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Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography

University of California Press

Hellenistic studies are burgeoning today as perhaps never before. Publishers' series are dedicated specifically to their furtherance on both sides of the Atlantic, and since July 1995 the active reappraisal and radical revaluation of Hellenistic visual art have been complemented and enhanced by what the British Museum claims to be the first permanent Hellenistic gallery anywhere. Consequently, a full-scale review of the "state of the question" in Hellenistic studies today, or rather of the many diverse and highly complex questions at issue, would be not merely inappropriate in a volume such as the present collection of essays but beyond any ordinary mortal's capacity. Fortunately, the Hellenistic entity, period, age or world has not lacked for essays at overall characterization, with plentiful reference to the latest scholarship.1 But what has principally eased my introductory task is a

For many suggestions and corrections I am most grateful above all w my co-editors, and also to Ricardo Martinez Lacy, Seth Schwartz, Dorothy Thompson, and Frank Walbank. The responsibility for the remaining errors of omission and commission is mine alone.

P. Green (ed.), Hellenistic History and Culture (Berkeley, 1993) 5-11 suggests reasons for "the contemporary renaissance in Hellenistic studies" (10), which now even have their own dedicated "small lexicon": H. H. Schmitt and E. Vogt (eds.), Kleines Lexikon des Hellenismus , 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden, 1993). Earlier surveys include J. B. Bury et al., The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge, 1923); P. Jouguet, L'impérialisme macédonien et l'helléisation de l'Orient (Paris, 1937; repr. 1972 with add. bibl. 1937-1971); W.W. Tarn and G. T. Griffith, Hellenistic Givilisation , 3rd ed. (London, 1952); E. Badian, "The Hellenistic World," in H. Lloyd-Jones (ed.), The Greeks (Harmondsworth, 1965) ch. 10; C. Préaux, "Réflexions sur l'entité hellénistique," GhrEg 40 (1965) 129-39; A. H. M. Jones, "The Hellenistic Period," PastPres 27 (1964) 3-22; V. Ehrenberg, "The Hellenistic Age" (1964) repr. in Man, State and Deity: Essays in Ancient History (London, 1974) 64-106; R. Bichler, "Hellenismus": Geschichte und Problematik eines Epochenbegriffs (Darmstadt, 1983); S. Sherwin-White, "The Hellenistic World," History Today (December 1983) 45-48; L. Canfora, Ellenismo (Rome, 1987); H.-J. Gehrke, Geschichte des Hellenismus (Munich, 1990); P. Cabanes, Le monde hellénistique de la mort d'Alexandre à la Paix d'Apamée (Paris, 1995); C. Vial, Les Grecs de la Paix d'Apamée à la bataille d'Actium (Paris, 1995). See also n. 7.

characteristically wide-ranging, fair and incisive account of some "new trends and directions" in Hellenistic studies by Frank Walbank, a scholar (as well as a gentleman) who has towered over this field for more than half a century and has himself written probably the best concise survey of it.2

However precisely it is defined in time and space, the Hellenistic portion of Greek (or Graeco-Macedonian, Graeco-Roman, Graeco-Oriental) history has surely suffered from the outset from its unhappy title.3 In ancient Greek hellênizein meant originally to speak Greek, and subsequently to behave like a Greek in other than linguistic ways too; but Greek-speakers were Hellenes, not Hellenists , and in English at any rate the suffix "-istic" conjures up a notion of pale or failed imitation, Greek-ish, Greek-like, not the real pukka thing. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that two of the most interesting of modern English historical fictions about ancient Greece with Hellenistic settings are countercultural novels of political subversion—Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1933) and William Golding's posthumous (and unfinished) The Double Tongue (1995).

The inventor of the Hellenistic age or world—in the ancient Greek sense of its prôtos heuretês , the man later generations of scholars have come to see as its "onlie begetter"—is Johann-Gustav Droysen, who in 1836 labelled or rather baptised his creation as "Hellenismus," Greek-ism. (English "Hellenism," Greek-ness, would not be a correct translation of Droysen's German.) For him, this was a world-historical epoch of the first significance, not only and not so much in its own right but thanks chiefly to its missionary role of evangelical preparation for the predestined dawn of Christianity. Without the Graeco-Oriental cultural fusion ("Verschmelzung") of "Hellenismus," Droysen preached, the seed of the Christian gospel would have fallen on barren ground. In the happy event, it fell rather into a fertile seedbed of hellenizing Judaism watered by the universal fountain of Rome's global empire. Had Paul not been a hellenized Roman citizen, and had there not been suitably hellenized Jews both in Palestine and in the Jewish diaspora,

F. W. Walbank, "The Hellenistic World: new trends and directions," Scripta Classica Israelica 11 (1991/92) 90-113; Walbank, The Hellenistic World , 2nd ed. (Glasgow, 1992); note also his "Recent work in Hellenistic history," Dialogos 3 (1996) 111-19.

Cf. S. Alcock, "Breaking up the Hellenistic World: survey and society," in I. Morris (ed.), Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies (Cambridge, 1994) 171-90.

Christianity would have been doomed to remain, and probably soon wither and die, as a tiny, parochial Jewish sect. That the new religion spread and flourished as it did, "universally," was made possible, according to the Droysen version, only by the prior and surely divinely planned establishment of "Hellenismus," the Hellenistic world and its receptively fecund culture.4

Droysen's Hellenism, therefore, was without doubt an overwhelmingly good thing. However, in the eyes of most subsequent classical scholarship on the ancient Greeks, suffused as it soon became with an often uncritical adulation of Greek glory, it appeared almost entirely the reverse. The imaginary Greece that came to exercise its "tyranny" over Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was not Droysen's "Hellenismus" but what had come to be called in basically art-historical terms "Classical Greece." This comprised the golden century and a half from the defeats of the invading Persians in Greece (490, 480-79 B.C.E. ) to the defeat of the invaded Persian empire by Greeks under Alexander the Great (d. 323). This was the Greece of Pericles and Demosthenes, Herodotus and Thucydides, the great tragedians and Aristophanes, of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and of the Parthenon at Athens and Pheidias' chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia. By comparison, so it was generally believed, the Hellenistic age could not but be construed and viewed as a decline, if not a catastrophe, of which the conquest of the Greek world by Rome was the perfectly apt symbol and expression.5

Despite and to a certain degree because of Droysen, this negative image has never quite been redressed, let alone expunged. It can, indeed, be questioned whether it is correct to speak of a self-contained Hellenistic age, epoch or period.6 Even if the term is allowed, the Hellenistic entity still tends to be...