In every city the culture of the ephebes continued to be valued highly. Fathers troubled to put their sons down for a good gymnasion, and
in later life the gymnasia looked to their 'old boys' for financial support. By the later second century B.C. Athens, the smartest centre of
all, was admitting rich foreigners among her ephebes. In turn, they helped to keep up the idealization of the city. What, though, was the
social value of all this Homer and arduous listing of Spartan rivers? It has been explained as a 'culture of reinforcement' to keep up Greek
morale abroad and to keep out barbarians. That purpose is not convincing: the same studies flourished in old Greece where nobody
risked being swamped. More relevantly, it marked social divisions between Greeks themselves. Vulgar people could not enter gymnasia.
The parents were usually rich: in later third-century Athens there were scarcely forty new ephebes each year. This exclusive-ness worked
wonders for the city's international image. In the mid second century a recently found decree from a Macedonian city excluded slaves
and freedmen, their children, those who had not attended wrestling school, anyone who had practised a trade in the agora, anyone who
was drunk or mad. It also banned paederasts. Gymnasia were scenes of the golden years of romances between young men, but they were
for 'amateurs' only.
Extravagant royal culture, therefore, was only the icing on a dry and well-established cake. Financed by their richer citizens, the cities set
men's cultural horizons. Their speakers and antiquarians were not 'irrelevant'. They served on the vital embassies, while historians and
local experts played a fascinating part in local boundary disputes and the many boards of arbitration. History had urgent public uses. At
their own level cities also remained lively centres of shows and recitals, games and drama. They were served by wandering poets and
musicians and the troupes of professional actors who were declared 'inviolable' on their travels through warring Hellenistic kingdoms.
A huge theatre has been unearthed at All Khanoum beside the Oxus river, and it is possible that the forms of Greek drama influenced the
emergent theatrical art of India. The Hellenistic age also saw the flowering of many small societies in which members used to dine and
patronize recitals. Non-citizens in places such as Rhodes or Delos found a focus for their loyalties in these groups, which were often
organized with titles from civic life. By 300 B.C. they were joined by the foundations set up to honour a dead man's memory. Below the
city's public patronage these groups all multiplied the centres of local cultural life.
Across such an area, how far was there a single culture? In the cities there was no common calendar and no common body of law. But
there were broad similarities in civic life and the many sets of athletic games. At court, the kings used the 'common Greek' prose, or
koine, which developed from Attic origins and gradually pushed the older dialects in Greece itself into retreat. A measure of linguistic
unity thus emerged around official, Hellenistic Greek. A common feeling was also aroused by the threat of barbarians, best seen in the
sigh of Hellenic relief which followed the repulse of the Gauls from Greece and Delphi in 279 B.C. Culturally, the kings all respected
Athens' legacy. She had invented the theatre which every good city now imitated. Her fourth-century prose and her past record against
Asian barbarians combined with the prestige of her former philosophers and dramatists. Together they kept up her appeal.
If there was a measure of common culture, how did it differ in the cities from fourth-century culture, except that we happen to know
more about it? The differences were more of degree than of kind, and they are best brought out by some Hellenistic improvements.
Closer contact with eastern spices transformed the industry of female scents and soaps. Make-up is thought to have been improved by
Near Eastern skills, not least in the art of eye-shadow. There had never been such prostitutes as the great Attic mistresses of the
Macedonian generals: the loose women of Alexandria were famous.
The game parks and wild animals of Asia made the old Greek hare-chasing seem as tame as beagling. Indian blood bred newer and
better hounds for spectacular hunting across Asia. The cooking, surely, improved: Alexandrian sauces for fish and gourds passed into
Roman cook-books; the best banquets were spectacular, and although one of the Ptolemies kept pheasants without eating one, he crossed
them with guinea-fowl and ate the result instead. Egypt's cabbage was so bitter that seed was imported from Rhodes to combat it. For
one happy year it worked, but then the old bitterness emerged again. Greeks introduced chick-peas from Byzantium into Egypt, and a
better wheat almost drove out the old, husked grain. An experiment was made with palm-trees in Greece, and estate owners in the Near
East struggled to produce frankincense. We know too little about royal gardening, but there is an ominous hint in a letter from a
Ptolemaic minister to his agent, telling him to plant 300 fir trees in the park on his estate, not just for ship-timber but for the 'tree's
striking appearance': did other Greeks spatter Egypt with conifers? In places they greatly extended the area and yield of cultivable land.
In Egypt's Fayum basin they are thought to have trebled it; the plain behind their city on the Oxus was never better irrigated or more
densely worked. At Olympia we find baths with under-floor heating in the early second century, surely before any Roman influence. The
Hellenistic gymnasia invented the detailed health exercises which passed into the handbooks of the second century A.D. Distinct from
mere sport, they were planned as a '-work-out': jogging was said to be good for sexual diseases.