Probably in no other country, except Judaea, did Hellenism encounter as stubborn a national antagonism as in Egypt. The common description of “the Oriental” as indurated in his antagonism to the alien conqueror here perhaps has some truth in it. The assault made upon the Macedonian devotee in the temple of Serapis at Memphis “because he was a Greek” is significant (Papyr. Brit. Mus. i. No. 44; cf. Grenfell, Amherst Papyr. p. 48). And yet even here one must observe qualifications The papyri show us habitual marriage of Greeks and native women and a frequent adoption by natives of Greek names. It has even been thought that some developments of the Egyptian religion are due to Hellenistic influence, such as the deification of Imhotp (Bissing, Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 1902, col. 2330) or the practice of forming voluntary religious associations (Otto, Priester und Tempel, i. 125). The worship of Serapis was patronized by the court with the very object of affording a mixed cultus in which Greek and native might unite. In Egypt, too, the triumph of Christianity brought into being a native Christian literature, and if this was in one way the assertion of the native against Hellenistic predominance, one must remember that Coptic literature, like Syriac, necessarily incorporated those Greek elements which had become an essential part of Christian theology.
From the Ptolemaic kingdom Hellenism early travelled up the Nile into Ethiopia. Ergamenes, the king of the Ethiopians in the time of the second Ptolemy, “who had received a Greek education and cultivated philosophy,” broke Ethiopia. with the native priesthood (Diod. iii. 6), and from that time traces of Greek influence continue to be found in the monuments of the Upper Nile. When Ethiopia became a Christian country in the 4th century, its connexion with the Hellenistic world became closer.
(vii.) Hellenism in the West.—Whilst in the East Hellenism had been sustained by the political supremacy of the Greeks, in Italy Graecia capta had only the inherent power and charm of her culture wherewith to win her way. At Greek culture in the Roman world. Carthage in the 3rd century the educated classes seem generally to have been familiar with Greek culture (Bernhardy, Grundriss d. griech. Lit. § 77). The philosopher Clitomachus, who presided over the Academy at Athens in the 2nd century, was a Carthaginian. Even before Alexander, as we saw, Hellenism had affected the peoples of Italy, but it was not till the Greeks of south Italy and Sicily were brought under the supremacy of Rome in the 3rd century B.C. that the stream of Greek influence entered Rome in any volume. It was now that the Greek freedman, L. Livius Andronicus, laid the foundation of a new Latin literature by his translation of the Odyssey, and that the Greek dramas were recast in a Latin mould. The first Romans who set about writing history wrote in Greek. At the end of the 3rd century there was a circle of enthusiastic phil-hellenes among the Roman aristocracy, led by Titus Quinctius Flamininus, who in Rome’s name proclaimed the autonomy of the Greeks at the Isthmian games of 196. In the middle of the 2nd century Roman Hellenism centred in the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, which included men like Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius. The visit of the three great philosophers, Diogenes the “Babylonian,” Critolaus and Carneades in 155, was an epoch-making event in the history of Hellenism at Rome. Opposition there could not fail to be, and in 161 a senatus consultum ordered all Greek philosophers and rhetoricians to leave the city. The effect of such measures was, of course, transient. Even though the opposition found so doughty a champion as the elder Cato (censor in 184), it was ultimately of no avail. The Italians did not indeed surrender themselves passively to the Greek tradition. In different departments of culture the degree of their independence was different. The system of government framed by Rome was an original creation. Even in the spheres of art and literature, the Italians, while so largely guided by Greek canons, had something of their own to contribute. The mere fact that they produced a literature in Latin argues a power of creation as well as receptivity. The great Latin poets were imitators indeed, but mere imitators they were no more than Petrarch or Milton. On the other hand, even where the creative originality of Rome was most pronounced, as in the sphere of Law, there were elements of Hellenic origin. It has been often pointed out how the Stoic philosophy especially helped to shape Roman jurisprudence (Schmekel, Philos. d. mittl. Stoa, p. 454 f.).
Whilst the upper classes in Italy absorbed Greek influences by their education, by the literary and artistic tradition, the lower strata of the population of Rome became largely hellenized by the actual influx on a vast scale of Greeks and hellenized Asiatics, brought in for the most part as slaves, and coalescing as freedmen with the citizen body. Of the Jewish inscriptions found at Rome some two-thirds are in Greek. So too the early Christian church in Rome, to which St Paul addressed his epistle, was Greek-speaking, and continued to be till far into the 3rd century.
III. Later History.—It remains only to glance at the ultimate destinies of Hellenism in West and East. In the Latin West knowledge of Greek, first-hand acquaintance with the Greek classics, became rarer and rarer as The middle ages. general culture declined, till in the dark ages (after the 5th century) it existed practically nowhere but in Ireland (Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 438). In Latin literature, however, a great mass of Hellenistic tradition in a derived form was maintained in currency, wherever, that is, culture of any kind continued to exist. It was a small number of monkish communities whose care of those narrow channels prevented their ever drying up altogether. Then the stream began to rise again, first with the influx of the learning of the Spanish Moors, then with the new knowledge of Greek brought from Constantinople in the 14th century. With the Renaissance and the new learning, Hellenism came in again in flood, to form a chief part of that great river on which the modern world is being carried forward into a future, of which one can only say that it must be utterly unlike anything that has gone before. In the East it is popularly thought that Hellenism, as an exotic, withered altogether away. This view is superficial. During the dark ages, in the Byzantine East, as well as in the West, Hellenism had become little more than a dried and shrivelled tradition, although the closer study of Byzantine culture in latter years has seemed to discover more vitality than was once supposed. Ultimately the Greek East was absorbed by Islam; Islam. the popular mistake lies in supposing that the Hellenistic tradition thereby came to an end. The Mahommedan conquerors found a considerable part of it taken over, as we saw, by the Syrian Christians, and Greek philosophical and scientific classics were now translated from Syriac into Arabic. These were the starting-points for the Mahommedan schools in these subjects. Accordingly we find that Arabian philosophy (q.v.), mathematics, geography, medicine and philology are all based professedly upon Greek works (Brockelmann, Gesch. d. arabischen Literatur, 1898, vol. i.; R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 1907, pp. 358-361). Aristotle in the East no less than in the West was the “master of them that know”; and Moslem physicians to this day invoke the names of Hippocrates and Galen. The Hellenistic strain in Mahommedan civilization has, it is true, flagged and failed, but only as that civilization as a whole has declined. It was not that the Hellenistic element failed, whilst the native elements in the civilization prospered; the culture of Islam has, as a whole (from whatever causes), sunk ever lower during the centuries that have witnessed the marvellous expansion of Europe.
Authorities.—For the inner history of Hellenism after Alexander, the general historical literature dealing with later Greece and Rome supplies material in various degrees. See works quoted in articles [Greece], History; [Rome], History; [Ptolemies]; [Seleucid Dynasty]; [Bactria], &c.
Different elements (literature, philosophy, art, &c.) are dealt with in works dealing specially with these subjects, among which those of Susemihl, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erwin Rohde and E. Schwartz are of especial importance for the literature; those of Schreiber and Strzygowski for the later Greek art.
Sketches of Hellenistic civilization generally are found in J. P. Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought (1887), The Greek World under Roman Sway (1890); The Silver Age of the Greek World (1906); Julius Kaerst, Gesch. d. hellenist. Zeitalters (Band ii., publ. 1909); and in Beloch’s Griechische Geschichte, vol. iii. (for the century immediately succeeding Alexander). R. von Scala’s “The Greeks after Alexander,” in Helmolt’s History of the World (vol. v.), covers the whole period from Alexander to the end of the Byzantine Empire. P. Wendland’s Hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zu Judentum u. Christentum (1907) is an illuminating monograph, giving a conspectus of the material. For Hellenistic Egypt, Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire des Lagides, vol. iii. (1906).
(E. R. B.)