became the language of literature and culture, and remained so until the Mohammedan
conquest.
Syria (excluding Judea) became completely Hellenized in the cities, in so far as language and
literature were concerned. But the rural populations, which were more conservative, retained
the religions and the languages to which they were accustomed. * In Asia Minor, the Greek
cities of the coast had, for centuries, had an influence on their barbarian neighbours. This was
intensified by the Macedonian conquest. The first conflict of Hellenism with the Jews is related
in the Books of the Maccabees. It is a profoundly interesting story, unlike anything else in the
Macedonian Empire. I shall deal with it at a later stage, when I come to the origin and growth of
Christianity. Elsewhere, Greek influence encountered no such stubborn opposition.
From the point of view of Hellenistic culture, the most brilliant success of the third century
B.C. was the city of Alexandria. Egypt was less exposed to war than the European and Asiatic
parts of the Macedonian domain, and Alexandria was in an extraordinarily favoured position for
commerce. The Ptolemies were patrons of learning, and attracted to their capital many of the
best men of the age. Mathematics became, and remained until the fall of Rome, mainly
Alexandrian. Archimedes, it is true, was a Sicilian, and belonged to the one part of the world
where the Greek City States (until the moment of his death in 212 B.C.) retained their
independence; but he too had studied in Alexandria. Eratosthenes was chief librarian of the
famous library of Alexandria. The mathematicians and men of science connected, more or less
closely, with Alexandria in the third century before Christ were as able as any of the Greeks of
the previous centuries, and did work of equal importance. But they were not, like their
predecessors, men who took all learning for their province, and propounded universal
philosophies; they were specialists in the modern sense. Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes, and
Apollonius, were content to be mathematicians; in philosophy they did not aspire to originality.
Specialization characterized the age in all departments, not only in the world of learning. In the
self-governing Greek cities of the fifth and fourth centuries, a capable man was assumed to be
capable of
* See Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. VII, pp. 194-5.