(vi.) In Egypt the Ptolemies were hindered by special considerations from building Greek cities after the manner of the other Macedonian houses. One Greek city they found existing, Naucratis; Alexander had called Alexandria into being; the first Ptolemy added Ptolemais as Ptolemaic kingdom. a Greek centre for Upper Egypt. They seem to have suffered no other community in the Nile Valley with the independent life of a Greek city, for the Greek and Macedonian soldier-colonies settled in the Fayum or elsewhere had no political self-existence. And even at Alexandria Hellenism was not allowed full development. Ptolemais, indeed, enjoyed all the ordinary forms of self-government, but Alexandria was governed despotically by royal officials. In its population, too, Alexandria was only semi-Hellenic; for besides the proportion of Egyptian natives in its lower strata, its commercial greatness drew in elements from every quarter; the Jews, for instance, formed a majority of the population in two out of the five divisions of the city. At the same time the prevalent tone of the populace was, no doubt, Hellenistic, as is shown by the fact that the Jews who settled there acquired Greek in place of Aramaic as their mother-tongue, and in its upper circles Alexandrian society under the Ptolemies was not only Hellenistic, but notable among the Hellenes for its literary and artistic brilliance. The state university, the “Museum,” was in close connexion with the court, and gave to Alexandria the same pre-eminence in natural science and literary scholarship which Athens had in moral philosophy.
Probably in no other country, except Judaea, did Hellenism encounter as stubborn a national antagonism as in Egypt. The common description of “the Oriental” as indurated in his antagonism to the alien conqueror here perhaps has some truth in it. The assault made upon the Macedonian devotee in the temple of Serapis at Memphis “because he was a Greek” is significant (Papyr. Brit. Mus. i. No. 44; cf. Grenfell, Amherst Papyr. p. 48). And yet even here one must observe qualifications The papyri show us habitual marriage of Greeks and native women and a frequent adoption by natives of Greek names. It has even been thought that some developments of the Egyptian religion are due to Hellenistic influence, such as the deification of Imhotp (Bissing, Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 1902, col. 2330) or the practice of forming voluntary religious associations (Otto, Priester und Tempel, i. 125). The worship of Serapis was patronized by the court with the very object of affording a mixed cultus in which Greek and native might unite. In Egypt, too, the triumph of Christianity brought into being a native Christian literature, and if this was in one way the assertion of the native against Hellenistic predominance, one must remember that Coptic literature, like Syriac, necessarily incorporated those Greek elements which had become an essential part of Christian theology.
From the Ptolemaic kingdom Hellenism early travelled up the Nile into Ethiopia. Ergamenes, the king of the Ethiopians in the time of the second Ptolemy, “who had received a Greek education and cultivated philosophy,” broke with the native priesthood (Diod. iii. 6), and from that time Ethiopia. traces of Greek influence continue to be found in the monuments of the Upper Nile. When Ethiopia became a Christian country in the 4th century, its connexion with the Hellenistic world became closer.
(vii.) Hellenism in the West.—Whilst in the East Hellenism
had been sustained by the political supremacy of the Greeks, in
Italy Graecia capta had only the inherent power and
charm of her culture wherewith to win her way. At
Carthage in the 3rd century the educated classes
Greek culture in
the Roman world.
seem generally to have been familiar with Greek
culture (Bernhardy, Grundriss d. griech. Lit. § 77).
The philosopher Clitomachus, who presided over the Academy
at Athens in the 2nd century, was a Carthaginian. Even before
Alexander, as we saw, Hellenism had affected the peoples of
Italy, but it was not till the Greeks of south Italy and Sicily
were brought under the supremacy of Rome in the 3rd century
B.C. that the stream of Greek influence entered Rome in any
volume. It was now that the Greek freedman, L. Livius
Andronicus, laid the foundation of a new Latin literature by
his translation of the Odyssey, and that the Greek dramas were
recast in a Latin mould. The first Romans who set about
writing history wrote in Greek. At the end of the 3rd century
there was a circle of enthusiastic phil-hellenes among the Roman
aristocracy, led by Titus Quinctius Flamininus, who in Rome’s
name proclaimed the autonomy of the Greeks at the Isthmian
games of 196. In the middle of the 2nd century Roman Hellenism
centred in the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, which included
men like Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius. The visit
of the three great philosophers, Diogenes the “Babylonian,”
Critolaus and Carneades in 155, was an epoch-making event in
the history of Hellenism at Rome. Opposition there could not
fail to be, and in 161 a senatus consultum ordered all Greek
philosophers and rhetoricians to leave the city. The effect of
such measures was, of course, transient. Even though the
opposition found so doughty a champion as the elder Cato
(censor in 184), it was ultimately of no avail. The Italians did
not indeed surrender themselves passively to the Greek tradition.
In different departments of culture the degree of their independence
was different. The system of government framed by
Rome was an original creation. Even in the spheres of art and
literature, the Italians, while so largely guided by Greek canons,
had something of their own to contribute. The mere fact that
they produced a literature in Latin argues a power of creation
as well as receptivity. The great Latin poets were imitators
indeed, but mere imitators they were no more than Petrarch or
Milton. On the other hand, even where the creative originality
of Rome was most pronounced, as in the sphere of Law, there
were elements of Hellenic origin. It has been often pointed out
how the Stoic philosophy especially helped to shape Roman
jurisprudence (Schmekel, Philos. d. mittl. Stoa, p. 454 f.).
Whilst the upper classes in Italy absorbed Greek influences by their education, by the literary and artistic tradition, the lower strata of the population of Rome became largely hellenized by the actual influx on a vast scale of Greeks and hellenized Asiatics, brought in for the most part as slaves, and coalescing as freedmen with the citizen body. Of the Jewish inscriptions found at Rome some two-thirds are in Greek. So too the early Christian church in Rome, to which St Paul addressed his epistle, was Greek-speaking, and continued to be till far into the 3rd century.
III. Later History.—It remains only to glance at the ultimate destinies of Hellenism in West and East. In the Latin West knowledge of Greek, first-hand acquaintance with the Greek classics, became rarer and rarer as general culture declined, till in the dark ages (after The middle ages. the 5th century) it existed practically nowhere but in Ireland (Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 438). In Latin literature, however, a great mass of Hellenistic tradition in a derived form was maintained in currency, wherever, that is, culture of any kind continued to exist. It was a small number of monkish communities whose care of those narrow channels prevented their ever drying up altogether. Then the stream began to rise again, first with the influx of the learning of the Spanish Moors, then with the new knowledge of Greek brought from Constantinople in the 14th century. With the Renaissance and the new learning, Hellenism came in again in flood, to form a chief part of that great river on which the modern world is being carried forward into a future, of which one can only say that it must be utterly unlike anything that has gone before. In the East it is popularly thought that Hellenism, as an exotic, withered altogether away. This view is superficial. During the dark ages, in the Byzantine East, as well as in the West, Hellenism had become little more than a dried and shrivelled tradition, although the closer study of Byzantine culture in latter years has seemed to discover more vitality than was once supposed. Ultimately the Greek East was absorbed by Islam; Islam. the popular mistake lies in supposing that the Hellenistic tradition thereby came to an end. The Mahommedan conquerors found a considerable part of it taken
