This Hellenistic state allowed Alexander’s scheme to drop; he would have granted the Persians full rights of citizenship. From henceforth these rights pertain only to the man who has been Hellenised—the legal stamp of such a condition being membership of an Hellenic community. This is clearly manifest in Egypt, where even the Roman emperor bestows Roman citizenship on no Egyptian who has not been adopted into one of the Greek cities of the country. (In this connection we may leave institutions specifically Roman out of account.) For the rest, the king strives to preserve the ideals of the elder age of Greece, the free man and the free state. Personal and economic liberty, legal redress, and liberty of emigration are for the most part secured, not only to the subjects of a single kingdom, but to all Greeks. In like manner the cities enjoy a very considerable liberty of action, in degrees ranging from nominal sovereignty down to the government by royal officials which is presently established in Alexandria. The ancient Greek municipalities of Asia, in particular, enjoyed as subjects much greater privileges than, for example, the cities of Latin countries at the present day. The country, on the contrary, was almost everywhere allotted to some municipal community; that tendency with which we are familiar in the Roman Empire, to convert nations which did not take kindly to town settlements (like the Celts, for instance) from tribes into towns, if only on paper, is equally perceptible in Syria. Egypt remained “the country,” Chora, but likewise remained barbarous and enslaved. One of the rocks on which the civilisation of antiquity made shipwreck was the fact that the farmer was kept in tutelage or even in bondage by the city, and that he lagged behind it in education. Slavery, as an institution, has to be reckoned with only in the western half of the empire; not in Egypt, Palestine, and large districts of Asia. A community which holds property of its own, imposes its own taxes, which has its own laws and law courts, its own constitution and elective magistrates, is free to all intents and purposes; the fact that it pays a fixed tribute to the king, and leaves to his decision or award all questions of peace and war, intercourse with foreign states, or even with communities of its own political status, and is in many respects practically subject to his control, does not materially detract from its liberty. The danger of such a situation lurks in the circumstance that it minimises interest in their own city among the most capable of its citizens. It offers no career for effective political action. Worse still, the citizen ceases to bear arms. The army consists of the royal troops, official rank goes by royal appointment, and the monarchy alone has great resources at its command. To this centre, and to courts and capitals, the stir of life and every kind of talent is drawn. Very few of the free cities, mainly those which still retained their sovereign rights, like Rhodes, remained centres of civilisation. Not one of the new settlements became such, unless it was a royal capital. Doubtless there can be no genuine patriotism when the citizen takes no part in public life either by counsel or act. Doubtless a government which rests entirely upon the capacity of the sovereign can neither he stable, nor in the long run endure. But, on the whole, we must confess that the Hellenes lived at ease under this kind of government. The ancient petty states alone chose rather to bleed to death than to forego the empty name of liberty. We may regard with sympathy the attempts at confederacies made by Crete, the Peloponnesus and Ætolia; but we cannot deny that politically they are of little importance; they are matters of no moment in the history of civilisation.
About the year 330 there were three men who stood forth as the representatives of the great ideals of life—Alexander, Aristotle, and Demosthenes. Demosthenes perishes; the time is gone by for his kind of Greek liberty and greatness; the future is for the heroes of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, men of action who passionately assail the Doric ideal of the sophrosyne, as Alexander did in taking the Achilles of Homer for his model. In many cases they are inspired solely by personal ambition, and the lust of pleasure joins hands with the love of power. The end is contempt for man and the nausea of satiety. Of such are Demetrius, the conqueror of cities, and Pyrrhus. But not a few have learned from Aristotle and Alexander what the duty of a king is. The first sovereigns of the dynasties of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, Antigonus Gonatas and Hiero of Syracuse, devoted a lifetime of toil and pains to the high duty of sovereignty. Cleomenes of Sparta, the socialistic dreamer on the throne, perishes in the attempt to renew the youth of Sparta and the Peloponnesus.
The men of contemplative life vanish from public and often from social life; they make a habit of living celibate lives in small circles and communities; doctrine alone, and that often esoteric, takes its place side by side with research. Those who translate into action what they have learned from the masters generally contribute little to scientific inquiry. Philosophy is compelled to an inevitable step, the several sciences disengage themselves from her. What remains,—metaphysical and logical speculation,—nevertheless maintains its supreme ascendancy in virtue of the fact that from this time forward the active, effective potency of philosophy shines forth, the potency which she exercises as magistra vitæ, as the religion of the heart and the assurance of the intellect in life and conduct. This power extends its sway over ever widening circles even though it cannot reach down to the lower classes; and the gulf between the cultured and the illiterate grows broader and broader. Athens remains the capital city of this philosophy; this is its only title to distinction. Wide as are the differences between the schools, they are agreed in this, that their ideal is the sage, the man apart, who takes his stand not only above the world but outside it—the reverse of the kingly type. The historic continuity of the ancient ideals, Ionian no less than Dorian, is unmistakable.
The various sciences flourish where the necessary means are at their disposal, that is to say, at the courts. This does not make them courtly in character, although Eratosthenes and Aristarchus were tutors of princes; not mathematics alone but all serious learning knows no royal road for kings. The library, the observatory, the scientific collections, and the medical school of Alexandria, which far surpass all others, must be looked upon as directly due to the school of Aristotle; the first two Ptolemies honoured learning, and for that reason gave it nothing but means and liberty. In the second century, their unworthy successors banished the company of scholars, who then found liberty at least in Rhodes. By tracing the course of mathematics and astronomy we can see how the scholars of the few places where they laboured with enthusiasm keep in constant touch with one another by their writings; but splendid as is the progress made by individuals, the number of those who can really follow is very small, and we feel that a general stagnation must set in if this correspondence were to die out and the few scientific institutions perish. Without the study of pure science that of the applied sciences will never make progress; it will soon lose ground. Thus it was, even in the department in which observation and practice most go hand in hand, in medicine. From his geographical, botanical, and zoölogical survey, Alexander had left behind an enormous mass of material which was at first augmented by many additions. Eratosthenes, in his map of the world, could use some of the astronomical definitions of locality which had evidently been made for the purpose. This is the origin of the network of degrees with which the globe is overlaid, and one would have thought that other scholars would have hastened to verify and complete it by further measurements of shadows. Not so. True, Eratosthenes stands at the end of the third century, when the great period of advance is over, and the evil genius of Greece gathers strength to rest satisfied with the great things achieved and, by canonising them, to put a stop to further progress. The criticism of Hipparchus, well grounded as it was in the abstract, contributed something to this end by repudiating the good attained and setting hindrances in the way of a greater attainable good, for the sake of a greatest good that was unattainable. Every department of natural science presents much the same spectacle. What has been gained by the labours of the third century, is here and there carried farther by the few (in many cases, as was inevitable, by quantitative amplification), but in the main the scientific thinking had been done; and by no means all the old ideas were transmitted, even in this petrified form. It was left for the nineteenth century, which in its own strength has advanced to an incomparable height of knowledge, to look back and appreciate at its just value the achievements and intuitions of the earlier age.
In the department of abstract science the accumulation of material,—not only of the whole heritage of literature, but also of all that was preserved in the memory of man,—was taken in hand on a scale amazingly vast. The Ionians had already taken note of the traditions of barbarous nations; the study was prosecuted in the spirit of Alexander, and presently Hellenised barbarians, such as Manetho, Berosus, and Apollonius of Caria, took part in it. Grammar, with philology, lexicography, textual criticism, and minute exegesis, likewise becomes a genuine science, the importance of which, again, the nineteenth century has been the first to realise, when, in the pride of its own strength, it soared beyond the achievements of this early period. Towards a real science of history, however, no step had been taken, even in dealing with Homer, who constituted the centre and culminating point of these studies. Nor did the Greeks attempt to gain a scientific conception of any foreign language, not even of Latin. This one-sided view hampered their historical judgment. Not one of them tried to see from the point of view of another mind, and their philology and their science of history have therefore remained rationalistic.
The students in the sphere of language and literature were principally poets, men whose interest was æsthetic; and the poetry of the time, in so far as it has come down to us, is either actually erudite or has the airs and graces of erudition, in that it employs the art-forms of an earlier period, particularly those of the Ionic school. It displays a vast amount of taste and elegance; it twines about the stately life of the courts and the seats of learning, the quiet peristyles of the town houses and country villas by shore and stream; as rich and ornate as the grotesques of the loggias in the Vatican and the frescoes of the Farnesina, obtrusively magnificent as the allegories of the Doges’ palace and of the Luxembourg. But it no longer brought forth anything that fired the spirit of the whole nation, and spoke to all mankind. Moreover, it disdained to seek new forms, and soon prohibited the search for them. No doubt in the lower and numerically larger classes of society there continued to exist a poetry which satisfied their needs, a poetry which would probably have a powerful charm for us by reason of its popular character; but the fatal evil was that the nation was now altogether incapable of renewing its youth by the upspringing of fresh elements.
Prose was more national in character and more lucid. Our terminology is incommensurable with that of the period, and the works themselves have all fallen victims to the later tendencies of style, but when we see that the historical novel, the love-story, the roman comique, the romance of travel, and so forth, are Hellenic products, we suspect that intellectual activity was no less marked in this sphere than in others.
In the third century the bias towards mysticism seems to have been completely repressed, we find no trace of a popular religious movement that seizes upon the hearts of men and takes their senses captive. The Ionian spirit prevails throughout. The gorgeous ritual of worship, the temple-building and festivals, all bear the stamp of superficiality. Even the disciples of Plato hark back to Socratic criticism: the result being the most important scientific work of the age, though to the uninitiated it looks like pure scepticism. It has its complement, however, in Plato’s own writings and in the practical recognition of his moral idealism. The deficiency is none the less unmistakable. Even with the noblest representatives of active as of intellectual life we breathe a thin rationalistic air. In the second century mysticism begins to come slowly to the surface, frequently associated with the ancient name of Pythagoras, not seldom heralding the irruption of the barbarian element and barbarian religions. And astrology, with its vain superstitions, has already made its appearance, having tortured into its service a hideously shallow pseudo-science.
Even the man in whom the intellectual culture of the Hellenistic period as a whole is once more grandly embodied at its close does not escape the contagion of this false doctrine; I mean Posidonius, who, in the spirit of Aristotle, strove, by voyages of discovery, observations, and calculations of his own, to unite that side of philosophy which touched upon natural science with metaphysics and ethics, primarily and mainly on the basis of the old Stoic school, though strongly influenced by Plato and Aristotle. Apart from these merits, he was a brilliant portrayer of manners and chronicler of contemporary history, a loyal adherent of the Roman oligarchy, even though he preferred to live in Rhodes, the most independent of free cities. By his monotheism, which was a heart-felt religion with him, by the mixture of mysticism and reason, the abundance of his encyclopædic learning and his advocacy of encyclopædic education, he affected the succeeding age more powerfully than any other man; especially among the Romans, for Varro and Cicero, Sallust and Seneca are under his influence. For all our admiration we must confess that he himself is not free from gross superstition, and that scholarship with him is in danger of being attenuated to general culture. We can judge of the change when we remember that he was the pupil of Panætius, the shallow and shrewd-minded friend of Scipio Æmilianus, who drew up for the Romans a handbook of the Ciceronian doctrine of duty, afterwards compiled by Cicero in his Di Officiis, and who athetised the Phædo, because the doctrine of immortality appeared to him unworthy of the admired dialectician.
Posidonius came from Apamea in Syria, and countries in which the bulk of the population was Semitic furnish a large number of contemporary poets and writers of all sorts. But the best witness to the power of Hellenism is supplied by those circles which oppose it, in the front rank the Jews, concerning whom we have the fullest information. Their independence in matters of detail is of far less importance than their community of thought and feeling. In writings like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Wisdom, the influence of Greek thought is unmistakable. Before and during the Maccabæan reaction the subject-matter of the Old Testament was worked up by Greek methods into novels, epics, and dramas. Prophecy and apocalypse linked themselves with the poetic oracles of Greece, and the nationalist movement, the leaders of which soon became Hellenistic princes themselves, goes but a little way towards severing the threads of connection. In the early days of the empire, Philo is no less subject than Cicero to the influence of Posidonius and of Plato. The Pharisees of Jerusalem, and, still more, the populations of mixed districts, could not disown the Hellenistic atmosphere they breathed. Without Alexander, without Hellenism, we cannot imagine the Gospels coming into existence.