THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD

The term 'Hellenistic' which originally had a mainly linguistic significance, distinguishing speakers of Greek from others in the empire founded by Alexander the Great, is now taken to refer to the period of some three centuries from Alexander's death in 323 BC. Babylon was to have been the capital of Alexander's vast Hellenized Near Eastern empire, but when he died, aged only 32, his conquests devolved upon his generals, known as the diadochi or successors, who set themselves up as absolute monarchs. Ptolemy took over Egypt and southern Syria, including Judea. The rest of the empire in Asia fell to Seleucus; Macedon was taken by the successors of Antigonus; other Hellenistic kingdoms were smaller. In Greece and the Aegean islands the city-states recovered some of their independence during the third and second centuries BC, but they had lost their power and importance; and Athens was now little more than a centre of culture and learning. The end of the Hellenistic period cannot be as precisely dated as its beginning. In the mid-third century BC the Seleucids were driven out of Iran by Parthian nomads from the steppes, who pressed on to occupy Mesopotamia in 141 BC. During these same years the Roman republic (see p. 190) became the dominant power in the Italian peninsula and eventually in the whole Mediterranean area (see p. 197).

The rulers of the Hellenistic kingdoms were of Greek (strictly Macedonian) descent, and so, too, were most of their administrators. The official language was a form of Greek called koine - the Greek of the New Testament -spoken and written from Sicily to the Hindu Kush, from the shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian to the cataracts of the Nile. Greek culture spread over the same area. What had previously been confined to a few, relatively small independent communities now became the artistic language of half the civilized world. Cities were built or rebuilt on the pattern of the Greek polis, each with its temple, assembly hall, theatre, gymnasium, stoa and agora all conforming to the Greek orders of architecture and adorned with sculptures embodying the Greek ideal of the beautiful human form. The capital cities grew into large and wealthy centres of trade, industry, learning and artistic activity: Alexandria in Egypt, Seleucia on the Tigris, Antioch near the coast of Syria and, later, Pergamum in Asia Minor. And their influence extended to the Greek cities of the western Mediterranean, to Etruria and to Rome.

Small, tightly knit, heroically competitive societies had given way to vast, amorphous, cosmopolitan urban centres, predominantly commercial and manufacturing. Their history has sometimes been described, and often dismissed, as a confused and unhappy epilogue or degenerate sequel to the Classical age. But they made important contributions to civilization. The two most widely influential philosophies of life in the ancient world were Hellenistic: Stoicism, which held virtue to be its own reward, and Epicureanism, with its belief in virtue as the prerequisite of happiness. Both were philosophies of withdrawal, reflecting a shift in emphasis from problems of human relations - man is by nature a 'political animal' in Aristotle's famous definition, i.e. a citizen of a free polis - to those of the inner life of the individual.

Aristotle (384-322 BC), who had been tutor to Alexander, began his long domination of scientific thought and method, and nearly all the major achievements of the ancient world in science and mathematics date from the Hellenistic period: Euclid's Elements, the discovery of specific gravity and the invention of the water-pump by Archimedes, the calculation of the diameter of the earth to within a few hundred miles of the correct figure by Eratosthenes.

In the visual arts the influence of the Hellenistic world was to be equally pervasive. The Greek sculptures admired and collected by the Romans included such Hellenistic works as the Medici Venus and Apollo Belvedere (5,4; 5). The Medici Venus is the best of 33 surviving copies or versions of a lost original presumed to be of the third or second century BC. It owes a debt to the Aphrodite of Cnidus by Praxiteles (4,38), but the rendering is less idealized - softer and more fleshy - and there is a hint of self-conscious coquetry in the turn of the head and almost alluringly defensive gesture. The arms held in front of the body also emphasize the third dimension and lend the whole figure a gyrating movement. The Apollo Belvedere is a second-century AD Roman copy or version of a lost original usually presumed to have been a late fourth-century BC bronze, although it is at least equally likely that the statue was based on more than one original and is a pastiche. With its almost dancing posture, effeminate physique, elaborately dressed hair and heartlessly beautiful face, the Apollo Belvedere makes a very striking contrast with surviving male statues from fifth-century BC Athens. Although neither the Medici Venus nor the Apollo Belvedere was as famous in its own time as it became when rediscovered 1,000 or more years later (in the late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century respectively), they illustrate very well certain formal tendencies of the period. Sensuous delight in the handling of marble, equally characteristic of Hellenistic sculpture, can be seen in the Venus de Milo (5,6). The material here might almost seem to have been caressed rather than chiselled and rasped into the texture of soft, warm flesh, complementing an air of rather precious worldly elegance and sophisticated self-awareness.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 664