Phoenicia, and Palestine, and the Aetolians allied
themselves with a new power then emerging in the
west: Rome.
The struggles between the Hellenistic kingdoms,
though occasionally dramatic, seem to have had little
impact on everyday life. The most important social and
economic effect was a periodic influx of slaves into the
labor market as one side or the other succeeded in tak-
ing large numbers of captives. As a result, slavery be-
came increasingly important to the Hellenistic econ-
omy, forcing free laborers into marginal occupations or
outright unemployment. By the end of the third cen-
tury B.C., the cities of all three kingdoms were strug-
gling with the social problems created by poverty.
Otherwise, in the Antigonid kingdom, life went on
largely as before, though without the endless warfare of
Greek against Greek that had characterized the classi-
cal period. Under Macedonian rule the states retained
their separate identities, but loss of control over foreign
and military affairs blunted the intensity of their politi-
cal life. Not even the formation of the Achaean and
Aetolian leagues could restore it. Economic decline
continued. Poor yields as a result of erosion and soil
exhaustion forced landowners to compensate by ex-
perimenting with fertilizers and new agricultural tech-
niques. These methods were modestly successful, but
for small farmers their cost was prohibitive. Large es-
tates, many of them worked by slaves, became more
common. For thousands of Greeks, service as mercenar-
ies or as administrators in the other Hellenistic king-
doms remained the most promising route to success.
Most of these ambitious folk were absorbed by the
Seleucid kingdom. Alexander had established almost
seventy Greek cities in what had been the Persian Em-
pire. He sought to provide homes for his veterans and
for those fleeing overpopulation in their native land.
He also hoped to establish trustworthy centers of ad-
ministration in a vast region populated by dozens of
different ethnic and religious groups. This policy was
greatly expanded by the Seleucids. The new cities tried
to duplicate as far as possible the life of the polis. In the
years after Alexander’s death, the wealth extracted from
his conquests paid for the construction of temples, the-
aters, and other public buildings in the Greek style.
Greek law and Greek political institutions were im-
posed, but these cities, for all their magnificence, re-
mained cultural hybrids thronged with people of many
cultures. Unlike the citizens of a polis, they had neither
gods nor ancestors in common.
The Seleucids respected the cultural and religious
sensibilities of their subjects but preferred to rely on
Greek or Macedonian soldiers and administrators for
the day-to-day business of governing. The Greek popu-
lation of the cities, reinforced until the second century
B.C.by emigration from Greece, formed a dominant
though not especially cohesive elite. Their own origins
were diverse and their perspective was essentially ca-
reerist. They formed few emotional ties to their new
homes and were usually prepared to go elsewhere if op-5 2Chapter 3
DOCUMENT 3.3
Plutarch: A Positive View of
Alexander’s Conquests
Plutarch, who wrote the important Life of Alexander, be-
lieved in the conqueror’s “civilizing” mission and dedication to
the universal brotherhood of humankind. In this oration he
makes the best possible case for his hero’s motives.Alexander did not follow Aristotle’s advice to treat
the Greeks as a leader, the barbarians as a master,
cultivating the former as friends and kinsmen, and
treating the latter as animals or plants. Had he
done so his kingdom would have been filled with
warfare, banishments and secret plots, but he re-
garded himself as divinely sent to mediate and
govern the world. And those whom he failed to
win over by persuasion he overpowered in arms,
bringing them together from every land, combin-
ing, as it were in a loving cup, their lives, customs,
marriages, and manners of living....
For he did not cross Asia like a robber, nor did
he have it in mind to ravage and despoil it for the
booty and loot presented by such an unheard-of
stroke of fortune.... Instead he conducted himself
as he did out of a desire to subject all the races in
the world to one rule and one form of government,
making all mankind a single people. Had not the
divinity that sent Alexander recalled his soul so
soon, there would have been a single law, as it
were, watching over all mankind, and all men
would have looked to one form of justice as their
common source of light. But now, that portion of
the world that never beheld Alexander has re-
mained as if deprived of the sun.
Plutarch. “De Alexandri Magni Fortuna ast Virtute, Oratio I.” In
Sources in Western Civilization: Ancient Greece,pp. 199–200,
ed. and trans. Truesdell S. Brown. New York: The Free Press (Si-
mon & Schuster), 1965.