Alexander the Great and the Spread of Greek Culture

Yamin Mohammad Munshi

The Hellenistic period began with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 and ended in 30 BCE, when the Romans finally conquered Egypt. After Philip II was assassinated, Alexander led his army into Asia, and as a result, the world changed: It became Hellenistic, meaning “under the influence of Hellenic or Greek culture.” In other words, thanks to Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the whole former Persian empire and territory far beyond it came under the influence of Greek civilization for the first time.

The Persian empire covered at least a million square miles, and estimates of its population are anywhere between 17 and 35 million. Fortunately, these figures were unknown to Alexander, or he might have thought twice before setting out—or not, being Alexander the Great. But he certainly wouldn’t have revealed the size of the task ahead to his army.

And what was the objective? We don’t know. To defeat the Persian king Darius III and leave things at that? No, because Alexander endeavored to reach “the ends of the world and the outer sea,” hence his campaign into India, which almost broke the back of his army. Alexander had an incredible and inexhaustible appetite for the world and exotic, faraway places, and that in part seems to have been what motivated him to conquer the Persian empire.

More than half a century ago, interpretations of Alexander the Great were still largely based on the highly idealistic interpretation of the Scottish ancient historian Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn, more popularly known as W. W. Tarn, who wrote a two‑volume biography of Alexander and an influential chapter in the magisterial Cambridge Ancient History. He presents Alexander as “one of the supreme fertilizing forces of history” who had a vision of the unity of humankind.

The ancient historian Jeanne Reames, who has also written extensively on Alexander, amusingly accused Tarn of turning him into “a proper Scottish gentleman,” just like himself. Tarn was particularly troubled by what he saw as false charges of homoeroticism laid against Alexander in ancient sources, which he characterized as “defamations.”

What we can agree about, unequivocally, is that Alexander was a highly cultivated man who contributed like no one before or after him to the spread of a certain set of values rooted in Hellenic culture throughout the ancient world. Deliberately or unintentionally—consciously or unconsciously—therefore, Alexander did indeed change the world.

However, it’s fanciful to suggest that he made it his mission to introduce Greek culture to those benighted people out East, as Tarn saw them, who had never set eyes on a Greek sculpture and had never heard any Greek spoken. It’s true that Alexander was highly educated—Aristotle was his tutor—but it’s doubtful that he saw himself as an emissary of Hellenic culture. He was a warrior first and foremost, and a rather good one at that. The Hellenization part seems to have taken place almost of its own accord. It’s convention for ancient historians to tell the story of Alexander’s conquests through Greek eyes because the only sources we have for his reign are Greek. But we need to give credit to the people he conquered, who embraced, without any imposition, the culture that he and his Panhellenic army represented. The people Alexander conquered, apart from the Persians, were the inhabitants of modern‑day Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Israel, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait, and India. Alexander didn’t bring the total landmass of all of these countries under his control, but he impacted a fairly large slice of each.

When Alexander died in Babylon at the age of 32, after a reign that had lasted 12 years and eight months, he left an empire stretching from the Adriatic Sea in the west to the Punjab in the east. Much of it was held together very loosely, and parts of it had never come under Macedonian control at all. There were undoubtedly numerous pockets in this vast tract of land that had never heard of his name, as news, even important news, would not have penetrated the most rural districts.

Alexander is often faulted for not taking steps to solidify and unify his conquests. His most important initiative was to establish new cities, or at least settlements, organized on Greek lines in parts of the world that had never known Greek culture before, of which the most important was Alexandria in Egypt.

People talk rather loosely of the “empire” of Alexander the Great, but it wasn’t an empire in the traditionally accepted sense of the word, and it fragmented on his demise, when his “successors” took over and carved up his empire. The term successors describes Alexander’s generals, who struggled among themselves to grab as much of his empire as each could.

Alexander did not appoint an heir, so when he died, a council was held at Babylon supposedly to solve the situation. It was decided to appoint his half brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, who was simple‑minded, and his son Alexander, who was an infant, as coheirs to the empire as Philip III and Alexander IV. They were an unlikely pair, to put it mildly, and from the start, they were mere pawns in the struggle for power. The struggle for possession of Alexander’s erstwhile empire lasted for nearly half a century to 275 BCE, when three stable kingdoms finally took root, each with its own royal family: Macedonia under the Antigonids, southern Turkey and Syria under the Seleucids, and Egypt under the Ptolemies. All three were named for Alexander’s generals: Antigonus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy. As a result, kingship became the system of government under which all Greeks and all peoples subject to the Greeks live in the Hellenistic world. However, kingship at root didn’t mean ruling over a demarcated region or land; rather, it was a distinct honor accorded to an individual who controlled—often in some vague way but by virtue of military achievement— peoples or cities. In other words, kings imposed themselves on their subjects from above, apart from the Ptolemies, who inserted themselves into the political and religious structures of Egypt that already supported kingship. The inception of the Hellenistic world sounded the political death knell of the Greek city‑state. The polis continued to exist, but it was no longer selfgoverning in the way that it had been. In 314, Antigonus issued an edict declaring that the Greeks were to be “free, without garrisons, and selfgoverning,” according to the historian Diodorus Siculus. But that was a lie. The Greek states were never to be free again. They would be ruled first by the Macedonians, then by the Romans, then by the Byzantines, and then by the Ottoman Turks, up until the 19th century. But no one ever told them that they had lost their freedom for good, and they continued to squabble among themselves—at least until the Romans arrived. And though the polis wasn’t what it had been as an independent political entity, it took root from the mid‑3rd century onward in places where it had never existed before.

The spread of Greek culture throughout the eastern Mediterranean was for the most part a peaceful infiltration. It did not obliterate local traditions but peacefully coexisted with them. The one culture it did clash with was Judaism, largely because of the incompatibility of a monotheistic system of belief with a polytheistic system of belief. It was also the case that Hellenism made more inroads into the urbanized centers than it did into rural areas. One of the principal ways in which Hellenization took root was through the spread of the Greek language. The dialect wasn’t Athenian or Ionic or Doric or Aeolic. It was a unified dialect called Koine, which is short for koinê dialektos, meaning “common language.” In other words, it became the lingua franca of the Hellenistic world.

Author is Post Graduate in History from Kashmir University . He can me reached at munshiyamin5@gmail.com