The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  After Alexander, the Greek language was the language of power all the way from Cyrene in north Africa to the Oxus and the Punjab in north-west India. It was the main language of culture, and not only in big Alexandria. In what is now Afghanistan, on the banks of the river Oxus, Greek settlers put down roots and developed the big city at Ai Khanum. The first settlers here had probably included veterans whom Alexander dismissed in 329/8 bc. One of the them may have been the very man, Cineas, who was commemorated with a hero-shrine inside the city. It was then inscribed with moral precepts which were attributed to the former Seven Wise Men of Greece. They had been brought all the way from Delphi by one Clearchus, surely the man known as a pupil of Aristotle. The Greek gods received cult from the new settlers in some very distant landscapes, but there was no attempt to impose them on non-Greek subjects. The polytheist Greeks made something, too, of gods which they found in Asia already, identifying them with Heracles, their hero, or giving them a familiar feature: they added Macedonian hats to one of Asia's favourite votive-figures, the potent male rider on his potent horse.1

  Within the former Persian Empire, a wide horizon had already been spanned by Aramaic, the language used by secretaries all the way from Egypt to India. This separate horizon did not close with Alexander's conquests: Aramaic literature continued to have a broad perspective, some of which survives in many Christian Bibles' books of Jewish stories, composed in the new Greek age. Greeks, however, were more keen to understand their vast new world. With Alexander, they measured its roads and then put up 'distance-markers' along them. They sought out its mines and noted their potential; they observed its new flora and fruits: one type of wheat in the East was said to have been so strong that when Macedonians ate it they burst apart.2 Despite these local observations, Alexander and his staff had usually under­estimated Asia's size and, quite often, Alexander had been lost. How far east did India really go? Was the Caspian Sea a landlocked lake? These questions began to be explored in the decades after his death, when the most remarkable journey of all was made westwards, beyond Alexander's conquests. Pytheas, a Greek from Marseilles, travelled north past the Bay of Biscay, explored the coast of Britain and com­mented on a thick 'lung' which confronted him: it was probably a fog-bank in the northern latitudes.5 Pytheas was aware of the latest Greek astronomy, and went very far north, as his calculations prove; he probably went north-east to Norway, rather than north-west to uninhabited Iceland. He wrote up his travels, but their careful observa­tions seemed incredible to many later critics. Pytheas had seen a world which Alexander had never even imagined.

  It would be quite wrong to think that Greeks in the long-established Greek cities were disoriented by these new horizons or by the royal courts and kingdoms which were so much grander than their own citizen-bodies. The decades after Alexander's death are a fertile era in Greek thought and culture which grow directly out of the previous classical age. Comedy returns to view for us in the romantic 'sitcom' tales of family life composed by the Athenian Menander. At Athens, too, philosophy developed three new schools, the last three of impor­tance in ancient history. In one of them, Epicurus discussed profound questions of perception, ethical aims and sensations: his 'School of the Garden' was not at all the pleasure-seeking Epicurean centre of later legend. Zeno, from Cyprus, wrote on the ideal state, on norms of conduct and the nature of knowledge and obligation: his 'School of the Colonnade' (or Stoa) became known as the Stoics. Pyrrho contested the very grounds of knowledge and certainty and founded the Sceptics. For each of these philosophers, freedom was an indi­vidual's freedom, from fear or passion or deception: it was not a freedom to vote as one citizen in a free democracy.

  It was later said that Pyrrho had accompanied Alexander and, after seeing so much, had concluded that nothing could be known at all. In fact, these philosophies were reacting not to Alexander, but to previous philosophers, especially the challenge of Plato. Zeno's ideal state answered Plato's horrible Utopia; Epicurus engaged with the pre-existing scepticism of fourth-century Greek thinkers. The new thinkers were not propounding a new global state or a new emphasis on private withdrawal and ethical relativism in a new multi-cultural world. For, all around them, the Greek civic communities were still vigorous. The new foundations in Asia were not filled with rootless settlers, lost in a new landscape. What we know of them suggests that the citizens sustained their unity through the familiat Greek practices of intermarriage with one another or with the particular compatriots of their own civic subgroup. Family structures held firm, and old and new city-states were not pulled apart by some new 'Hellenistic individualism' or cosmopolitan ethos. Admittedly, they now had to cope with royal edicts and the threat of royal armies or unreliable royal 'friends'. But the citizens did not lose their strong sense of community and local political engagement. They attended their exclu­sive gymnasiums, whether in Macedonia or Syria or Egypt, social centres which were the citizens' privilege. 'Gyms' were no longer only centres of naked exercise. Here, the young were given lectures and cultural events. The gymnasium was a focus of civic life, passing on Greek values and learning. Beyond these training-centres, civic festi­vals and games continued. In the third century bc artistic and athletic festivals multiplied in the Greek and Asian Greek cities (except, curi­ously, in Syria). Again, these occasions brought city-states together for traditional Greek pursuits, celebrating Greek values.

  What Greeks in the city-states lacked was a level of personal luxury comparable to the royal society around the kings. We have a marvel­lous letter written from Macedon, perhaps c. 300 bc, where the Macedonian author Hippolochus says he had just been at a wedding-feast.4 He describes for an Athenian reader the dazzling display of silver and gold, the female musicians ('to me they looked statk naked, but some said they were wearing tunics'), the female fire-eaters and jugglers (also naked), the huge helpings of wild boar and the activities of a grandson of one of Alexander's heavy-drinking courtiers (his nanny's son) who also drank massively and was rewarded with a cup of gold. The twenty guests received astoundingly valuable presents. 'You think yourself happy,' the author tells his friend in Athens, 'listening to the propositions of [Aristotle's pupil] Theophrastus and eating wild thyme and those fine bread rolls. But we have taken away a fortune from a single dinner and are looking for houses, farms or slaves to buy with the proceeds.'

  In the recipient's same Athens, we can draw a similar conttast around a basic pleasure of life: gardening. Between c. 310 and 290 bc the Theophrastus whom this letter mentioned so honourably wrote the two texts which qualify him as the father of botany. Theophrastus had heard reports from Alexander's soldiers; he had read the first historians' books about Alexander's conquests and their strange flora, but he also knew stories about trees in Sicily and south Italy and had even picked up details about the varying habitats of trees in Latium, near Rome.5 He had no idea of the chemical properties of soil or the sexual reproduction of plants, the aspect which is the basis of their modern classification. But he did observe plants very closely, and they were not just dried specimens, or plants reported by friends and previous writers. Theophrastus gave an exact account of the cherry's flowers and fruits which depended on prolonged observation across the seasons. He discriminated between the habits of wild and culti­vated pears. He must have studied these subjects in his own garden, which he later bequeathed in his will, specifying it as his resting place. Theophrastus is the first man to have literally buried himself in the garden. He even cultivated dandelions, correctly observing their seed-heads but finding them 'bitter and unfit for eating'.6

  In Egypt, within twenty-five years of his death, we can enter into a very different world of planting and gardening, organized by a gran­dee, Apollonius, the 'finance minister' of King Ptolemy II. Apollonius was one of a group of the king's beneficiaries who were given personal estates of nearly 7,000 acres each in the Fayyum, a sandy area about 250 miles south of Alexandria. Nearby, Ptolemy II had founded a new town, Philadelphia, with a rectangular plan, a theatre a
nd a civic gymnasium. All around, the Fayyum was vastly cultivated, irrigated and improved by new proprietors during the 260s and 250s. Apol­lonius' estate-manager was another Greek immigrant into Egypt, Zenon, and his surviving papers take us into the domineering and insatiable world of a 'projects-man' who has turned his energies to changing nature. Letters from Apollonius order the planting of thou­sands of vines on his estates, some of which were grafted stock. Donkeys were to cart these plants down to the Fayyum for Zenon's attention, although the local Egyptians were mocking the Greek new­comers' ignorance of their hallowed ways of doing things. Once, the gardeners on the Fayyum estate threatened to run away and abandon them. But Apollonius was unstoppable: from a second estate at the old Egyptian capital of Memphis, many cuttings of olive trees, apricots and other fruits were ordered to be sent to Zenon at the Fayyum property. The Greek presence in Egypt transformed the scale of vine-growing in the country (previously Egyptians drank beer). Good olive trees, a Greek necessity, were also unavailable in Egypt, and so oil-bearing plants were cultivated to supplement the gap, including the oily seeds of the opium poppy: opium poppies enjoyed a short-lived phase of mass production on Apollonius' estate, but not, it seems, as narcotics. To decorate his park, there were to be second-rate wild olives (they would be sent to Zenon by the thousand), laurel bushes and masses of conifers; there were to be roses, too, for scent-making, garlands and ornament. Other 'seven-thousand-acre' Greek owners were doing likewise, and yet slow delivery, artificially irrigated soil and the risks of salt and sand endangered their massive experiment in new-style farming. Within twenty-five years Apollonius' grand estate had reverted to the kings, its ultimate freeholders, and the mass poppy-crops vanished. The experiments in luxurious agriculture became frag­mented and went the way of other grand gardening-schemes in history.

  Among Zenon's own papers, nonetheless, we find evidence of his literary taste, including a fine copy of Euripides' tragedy of the young hunting man, Hippolytus. Zenon himself wrote clear and thoughtful Greek and was always searching for the apt expression; he loved dogs and the irrepressible sport of a gentleman, hunting. One of his favourite dogs was praised in two poems for saving him from a wild boar: his letters refer to gazelle-hunters who came and went in his life. While the Hellenistic kings continued to vaunt their prowess on the hunting-field, out east at Kandahar another expatriate Greek left verses and a monument in praise of a dog of his who had bravely killed a wild prey. Among these new landscapes and their new 'big game', the noble sport of heroes became the beloved recreation of common men in the public eye.7

  Naturally, these Greeks abroad observed the new and unusual peoples around them. Herodotus had anticipated them here, and Alexander's own generals and staff had already been quick to record the oddities they observed in Indian society. There was a constant tension in this sort of writing. Was the distant East a society to be idealized, as Egypt had been idealized by Plato and the rhetorical Isocrates? After Alexander, legendary Greek Utopias continued to be fathered on faraway places, whether in the North, East or on islands in the southern 'Ocean'. Or was the East to be observed, researched and understood? Few if any of those who wrote on the new world learned anything of its languages, but they did go and look, and either they or their informants were able to communicate a little with one another in Greek.

  In Bactria and north-east Iran, many of the new Greek settlers proved to be tenacious even when they found that Alexander's death was not their cue to return home to Greece. Up at Ai Khanum, near the river Oxus, settlers continued to use the Macedonian calendar for more than a hundred and fifty years; in Iran, the old city of Susa was given a new Macedonian name; lines from Euripides, the same few, were copied out as a school-exercise both in Egypt and Armenia. In Egypt, the Ptolemies spoke Macedonian Greek, but not Egyptian, and encouraged Greek school teachers by exempting them from their tax on salt and other Greek speakers by another small tax-break: their government relied on Greek. Yet scholars' old idea of a blinkered Greek attitude to the 'East', close to apartheid, is too extreme. The Ptolemies and Seleucids never forgot their Macedonian origins, but in Egypt it was not possible to rule in the narrow strip of territory south of Alexandria without a certain openness to the long-established local culture. After all, the Egyptians' big temples and priesthoods were still active. In the Seleucid kingdom, from Syria to eastern Iran, there was much more space, and the upper ranks of the court, army and governorships remained overwhelmingly in Greek hands. In Mesopot­amia, however, the Seleucid kings did take on some of the ancient royal titles and profess a respect for some of the local temples: Alex­ander had already done the same. Overall, though, there was no new 'multi-cultural' openness about the Seleucids' style of monarchy. In Iran, Alexander had ended the Persians' complex system of food-rations and court-customs and the Seleucids never tried to bring them back. In Egypt, by contrast, a lively ideal of Egyptian kingship did survive with the local priesthood. It associated the ruling Pharaoh with eternal well-being and the ordered fertility of the land. Arguably, the Ptolemies did address this Egyptian culture which they found to be running in parallel to their own. They themselves were open to one or two Egyptian traditions, and it has been argued, perhaps correctly, that the Ptolemies imitated the ancient practice of the Pharaohs and subsidized doctors, free to all patients, by levying a special 'doctors' tax'. In Greek cities elsewhere, the council might interview and appoint a 'civic doctor', but all of his patients then had to pay him. There was no concern outside Egypt for subsidized 'national health'.

  In Egypt, the central role of Egyptian culture in the world's civiliz­ation was emphasized very early by a most remarkable Greek mind, Hecataeus, an immigrant to Egypt from Abdera, who arrived in the early years of Ptolemy I. While following Herodotus, Hecataeus claimed to have exceeded his great predecessor and to have consulted actual Egyptian records. His descriptions of ancient Pharaonic build­ings are notably precise and his accounts of ancient Egyptian laws and customs are not always fictional. He even praised the ancient Pharaohs for their obedience to law and justice and their moderation of personal luxury. The prejudice in him shows through when he praises them for having kept craftsmen out of political life: Hecataeus' view of old Egypt was not at all the view of a democrat.8

  Hecataeus is also a witness, probably the first in Greek, to a new discovery: the Jews. After Alexander's death, Ptolemy's troops had encountered Jews during their campaigns in Syria, and Hecataeus presents them as an offshoot of Egyptian civilization. They had merely been corrupted, he thought, by their ill-advised lawgiver Moses. Yet his picture is not a hostile or anti-Semitic one. When describing their idealized priestly society, Hecataeus appears to allude to a sentence in the biblical book of Deuteronomy. Within a hundred years, his successors in Alexandria would not be so tolerant: some of their literature marks the beginning of Western anti-Semitism.

  To the east, meanwhile, the great new fascination was India. During their invasion of 327-325 bc, Alexander's officers had seen and noted so much which Greeks had never previously encountered. In their histories, they described Indian dress, Indian cotton, the broad banyan trees and the elephants. At this level, they were capable of exact observation. But when they tried to explain Indian societies or teach­ings, they were hampered by their ignorance of the language and the stereotypes they brought with them. One Indian wise man did follow Alexander's army and is also said to have lectured to them: we may even have evidence of his teaching on the stars and seasons. The officers called him by the name 'Calanos', but it was not his true Indian name. They gave it to him for the word of greeting (kale) which he liked to utter. Some of them thought it was an Indian word, but he is much more likely to have been showing off his one bit of Greek ('kale', for 'very nice'). So, he acquired the name of 'Mr Nicely'.9

  On the slightest evidence, traces were 'discovered' locally of an invasion of India by the gods Dionysus and Heracles. Fanciful Greek minds also saw traces of an idealized Sparta in the customs of some of the Indian
kingdoms. Others, more bluntly, explained things by their own male sexism. Some of the Indians were found to practise suttee (the burning of a man's wives with him on a funeral pyre). The invaders ascribed it to the infidelity and wickedness of Indian wives. Indian men were seen to marry much younger women, and so these women, they presumed, would soon want to poison their ageing husband and go off with a younger lover. Suttee, therefore, was the husband's deterrent: if a husband was poisoned, his wife would be burned to death with him. So the women were kept in check. The explanation is probably the free invention of men with Alexander, without any Indian supporting story.10

  Soon after Alexander's death, yet more of India was visited by an intrepid Greek envoy, Megasthenes. He, too, combined observation with idealizing theory. He did visit the Indian royal city of Palimbothra on the river Ganges, a site which had eluded even Alexander, and he gave a credible account of its appearance, wooden architecture and all. He also distinguished seven orders of Indian society which were sustained by close intermarriage. He was presumably trying to describe the Indian castes. He made them seven (not four, the usual number) because he was influenced by his knowledge of Hetodotus who had supposed there to be seven classes in ancient Egypt. Mega­sthenes also wrote about someone called 'Boudyas', a companion, he believed, of Dionysus when he invaded India, and later a king. He had heard, surely, of Buddha and misunderstood him. He does, however, describe some of the Indians' funerary customs, but not the big Buddhist stupas which were to become so famous. Perhaps we should trust him, and conclude that stupas did not yet exist.

  By the end of the fourth century bc Alexander's conquests in India had been given away to the warrior Chandragupta. Yet the horizon which he had opened did not shut. A literate Greek-speaking popu­lation still existed in the Alexandrias and the Successors' cities which lay in the territories near the Punjab. For their sake, the Indian king Asoka had his royal Buddhist edicts translated into Greek and inscribed in the mid-third century bc in this region. Asoka could also name all the Hellenistic Greek kings as far west as Libya and refer to 'the world, my children'.1' From the 240s onwards, the Successor rulers in Bactria became independent Greek kings, and in due course, they took up Alexander's example and conquered again in north-west India. Under their remarkable king Menander (c. 150-130 bc), they went even further east than Alexander, conquered more Indian terri­tory and reached the river Ganges. Greek sculptures had begun to influence the newly devised Indian representations of Buddha: King Menander himself, a strikingly handsome man, was remembered in Buddhist tradition and may even have become a Buddhist.