46. THE GRAECO-ORIENTAL WORLD
THE NEW LUXURY
The Hellenistic Age was characterized by a general increase in wealth. The old Greeks and Macedonians, as a rule, had been content to live plainly. Now kings, nobles, and rich men began to build splendid palaces and to fill them with the products of ancient art—marbles from Asia Minor, vases from Athens, Italian bronzes, and Babylonian tapestries. They kept up great households with endless lords in waiting, ladies of honor, pages, guards, and servants. Soft couches and clothes of delicate fabric replaced the simple coverlets and coarse cloaks of an earlier time. They possessed rich carpets and hangings, splendid armor and jewelry, and gold and silver vessels for the table. The Greeks thus began to imitate the luxurious lives of Persian nobles.
THE SEA ROUTE TO INDIA
These new luxuries flowed in from all parts of the ancient world. Many came from the Far East in consequence of the rediscovery of the sea route to India, by Alexander's admiral, Nearchus. [21] The voyage of Nearchus was one of the most important results of Alexander's eastern conquests. It established the fact, which had long been forgotten, that one could reach India by a water route much shorter and safer than the caravan roads through central Asia. [22] Somewhat later a Greek sailor, named Harpalus, found that by using the monsoons, the periodic winds which blow over the Indian Ocean, he could sail direct from Arabia to India without laboriously following the coast. The Greeks, in consequence, gave his name to the monsoons.
ORIENTAL INFLUENCE ON THE GREEKS
All this sudden increase of wealth, all the thousand new enjoyments with which life was now adorned and enriched, did not work wholly for good. With luxury there went, as always, laxity in morals. Contact with the vice and effeminacy of the East tended to lessen the manly vigor of the Greeks, both in Asia and in Europe. Hellas became corrupt, and she in turn corrupted Rome.
GREEK INFLUENCE ON THE ORIENT
Yet the most interesting, as well as the most important, feature of the age is the diffusion of Hellenic culture—the "Hellenizing" of the Orient. It was, indeed, a changed world in which men were now living. Greek cities, founded by Alexander and his successors, stretched from the Nile to the Indus, dotted the shores of the Black Sea and Caspian, and arose amid the wilds of central Asia. The Greek language, once the tongue of a petty people, grew to be a universal language of culture, spoken even by "barbarian" lips. And the art, the science, the literature, the principles of politics and philosophy, developed in isolation by the Greek mind, henceforth became the heritage of many nations.
THE NEW COSMOPOLITANISM
Thus, in the period after Alexander the long struggle between East and West reached a peaceful conclusion. The distinction between Greek and Barbarian gradually faded away, and the ancient world became ever more unified in sympathies and aspirations. It was this mingled civilization of Orient and Occident with which the Romans were now to come in contact, as they pushed their conquering arms beyond Italy into the eastern Mediterranean.
[Illustration: ORIENTAL, GREEK, AND ROMAN COINS
1. Lydian coin of about 700 B.C.; the material is electrum, a
compound of gold and silver.
2. Gold daric; a Persian coin worth about $5.
3. Hebrew silver shekel.
4. Athenian silver tetradrachm showing Athena, her olive
branch and sacred owl.
5. Roman bronze as (2 cents) of about 217 B.C.; the
symbols are the head of Janus and the prow of a ship.
6. Bronze sestertius (5 cents) struck in Nero's reign; the
emperor, who carries a spear, is followed by a second horseman
bearing a banner.
7. Silver denarius (20 cents) of about 99 B.C.; it shows a
bust of Roma and three citizens voting.
8. Gold solidus ($5) of Honorius about 400 A.D.; the emperor
wears a diadem and carries a scepter.]