indo-Greek kings was Menander, who rose to power around 155 or 165 BC and apparently became a Buddhist; Buddhist texts remember him as Milinda. The Mahabharata calls the Yavanas, a Sanskrit word for Greeks, "the all-knowing." The Brihat-Samhita of the mathematician Varahamihira writes that "the Greeks, though impure, must be honored since they were trained in sciences and therein, excelled others." Representations of the Buddha from the Gandhara period show Greek artistic influence, with the Buddha depicted under the protection of Herakles. The Indo-Greek kingdom appears to have survived in western Punjab until around AD 10, outlasting many more celebrated Hellenistic states by a considerable margin.

• 6. Philosophy, Science, and the Arts

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  Euclid produced his mathematical works during the Hellenistic period, and Archimedes left behind a body of work that still carries his name in dozens of theorems and physical principles. Those two figures alone represent the kind of intellectual productivity that made the era remarkable. Philosophy branched in several directions: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Pyrrhonism all emerged as distinct schools during these centuries, each offering a different answer to how a person should live in an uncertain, large, and often violent world. In literature, New Comedy and Alexandrian poetry developed new registers for the Greek voice. The Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek, was produced during this period because many Jewish communities in Alexandria and Antioch had lost the ability to speak Hebrew and Aramaic. Koine Greek itself, the Attic-based dialect that spread across the conquered territories, became the lingua franca of the ancient world, a common language enabling trade, administration, and religious exchange across previously separate civilizations. Hellenistic sculpture broke from Classical restraint: the Dying Gaul and the Venus de Milo both illustrate the era's interest in intense emotion and dynamic movement. The Pergamon Altar, constructed under Eumenes II with friezes depicting the Gigantomachy, represents the architectural ambition of the age. Eumenes II also built the Library of Pergamum, which Plutarch said held 200,000 volumes and was considered second only to the Library of Alexandria. Theater and music flourished alongside these visual arts, giving the Hellenistic period a cultural breadth that no single chapter can fully contain.

• 7. Rome and the Long Ending

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  Philip V of Macedon, called "the darling of Hellas," may have been the last Macedonian ruler with both the ability and the opportunity to resist Rome. Under the Peace of Naupactus in 217 BC he controlled all of Greece except Athens, Rhodes, and Pergamum. His decision to ally with Hannibal of Carthage in 215 BC pulled Rome directly into Greek affairs and triggered a series of conflicts from which Macedon never recovered. The decisive defeat came at the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, where the Roman proconsul Titus Quinctius Flamininus crushed Philip's forces. The resulting peace stripped Macedon of its fleet, levied a massive indemnity, and returned the kingdom to its ancient boundaries. When Philip's son Perseus tried to restore Macedonian power, the Romans abolished the Macedonian kingdom entirely after the Third Macedonian War of 171 to 168 BC, replacing it with four puppet republics before formally annexing the territory. The Achaean League, the last formal Greek resistance, was dissolved after declaring war on Rome and losing. Pyrrhus of Epirus had beaten Rome at the Battle of Heraclea and at Asculum before his losses grew so heavy that his victories became their own undoing, producing the phrase still used today: Pyrrhic victory. By 30 BC, when Cleopatra VII died and Rome absorbed Ptolemaic Egypt, the last major Hellenistic kingdom was gone. But Koine Greek persisted as the language of the eastern Roman Empire and remained the medium of Christian scripture, carrying Hellenistic culture forward long past the political structures that had first spread it.