Remains Of Hypocaust In The Greek Baths At Olympia. This under floor heating system, dated about 100 B.C. foreshadows the
subsequent developments of thermal architecture in Roman Italy. The flue in the foreground leads into the heated room at the rear, with
its floor supported on brick pillars.
Most of this cultural life was restricted to the very few who could afford it. On the reverse side of Alexandrian elegance lay a battery of
royal taxes and dependent workers and the appalling inhumanity of gold-mines. By the 150s they were manned by political prisoners and
their innocent families. When Alexander founded cities beyond the Oxus he gave a horde of rebellious Asiatics to one of them,
presumably as slaves. The huge benefactions of a rich citizen in a late-third-century city on the Black Sea have been shrewdly related to
profits in the local slave trade. In the ancient economy people lived well only at the glaring expense of others.
To participate in cultural life natives had to Hellenize, and in a fascinating aspect of the period we see them doing just that. The kings
settled colonies of native soldiers who spoke Greek in royal service and thus left signs of their Hellenization at unlikely spots in Asia. At
Marissa, scarcely 30 miles across the Jordan from Jerusalem, the burial ground produced handsome tombs and paintings in a Greek style.
One of them had a frieze of wild animals, matching the African species known in the orbit of the Ptolemaic court. On its wall a Greek
poem was beautifully inscribed, telling how a woman took temporary leave of one of her two lovers. At Marissa the Ptolemies had
settled troops from Sidon: in the poem the woman keeps her lover's coat as a pledge, a theme which has been traced to old Semitic
culture.
Greek culture was not always imposed: it could exert its own fascination. Among the Jews we know of voluntary Hellenizers who
wished to go over to Greek -ways and religion. They were only stopped after a bitter war, and Jewish culture emerged into the
Maccabean age (175-63 B.C.), essentially resistant to the hard core of Hellenism. The Romans -were far more flexible, and the
Parthians, too, picked up the fashion: at their early capital instructions have been found for making a Greek actor's mask. Greek culture
was so lively and such fun. It had theatres and athletics, some fascinating books, and a refined style of dining, the symposium. In
response to it, a mid-second-century Jew turned the story of the Exodus into a Greek tragedy. By comparison it must have been rather
dull to be a Jew in the evenings before the Greeks came. In their trading and art, their warfare and intellectuality, their literature and
culture, the Greeks towered over their Asian subjects. In reaction, only Jews wrote anything literary, but it was minor stuff, largely
taking refuge in divine revelation and sacred 'wisdom'. It is surely only a second-century-BC legend that Ptolemy II patronized the
literal, clumsy Greek translation of Jewish Scripture, the Septuagint. Although some believe this story, it was probably attached to the
translation later to give it prestige.