Such slight notices in Western literature do not give us any penetrating view into the operation of Hellenism among the Iranians. As an expression of the Iranian mind we have the Avesta and the Pehlevi theological literature. Unfortunately in a question of this kind the dating of our documents is the first matter of importance, and it seems that we can only assign dates to the different parts of the Avesta by processes of fine-drawn conjecture. And even if we could date the Avesta securely, we could only prove borrowing by more or less close coincidences of idea, a tempting but uncertain method of inquiry. Taking an opinion based on such data for what it is worth, we may note that Darmesteter believed in the influence of the later Greek philosophy (Philonian and Neo-platonic) as one of those which shaped the Avesta as we have it (Sacred Books of the East, iv. 54 f.), but we must also note that such an influence is emphatically denied by Dr L. Mills (Zarathushtra and the Greeks, Leipzig, 1906). Outside literature, we have to look to the artistic remains offered by the region to determine Hellenic influence. But here, too, the preliminary classification of the documents is beset with doubt. In the case of small objects like gems the place of manufacture may be far from the place of discovery. The architectural remains are solidly in situ, but we may have such vast disagreement as to date as that between Dieulafoy and M. de Morgan with respect to domed buildings of Susa, a disagreement of at least five centuries. It is enough then here to observe that Iran and Babylonia do, as a matter of fact, continually yield the explorer objects of workmanship either Greek or influenced by Greek models, belonging to the age after Alexander, and that we may hence infer at any rate such an influence of Hellenism upon the tastes of the richer classes as would create a demand for these things.
For gems see “Gobineau” in the Rev. archéol., vols. xxvii., xxviii. (1874); Ménant, Recherches sur la glyptique orientale, ii. 189 f.; E. Babelon, Catalogue des camées de la Bibl. Nat. (1897), p. 56; A. Furtwängler, Die antiken Gemmen, pp. 165, 369 ff.; Figurines: Heuzey, Fig. ant. du Louvre (1883) p. 3; J. P. Peters, Nippur, ii. 128; Military standard: Heuzey, Comptes rendus de l’Acad. d. Inscr. (1895) p. 16; Rev. d’Assyr. v. (1903), p. 103 f. Alabaster vase: Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia, p. 445. In the case of the architectural remains, the Greek tradition is obvious at Hatra (Jacquerel, Rev. archéol., 1897 [ii.], 343 f.), and in the relics of the temple at Kingavar (Dieulafoy, L’Art antique de la Perse, v. p. 10 f.).
If any vestige of Hellenism still survived under the Sassanian kings, our records do not show it. The spirit of the Sassanian monarchy was more jealously national than that of the Arsacid, and alien grafts could hardly have flourished Sassanian empire. under it. Of course, if Darmesteter was right in seeing a Greek element in Zoroastrianism, Greek influence must still have operated under the new dynasty, which recognized the national religion. But, as we saw, the Greek influence has been authoritatively denied. At the court a limited recognition might be given, as fashion veered, to the values prevalent in the Hellenistic world. The story of Hormisdas in Zosimus is suggestive in this connexion (Zosim. Hist. nov. ii. 27). Chosroes I. interested himself in Greek philosophy and received its professors from the West with open arms (Agath. ii. 28 f.); according to one account, he had his palace at Ctesiphon built by Greeks (Theophylact. Simocat. v. 6).
But the account of Chosroes’ mode of action makes it plain that the Hellenism once planted in Iran had withered away; representatives of Greek learning and skill have all to be imported from across the frontier.
For Hellenism in Babylonia and Iran, see the useful article of M. Victor Chapot in the Bull. et mémoires de la Soc. Nat. des Antiquaires de France for 1902 (published 1904), p. 206 f., which gives a conspectus of the relevant literature.
(iii.) Asia Minor.—Very different were the fortunes of Hellenism in those lands which became annexed to the Roman Empire.
In Asia Minor, we have seen how, even before Alexander, Hellenism had begun to affect the native races and Persian nobility. During Alexander’s own reign, we cannot trace any progress in the Hellenization of the interior, Greek cities of the Diadochi. nor can we prove here his activity as a builder of cities. But under the dynasties of his successors a great work of city-building and colonization went on. Antigonus fixed his capital at the old Phrygian town of Celaenae, and the famous cities of Nicaea and Alexandria Troas owed to him their first foundation, each as an Antigonia; they were refounded and renamed by Lysimachus (301-281 B.C.). Then we have the great system of Seleucid foundations. Sardis, the Seleucid capital in Asia Minor, had become a Greek city before the end of the 3rd century B.C. The main high road between the Aegean coast and the East was held by a series of new cities. Going west from the Cilician Gates we have Laodicea Catacecaumene, Apamea, the Phrygian capital which absorbed Celaenae, Laodicea on the Lycus, Antioch-on-Meander, Antioch-Nysa, Antioch-Tralles. To the south of this high road we have among the Seleucid foundations Antioch in Pisidia (colonized with Magnesians from the Meander) and Stratonicea in Caria; in the region to the north of it the most famous Seleucid colony was Thyatira. Along the southern coast, where the houses of Seleucus and Ptolemy strove for predominance, we find the names of Berenice, Arsinoë and Ptolemais confronting those of Antioch and Seleucia. With the rise of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamum, a system of Pergamene foundation begins to oppose the Seleucid in the interior, bearing such names as Attalia, Philetaeria, Eumenia, Apollonis. Of these, one may note for their later celebrity Philadelphia in Lydia and Attalia on the Pamphylian coast. The native Bithynian dynasty became Hellenized in the course of the 3rd century, and in the matter of city building Prusias (the old Cius), Apamea (the old Myrlea), probably Prusa, and above all Nicomedia attested its activity. While new Greek cities were rising in the interior, the older Hellenism of the western coast grew in material splendour under the munificence of Hellenistic kings. Its centres of gravity to some extent shifted. There was a tendency towards concentration in large cities of the new type, which caused many of the lesser towns, like Lebedus, Myus or Colophon, to sink to insignificance, while Ephesus grew in greatness and wealth, and Smyrna rose again after an extinction of four centuries. The great importance of Rhodes belongs to the days after Alexander, when it received the riches of the East from the trade-routes which debouched into the Mediterranean at Alexandria and Antioch. In Aeolis, of course, the centre of gravity moved to the Attalid capital, Pergamum. It was the irruption of the Celts, beginning in 278-277 B.C., which checked the Hellenization of the interior. Not only did the Galatian tribes take large tracts towards the north of the plateau in possession, but they were an element of perpetual unrest, which hampered and distracted the Hellenistic monarchies. The wars, therefore, in which the Pergamene kings in the latter part of the 3rd century stemmed their aggressions, had the glory of a Hellenic crusade.
The minor dynasties of non-Greek origin, the native Bithynian and the two Persian dynasties in Pontus and Cappadocia, were Hellenized before the Romans drove the Seleucid out of the country. In Bithynia the upper classes seem to Native dynasties. have followed the fashion of the court (Beloch iii. [i.], 278); the dynasty of Pontus was phil-hellenic by ancestral tradition; the dynasty of Cappadocia, the most conservative, dated its conversion to Hellenism from the time when a Seleucid princess came to reign there early in the 2nd century B.C. as the wife of Ariarathes V. (Diod. xxxi. 19. 8). But Hellenism in Cappadocia was for centuries to come still confined to the castles of the king and the barons, and the few towns.
When Rome began to interfere in Asia Minor, its first action was to break the power of the Gauls (189 B.C.). In 133 Rome entered formally upon the heritage of the Attalid kingdom and became the dominant power in the Hellenism under Roman sway. Anatolian peninsula for 1200 years. Under Rome the process of Hellenization, which the divisions and weakness of the Macedonian kingdoms had checked, went forward. The coast regions of the west and south the Romans found already Hellenized. In Lydia “not a trace” of the old language was left in Strabo’s time (Strabo xiv. 631); in Lycia, the old language became obsolete in the early days of Macedonian rule (see Kalinka, Tituli Asiae minoris, i. 8). But inland, in Phrygia, Hellenism had as yet made little headway outside the Greek cities. Even the Attalids had not effected much here (Körte, Athen. Mitth. xxiii., 1898, p. 152), and under the Romans, the penetration of the interior by Hellenism was slow. It was not till the reign of Hadrian that city life on the Phrygian plateau became rich and vigorous, with its material circumstances of temples, theatres and baths. Among the villages of the north and east of Phrygia, Hellenism “was only beginning to make itself felt in the middle of the 3rd century A.D.” (Ramsay in Kuhn’s Zeitsch. f. vergleich. Sprachforschung, xxviii., 1885, p. 382). Gravestones in this region as late as the 4th century curse violators in the old Phrygian speech. The lower classes at Lystra in St Paul’s time spoke Lycaonian (Acts xiv. 11). In that part of Phrygia, which by the settlement of the Celtic invaders became Galatia, the larger towns seem to have become Hellenized by the time of the Christian era, whilst the Celtic speech maintained itself in the country villages till the 4th century A.D. (Jerome, Preface to Comment, in Epist. ad Gal. book ii.; see J. G. C. Anderson, Journ. of Hell. Stud. xix., 1899, p. 312 f.). Cappadocia at the beginning of the Christian era was still comparatively townless (Strabo xii. 537), a country of large estates with a servile peasantry. Even in the 4th century its Hellenization was still far from complete; but Christianity had assimilated so much of the older Hellenic culture that the Church was now a main propagator of Hellenism in the backward regions. The native languages of Asia Minor all ultimately gave way to Greek (unless Phrygian lingered on in parts till the Turkish invasions; see Mordtmann, Sitzungsb. d. bayer. Ak. 1862, i. p. 30; K. Holl in Hermes, xliii., 1908, p. 240 f.). The effective Hellenization of Armenia did not take place till the 5th century, when the school of Mesrop and Sahak gave Armenia a literature translated from, or imitating, Greek books (Gelzer in I. v. Müller’s Handbuch, vol. ix. Abt. i. p. 916.)
(iv.) Syria.—In Syria, which with Cilicia and Mesopotamia, formed the central part of the Seleucid empire, the new colonies were especially numerous. Alexander himself had perhaps made a beginning with Alexandria-by-Issus Seleucid empire. (mod. Alexandretta), Samaria, Pella (the later Apamea), Carrhae, &c. Antigonus founded Antigonia, which was absorbed a few years later by Antioch, and after the fall of Antigonus in 301, the work of planting Syria with Greek cities was pursued effectively north of the Lebanon by the house of Seleucus, and, less energetically, south of the Lebanon by the house of Ptolemy. In the north of Syria four cities stood pre-eminent above the rest, (1) Antioch on the Orontes, the Seleucid capital; (2) Seleucia-in-Pieria near the mouth of the Orontes, which guarded the approach to Antioch from the sea; (3) Apamea (mod. Famia), on the middle Orontes, the military headquarters of the kingdom; and (4) Laodicea “on sea” (ad mare), which had a commercial importance in connexion with the export of Syrian wine. Of the Ptolemaic foundations in Coele-Syria only one attained an importance comparable with that of the larger Seleucid foundations, Ptolemais on the coast, which was the old Semitic Acco transformed (mod. Acre). The group of Greek cities east of the Jordan also fell within the Ptolemaic realm during the 3rd century B.C., though their greatness belonged to a somewhat later day. The whole of Syria was brought under the Seleucid sceptre, together with Cilicia, by Antiochus III. the Great (223-187 B.C.). Under his son, Antiochus IV. Epiphanes (175-164), a fresh impulse was given to Syrian Hellenism. In 1 Maccabees he is represented as writing an order to all his subjects to forsake the ways of their fathers and conform to a single prescribed pattern, and though in this form the account can hardly be exact, it does no doubt represent the spirit of his action. Other facts there are which point the same way. We now find a sudden issue of bronze money by a large number of the cities of the kingdom in their own name—an indication of liberties extended or confirmed. Many of them exchange their existing name for that of Antioch (Adana, Tarsus, Gadara, Ptolemais), Seleucia (Mopsuestia, Gadara) or Epiphanea (Oeniandus, Hamath). At Antioch itself great public works were carried out, such as were involved in the addition of a new quarter to the city, including, we may suppose, the civic council chamber which is afterwards spoken of as being here. With the ever-growing weakness of the Seleucid dynasty, the independence and activity of the cities increased, although, if, on the one hand, they were less suppressed by a strong central government, they were less protected against military adventurers and barbarian chieftains. Accordingly, when Pompey annexed Syria in 64 B.C. as a Roman province, Roman period. he found it a chaos of city-states and petty principalities. The Nabataeans and the Jews above all had encroached upon the Hellenistic domain; in the south the Jewish raids had spread desolation and left many cities practically in ruins. Under Roman protection, the cities were soon rebuilt and Hellenism secured from the barbarian peril. Greek city life, with its political forms, its complement of festivities, amusements and intellectual exercise, went on more largely than before. The great majority of the Hellenistic remains in Syria belong to the Roman period. Such local dynasties as were suffered by the Romans to exist had, of course, a Hellenistic complexion. Especially was this the case with that of the Herods. Not only were such marks of Hellenism as a theatre introduced by Herod the Great (37-34 B.C.) at Jerusalem, but in the work of city-building this dynasty showed itself active. Sebaste (the old Samaria), Caesarea, Antipatris were built by Herod the Great, Tiberias by Herod Antipas (4 B.C.-A.D. 39). The reclaiming of the wild district of Hauran for civilization and Hellenistic life was due in the first instance to the house of Herod (Schürer, Gesch. d. jüd. Volk. 3rd ed., ii. p. 12 f.). In Syria, too, Hellenism under the Romans advanced upon new ground. Palmyra, of which we hear nothing before Roman times, is a notable instance.