The Hellenistic World and Rome
display of Straton of Sidon, his hiring of entertainers from Greece, and his
rivalry with Nicocles of Salamis (Athenaeus,Deipn. ). It was either this
Straton or the one whom Alexander found in power under whom merchants
from Tyre dedicated statues representing Tyre and Sidon to Delian Apollo,
commemorating this with a bilingual inscription.^56 The impulse given to
Hellenisation in Caria by the dynast is equally the main theme of Simon
Hornblower’sMausolus(); and the dynastic monuments, the bi- and tri-
lingual inscriptions, and the coins of fifth- and fourth-century Lycia provide
ample evidence of comparable influences there.^57 We are thus presented with
the agreeable paradox that the most clear and convincing cases ofVerschmel-
zungin Droysen’s sense from the Greek East with which our evidence now
presents us were ones which began before Alexander, and where it remains
quite unclear how much their cultural evolution owed to the Macedonian
conquest.
In the case of Phoenicia, however, there was perhaps more to it than
that. Firstly, the Phoenician cities already bore at least some resemblance to
Greek city-states; it is not easy to say what if any significant social changes
their (partial) evolution into Greekpoleiswill have necessitated. Secondly,
and more important, when the Phoenicians began to explore the storehouse
of Greek culture, they could find, among other things, themselves, already
credited with creative roles—not all of which, as it happens, were purely
legendary. If some aspects were just legend, like the story of Kadmos, what
is clear is that the Phoenicians adopted it (perhaps, like the legend of Aeneas
in Italy, very early) and made it their own. In doing so they acquired both
an extra past and a reinforcement of their historical identity; and they also
simultaneously gained acceptance as being in some sense Greeks. It is rele-
vant to observe that the Romans, admitted to the Isthmian games in ..,
probably a little before Diotimus of Sidon won the chariot race at Nemea,
earned a similar acceptance on similar grounds. The famous inscription of
the s from Lampsacus shows that the city appealed to the Romans as ‘‘rela-
tives,’’ on the basis of their descent from Troy.^58
That was also, it need hardly be said, the period of the birth of Latin litera-
ture. We might well wonder why it was in Rome and not in Phoenicia that
there evolved, entirely without the aid of a conquering Macedonian state,
the only literary culture which really was a ‘‘fusion’’ in Droysen’s sense.
.CIS., no. :Ins. Délos,no..
. See W. A. P. Childs, ‘‘Lycian Relations with Persians and Greeks in the Fifth and
Fourth Centuries Reexamined,’’Anat. Stud. (): .
.Syll.^3 ;I. K. Lampsakos(), no. . Translated by Austin (n. ), no. .