The Phoenician Cities:
A Case-Study of Hellenisation
*When Alexander was civilising Asia, Homer was commonly read, and
the children of the Persians, of the Susianians and of the Gedrosians
learned to chant the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. And al-
though Socrates, when tried on a charge of introducing foreign deities,
lost his cause to the informers who infested Athens, yet through Alex-
ander Bactria and the Caucasus learned to revere the gods of the Greeks.
Plato wrote a work on the one ideal constitution, but because of its
forbidding character he could not persuade anyone to adopt it; but
Alexander established more than seventy cities among savage tribes and
sowed all Asia with Grecian magistracies, and thus overcame its un-
civilised and brutish manner of living.These familiar words of Plutarch (Mor. D–E, Loeb trans.) begin to seem
not quite as foolish as they did, in the light of modern discoveries in Aï
Khanum and Kandahar. They may thus serve to raise some larger questions.
Firstly, it is curious how Plutarch concentrates on remote central Asian areas
which were no longer Hellenised in any obvious sense in his own day. Sec-
ondly, he emphasises, as we would expect, the creation of new cities with
Greek constitutions. Here we might well turn to a neglected passage of his
older contemporary, Josephus, concluding his account of the tower of Babel.
*First published inProceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (): –. Earlier
versions were read at the Cambridge Philological Society in April and subsequently
at the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich and at the Istituto di Storia
Antica at Pavia. Since it cannot pretend in any case to be more than a sketch, it has been
left in the same form, with added annotation.