Читать книгу The Hellenistic World - F. Walbank W. - Страница 8

For rather more than a century – from 480 to 360 BC – the city-states of Greece pursued their rivalries and feuds without serious challenge from outside. But from 359 onwards the growing power of Philip II of Macedonia threw a shadow over the Greek peninsula. In 338, at Chaeronea in Boeotia, Philip decisively defeated the armies of Thebes and Athens and through a newly constituted Council at Corinth imposed peace and his own policy on most of the cities. Already Philip had his eyes on Persia, the great continental power beyond the Aegean, whose weakness had been dramatically revealed sixty years earlier, when a body of Greek mercenaries in the pay of an unsuccessful rebel prince and led by the Athenian Xenophon had marched all the way from Mesopotamia to the sea at Trebizond (400/399). Polybius writes later:

It is easy for anyone to see the real causes and origin of the war against Persia. The first was the retreat of the Greeks under Xenophon from the upper satrapies in which, though they traversed the whole of Asia, a hostile country, none of the barbarians ventured to face them (iii, 6, 10).

Encouraged by this and by the campaign of the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor shortly afterwards, Philip planned to invade the ramshackle Persian dominions of Asia Minor in search of money and new lands – though as a pretext he alleged the wrongs done to Greece during the Persian invasions of the early-fifth century. Philip did not live to carry out his plan. In 336 he was assassinated and the projected invasion of Persia was left as part of the inheritance of his son Alexander.

Alexander reigned for only thirteen years, but during that time he completely changed the face of the Greek world. In the great colonizing age from the eighth to the sixth centuries the shores of Spain, the Adriatic lands, southern Italy and Sicily, northern Africa and the Black Sea shores had been settled with Greek maritime colonies. The new expansion was of a different order. Advancing overland with his army – a mere 50, 000 at the outset – Alexander marched through Asia Minor and Palestine to Egypt, from there to Mesopotamia and eastward through Persia and central Asia to where Samarkand, Balkh and Kabul now lie; thence he penetrated the Punjab and after defeating the Indian king Porus brought his forces partly by land and partly by sea back to Babylon, where he died.

The vast land empire which he left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. It was in fact the old Persian empire under Greek and Macedonian management and it formed the theatre within which the events of Greek history were to be enacted during the next 300 years. The Greeks who during the seventy or so years following Alexander’s death flocked southwards and eastwards to join new settlements or enlist in mercenary armies, hoping to make their fortunes, found themselves no longer insulated within the traditions of a city-state but living in any one of a variety of environments alongside native peoples of every race and nationality. The term ‘hellenistic’ – derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to speak Greek’ – is commonly used to describe this new world in which Greek was in fact the lingua franca. It carries a connotation, not so much of a diluted hellenism, but rather of a hellenism extended to non-Greeks, with the clash of cultures which that inevitably implies. There were of course still city-states in Greece and the Aegean – often powerful like Rhodes – and the relations between the cities of Greece proper and Macedonia, though often strained, were not seriously complicated by cultural differences. But within the kingdoms established by Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Asia, whether we look at the armies or at the bureaucracies, Greeks and Macedonians occupied positions of dominance over Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians and the diverse peoples of Anatolia. The relationships thus established were uneasy and far from static. From the outset there were tensions, and as the flow of Greeks dried up the relative position of Greeks and barbarians changed gradually in many ways. The pattern of this development varied from kingdom to kingdom. Greeks influenced barbarians, and barbarians Greeks. It is indeed in this clash and coming together of cultures that one of the main interests of the period lies.

From the late-third century onwards a new power appears in the hellenistic world, the Roman republic. The taking-over of one after another of the hellenistic kingdoms by Rome has already been recounted and discussed in another volume of this series (Michael Crawford, The Roman Republic) and will not be repeated here, though the cumulative effect of the first half-century of the process is discussed below in Chapter 13. The main emphasis in this book will be rather on the hellenistic kingdoms themselves and on their relations with each other and with the Greek cities in Europe and Asia. We shall be concerned with economic and social trends, with the cultural developments in the new centres set up at Alexandria and Pergamum, with the expanding (and contracting) frontiers of this new world, with its scientific achievements and with the religious experience of its peoples.