And after the flower comes the seed and the scattering of the seed.
The blossoming time of the idea which we saw in bud three centuries earlier—Hellenism—was the age during which Hellas consisted of a cluster of self-dependent cities in Greece, with their free colonies in Sicily, Italy, Asia Minor and elsewhere around the Mediterranean basin. Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus were the sculptors of the age when Athens was still the centre of Greek intellectual thought and artistic action. The seedtime of Hellenism—its second phase—is that in which the Hellenic ideal is given to mankind. Magna Græcia is no longer self-centred and self-contained. The Greek takes upon himself the task of showing the barbarian world the value of that clarity of thought and expression which is at once peculiarly Hellenic and peculiarly sculpturesque.
This second phase is the Hellenistic period. It roughly dates from 323 b.c., when Alexander died, until the Roman occupation of Syria in the first century before our era. During this period independent schools of sculpture arose beyond the Ægean Peninsula. These were animated in the main by the Hellenic spirit, but the resulting works show abundant traces of the alien influences among which the seed was planted and grew up.
Previously, countries within reach of Greek influence turned to such a centre as Athens when they required artists of the first rank to design or decorate a temple or to adorn a public building. Moreover, Greek ideals had never penetrated into the vast countries ruled by Persia. But the union of the country between the Adriatic and the Indus into one Hellenic-Oriental empire, and the foundation of Greek cities throughout the length and breadth of the vast territory, changed all this. Workers in marble and bronze of the first rank arose at centres as remote from Greece as Pergamus and Alexandria. In Greece itself, the peculiar conditions which had produced Hellenism passed away. But a measure of the old artistic force remained, and though the Hellenistic sculptures possess definite characteristics of their own, evidence of connection with the original stock can still be traced.
The first task—the purpose of the present chapter—is to realise the circumstances under which the experience of the Hellenic sculptor was given to the non-Greeks.
The prime essential was, of course, an immense widening of the borders of the Greek world. In view of our sketch of fourth-century Greece, it is not surprising that the necessary energy came from a non-Hellenic power. The rude force of a people, who a generation earlier had been ploughmen and shepherds, was naturally enough more potent in the task of carving the greater part of the then civilized world into a vast empire, than the artistic instincts of Greece.
Nor is it wonderful that when the mere physical work of conquest was accomplished, the non-Hellenic Macedonians were found to lack the organising powers required to complete the task. They wanted that experience which only comes after centuries of commercial and political struggle. It was at once found that Macedonia was entirely unequal to the work of administering Alexander’s vast empire. Thousands of Athenian younger sons flocked into Asia in search of careers. Twenty years after Alexander’s death, the language and art of Greece predominated in every country from the Mediterranean to India.
In the more eastern portions of Alexander’s empire, the Greek predominance was short-lived. But in the western countries, a sure source of Hellenic influence was present in the cities founded by the conqueror and the generals who followed him. Alexander’s policy had been to bind the conquered provinces together by a stout chain of cities. In each a garrison was left, and with it a body of merchants to organize the civic life of the new town.
THE EMPIRE OF SELEUCUS
(301 b.c. TO 65 b.c.)
No one centre is entirely typical, but a fair idea of the influences which favoured the spread of Hellenic experience eastwards can be gained from the history of the Empire of Seleucus, and, particularly, from the circumstances under which the city of Antioch, on the Orontes, was founded. Seleucus Nicator was a Macedonian noble, and being only thirty-three on the death of Alexander had his life’s work before him. After two years as commander of the household cavalry he became Satrap in Babylon. It will be remembered that the general political situation was unstable in the extreme. Macedonia and Greece had fallen to the lot of Antipater; Antigonus had taken Phrygia; Ptolemy, Egypt; and Lysimachus, Thrace. A series of encounters ended in the defeat of Antigonus by Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Seleucus at Ipsus in 301 b.c. As the price of his aid, Seleucus claimed firm establishment in a kingdom bounded on the one side by the Taxartes and the other by the Euphrates. But the star of Seleucus continued in the ascendant for many years. The crowning-point in his career of conquest was reached after the defeat of Lysimachus at Corupedion in 281 b.c. Seleucus at this time held practically the entire Empire of Alexander, except Egypt.