The Hellenistic World. F. Walbank W.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ arrival, Greek or more likely barbarian. Ai Khanum too will certainly have contained a substantial proportion of non-Greeks, and probably their numbers increased with the passing of time. But it seems fairly clear, given the attitudes which led to the setting-up of the Delphic precepts by Clearchus, that in the early-third century at any rate native Bactrians will not have been admitted to the gymnasium and that, faced with a large non-Greek group around them, the usual reaction of Greeks and Macedonians was to close ranks and emphasize the Greek institutions of government, religion and education, in short their Greekness.

      III

      Greekness expressed itself primarily through the gymnasium, but there were also other institutions which catered for the private and social life of the citizens of hellenistic cities, both new and old. These were especially important in the new cities with their mixed populations and absence of traditions but they were also an integral part of life in the older cities. These associations are known as eranoi, thiasoi, and also by special names, such as Poseidoniastai, linking them with some particular deity worshipped as the patron of the association and the strong feeling of devotion to such bodies by their members comes out clearly from the inscriptional evidence. Here is an example from second-century Rhodes:

      In the priesthood of Theophanes, the chief eranistes being Menecrates son of Cibyratas, on the 26th day of Hyacinthius, the following eranistai promised contributions for the rebuilding of the wall and the monuments which fell down in the earthquake: Menecrates son of Cibyratas [undertook] to rebuild the wall and monuments at his own expense. The money coming from the [other] sums promised will be at the society’s disposal. . . [Dion]jydus 10 . . . (here the inscription breaks off) (Syll., 1116).

      The ‘walls’ are those of the clubhouse, the ‘monuments’ the graves of past members, for such guilds frequently combined the functions of a friendly society, dining club and burial club. In a city like Rhodes they were an important element in private life and in the new centres of the far east they were a means of building new loyalties in what was at first a rather drab and alien world. What is more, they were far less exclusive and purely ‘hellenic’ than the gymnasia. Though their structure and procedures often seem to imitate those of the city, they were catholic in their membership, and frequently included both Greeks and barbarians, free men and slaves, men and women. They gave opportunities for mixing which were less easy within the framework of the city institutions.

      In public life the Greeks and Macedonians formed the ruling class. They were a closed circle to which natives gained access only gradually and in very small numbers – and then usually only by the difficult method of turning themselves culturally into Greeks. The creation of this ruling class was the direct outcome of the decisions taken by the armies and generals of Alexander, who after his death decisively rejected his policy of racial fusion and very soon expelled all Medes and Persians from positions of authority. The setting-up of the monarchies did not alter this attitude. It has been calculated that even in the Seleucid kingdom, which faced the greatest problems of cultural conflict, after two generations there were never more than 2.5 per cent of natives in positions of authority (out of a sample of several hundred names) and most of this 2.5 per cent were officers commanding local units (see p. 125). This was not due to incompetence or reluctance to serve on the part of the easterners, as some have argued, but to the firm determination of the Greeks and Macedonians to enjoy the spoils of victory.

      When therefore we speak of the unity and homogeneity of hellenistic culture, it is of this Greco-Macedonian class we are speaking, a minority in every state made up of men from many parts of the Greek world, springing from various social origins which could be conveniently forgotten in the new environment. These immigrants, like Americans today, maintained lively memories of where they or their parents had come from but these origins had little significance, other than in sentiment, compared with the reality of their new homes and new status. The old frictions between city and city, class and class, were ironed out in the solidarity of life as a Greek minority in this new milieu. Their importance sprang from the fact that the hellenistic kings depended upon this Greco-Macedonian minority to provide them with their administration at the higher levels. Their role in Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia will be our concern later, when we consider these states in greater detail. But first it is convenient to glance at those features and institutions of the hellenistic world which held the Greeks together in the alien environment of Egypt and across the vast spaces of Asia, and made them more and more indistinguishable from each other as time passed.

      IV

      Two points should perhaps be noted at the outset. First, the special problems presented by a Greek minority in an alien environment did not arise in continental Greece and Macedonia, in the cities of the Aegean or (any more than they always had) in the cities of western Asia Minor. These areas continued to serve as a reservoir of Greek culture as well as of manpower (so long as the wave of emigration lasted). The Greeks living in the monarchies were still in contact with the world of city-states which had hitherto furnished the background for all Greek civilization. Secondly, though Alexander’s conquests had resulted in a vast extension of hellenism over central Asia, by 303 Seleucus had ceded Gandhara, eastern Arachosia and Gedrosia to Chandragupta (above, p. 54) and subsequently Bactria became independent of the Seleucids. Hence, although Greek culture continued to survive in the eastern provinces and re-established itself in India in the second century, politically the Seleucid empire became relatively more Mediterranean-based and Antioch began to take precedence over Seleuceia-on-the-Tigris as the main Seleucid centre. The Bactrian Greeks and that branch of them who set up a kingdom in India after the fall of the Mauryan empire were increasingly cut off from the mainstream of hellenistic life, especially after the rise of the Parthians in the later second century. It seems likely that in these circumstances and in response to the threats from the marauders of the steppes there was a closer collaboration between Greeks and natives there than elsewhere. By the second century the great centres of Greek culture were located on or close to the Mediterranean – Pergamum, Alexandria, Athens, Antioch. Thus the Mediterranean Sea was itself a factor making for homogeneity in hellenistic culture, since it facilitated movement and intercommunication.

      Ease of travel between the various parts of the hellenistic world was both a cause and a result of the common civilization which Greeks now shared; far more than in the past travellers of all kinds were constantly on the move. Perhaps the most obvious groups were the mercenaries. They formed an appreciable part of every hellenistic army and as the prosopography drawn up by Launey (Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, pp. 1111—271) makes clear, they came from all parts of Greece, from Macedonia and the Balkan peninsula generally, from Asia Minor, from Syria, Palestine and Arabia, from central Asia and India, from north Africa and from Italy and the west. Of the Greeks the Cretans were perhaps the most prominent. In an account of the career of his great-grandfather, whom he describes as a military expert, Strabo relates how

      because of his experience in military affairs, he was appointed (sc. by Mithridates Euergetes, the king of Pontus) to enlist mercenaries and often visited not only Greece and Thrace, but also the mercenaries of Crete, that is before the Romans were yet in possession of that island, and while the number of mercenary soldiers in the island, from whom the piratical bands were also wont to be recruited, was large (Strabo, x 4, 10).

      It is noteworthy that for many men piracy and mercenary service were alternative means of livelihood; we shall look at the conditions which encouraged both of these below (p. 163). But for the moment our concern is with the effects of mercenary service, which kept large numbers of more or less rootless people constantly on the move wherever wars called for their assistance. Sometimes they settled down if they could find a city ready to replenish its reduced numbers with men whom its citizens had got to know. An inscription set up probably in 219 at Dyme in western Achaea introduces a list of fifty-two names with this statement:

      The following were created citizens by the city having shared in the fighting during the war and having helped to save СКАЧАТЬ