- Hellenistic Culture And Literature
(By Robin Lane Fox)Introduction: The World after Alexander
After Alexander the horizons of the Greek world extended as far as India. Even Alexander had been surprised by the size of it all: he
wondered if the Caspian Sea was the outer ocean of the world, and in India he began by thinking that the River Indus ran cosily round
into Egypt's Nile. The new horizons were not altogether lost on those whom the Greeks bordered. Around 260 B.C. the Indian king
Asoka dispatched an edict for inscription throughout his realm which referred to the 'world my children'. It listed exactly the Hellenistic
kings from his Asian border through Egypt and Macedon to Cyrene in north Africa. A copy stood in Greek near the Greek and
Macedonian settlement at Kandahar.
In the West, meanwhile, intriguing discoveries had been made by Pytheas, a ship's captain from Marseilles who sailed north past
Scotland in, or shortly after, the age of Alexander. Noting the midnight sun, he continued north 'until there was no proper sea, land, or
air, but a sort of mixture of all three like a jelly-fish, in which one can neither walk nor sail ...': anyone who has sailed in the Arctic will
recognize the clamminess of the northern fog-bank. Afterwards, the best Greek geographers never made sense of Europe above and
along the line of the Danube. The Celts were indiscriminate barbarians, and nobody bothered with inland Spain until the Roman
conquests.
In the East, were the new settlers equally uninfluenced by their findings? At a great banquet Alexander had prayed for 'partnership' in
rule between Macedonians and Persians: his partnership, however, required its orientals to speak and learn Greek. In a good story, he is
said to have arranged Greek lessons for the captive women of the Persian King's family. In the East Greeks kept on exercising in Greek
gymnasia from the Oxus to the Persian Gulf and explaining the peoples around them by their own culture's myths: the Armenians, they
thought, descended from Jason, while 'Bouddhas' had followed their own Dionysus. In a world where it became usual to be bilingual,
Greeks spoke and read Greek only. They imported vines into Egypt and Babylonia: wherever possible, they grew their olives. For most
of them culture and politics still centred on the 'city' or polis, and on the disruptive power of kings who took Greece and the Aegean very
seriously. The court and the city, not Persia or India, were the setting for Hellenistic culture and literature.
At the major courts the kings and their top friends had the money to be spectacular in open defiance of reason. The difference in style
between a major and minor court was that the major had a bigger store of precious metal. On one winter's day in Alexandria during the
270s Ptolemy II staged a grand procession whose central section honoured Dionysus. Mechanical statues processed on huge floats; wine
ran freely over the streets from vast pitchers; sweet refreshments were given out to the spectators. Actors and masses of women joined
officials who had dressed as satyrs in a show which included scenes of Dionysus' drunken return from India, the figure of Alexander, and
an enormous gold phallus, 180 feet long, covered with ribbons and tipped with a large gold star. The Morning Star led the way; the
Evening Star brought up the rear. Between marched 2,000 oxen smothered in gold, 2,400 dogs, some giraffes, antelopes, Indian parrots,
elephants, a gnu (or a hartebeest), ostriches pulling carts, and a 'white she-bear' which was not, alas, from the Arctic. The figure of
'Corinth' led a parade of women named after the cities of Ionia and the islands; she was a clear allusion to the League of Corinth and the
Ptolemies' concern for Greek freedom. Slaves dragged the carts and the military processed in thousands.