12

GREEK CULTURE IN THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD

Political   Life    and the Polis

Hellenistic Literature

Science,    Technology, Engineering,    and Mathematics

Hellenistic Art

The character of life and culture in the Greek world was profoundly affected by the life and campaigns of
Alexander the Great. During the Archaic and Classical periods Greeks lived in more-or-less autonomous
poleis. Now, during the Hellenistic Period (323 to 30 BC), many of those poleis fell under the rule of
now one, now another of the Macedonian kingdoms that were created by the break-up of Alexander’s
empire and that engaged in almost constant warfare with one another. The rulers of these kingdoms
followed Alexander’s precedent in assuming divine status, and their cult had now to be added to that of
the other gods worshipped by the polis. In most other respects, however, the day-to-day existence of the
average citizen of one of the old Greek poleis was not significantly different from what it had been before
the time of Alexander. But the career of Alexander the Great resulted in the establishment of many new
centers of Greek culture throughout Asia and North Africa. Greek language and Greek culture were now
the characteristic marks of a ruling class, and Hellenistic art and literature reflect this new prestige status
and, at the same time, acknowledge the influence exerted by non-Greek cultures on the forms and methods
of artistic expression. The very fact that Greek culture found that it had to maintain itself in non-Greek
contexts far from the homeland meant that traditional forms of expression were tenaciously adhered to, but
the need to “say something new” within those forms led to a greater openness to the arcane and the exotic.
So, in literature we find epic poems written in imitation of Homeric style and tragedies reminiscent of
those of Euripides, but the subject of the one might be an obscure local myth and the subject of the other
might be a story drawn from the Hebrew Bible. The visual artists of the Hellenistic period exhibit the
same interest in experimentation within traditional forms that we see in Hellenistic literature. Indeed,
Hellenistic art is often “literary,” just as Hellenistic literature is often “pictorial.” Artists of the fourth
century and later are very much under the influence of Athenian tragedy and show a fondness for depicting
extreme emotion in their subjects and arousing in their viewers complex and problematic emotions of the
sort that Euripides exploited in his dramas. The poets and artists of the Hellenistic Period are among the
most original and inventive in all of Greek culture; their sculptures were avidly collected by Roman
patrons and their literary creations were the frequent subjects of imitation by the poets of Rome. Another
area of creativity inspired by the opening up of the Greek world was a fascination with the curiosities of
the natural world, and scientific inquiry and advances in mathematics attained levels of accomplishment
not seen again in the Western world for several centuries.

The career  of  Alexander   the Great   produced    rapid   and momentous   changes in  the Greek   world

and, indeed, in the entire region that stretches from Italy in the west to India in the east. Changes of this
magnitude generally prompt historians to see the changes as marking a new historical period, and it has