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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Wiley Blackwell Social and Cultural Histories of the Ancient World
- Sprache: Englisch
Explore the detailed and personal stories of real people living throughout the Hellenistic world
In A Social and Cultural History of the Hellenistic World, author Gillian Ramsey Neugebauer paints a vivid picture of the men and women of the Hellenistic period, their communities, and their experiences of life. Assuming only minimal knowledge of classical antiquity, this clear and engaging textbook brings to life the real people who lived in the Mediterranean region, the Balkans, around the Black Sea, across North Africa, and the Near East.
Rather than focusing on the elites, royals, and other significant figures of the period, the author draws from a wide range of ancient evidence to explore everyday Hellenistic people in their own context. Reader-friendly chapters offer fresh perspectives on well-studied areas of ancient Greek culture while providing new insights into rarely discussed aspects of day-to-day life in the Hellenistic world. Topics include daily technology, food, clothing, housing, travel, working life, slavery, education, temple economies, and more.
Containing numerous references, further readings, photographs, and figures, A Social and Cultural History of the Hellenistic World is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in Ancient History or Classical Studies programs, particularly those dedicated to Hellenistic history.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
List of Figures
Preface
Abbreviations
Money and Weights
Maps
1 Introduction
What Is Hellenistic?
Why Social History?
Mapping Out the Hellenistic World
A Polyglot World
Further Reading
2 Sources of Evidence
Written Sources
Numismatics
Archaeological Sources
Literary Sources
Further Reading
3 Chronological Patterns
Prevalence of Warfare
Alexander the Great's Legacy
Successor States
Foreign Incursions
Civil Unrest
Growing Roman Involvement
Further Reading
4 People and Status
Slaves
People on the Land
Citizens
Further Reading
5 Making a Living
Wages
Agriculture
Crafts
Temple Economies
Further Reading
6 Government and Administration
A Citizen's Duties
Paying Taxes
Law and Order
Further Reading
7 Sex and Gender
Sex
Gender
Further Reading
8 Daily Life
Eating and Drinking
Housing
Neighbourhoods
Further Reading
9 Art and Adornment
Adorning the Body
Art
Further Reading
10 Education
Primary Education
Training Young Citizens
Occupational Training
Higher Education
Exchange of Knowledge
Further Reading
11 Leisure and Entertainment
Opportunities for Leisure
Children's Play
Games
Gambling
Sports
Feasts
Music and Dance
Dramatic Performances
Competitive Festivals
Being in the Audience at a Special Event
Further Reading
12 Religious Life
Traditional Religion
Religious Change
Divine Interventions and Interactions
Funerary Practices
Further Reading
13 Health
Disease in the Hellenistic World
Medical Knowledge and Craft
Public Physicians and Public Health
Treatments
Healing Sanctuaries
Further Reading
14 Technology
Devices and Machines
Chemical Processes
Further Reading
15 Travel
Journeys
Logistics
Further Reading
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Clay tablet inscribed with the Astronomical Diary for 255/54
BCE
:...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Halike
clay sealing, Seleukeia‐on‐the‐Tigris: Kelsey Museum of Ar...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Phrygetron
, Athens, c. 350–late 290s
BCE
: Agora Object P 4462....
Figure 8.2
Lopas
with lid, excavated together at Athens, c. 150–100
BCE:
Ago...
Figure 8.3 Brazier, Corinth, c. second century
BCE
: Corinth Object C 1947 83...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Tanagra figurine with the melon hairstyle, yellow
chiton
, and blu...
Figure 9.2 Meander motif drawing, bottom of
P.Tebt
. 1.166, late second centu...
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Terracotta boar rattle, Hellenistic Cyprus: BM 1982,0729.89.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Sign of the Cretan dream interpreter, Saqqara. Two lines of iamb...
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 The carpenter Dorion's elephant and inscription thanking Pan of ...
Guide
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
List of Figures
Preface
Abbreviations
Money and Weights
Maps
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Wiley Blackwell Social and Cultural Histories of the Ancient World
This series offers a fresh approach to the study of ancient history,seeking to illuminate the social and cultural history often obscuredby political narratives. The books in the series will emphasize themes in socialand cultural history, such as slavery, religion, gender, age, medicine, technology,and entertainment. Books in the series will be engaging, thought provokingaccounts of the classical world, designed specifically for studentsand teachers in the classroom.
Published
A Social and Cultural History of Late AntiquityDouglas Boin
A Social and Cultural History of Republican RomeEric M. Orlin
Upcoming
A Social and Cultural History of the Roman EmpireJinyu Liu
A Social and Cultural History of the Hellenistic World
Gillian Ramsey Neugebauer
Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial technologies or similar technologies.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per‐copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750‐8400, fax (978) 750‐4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Applied for:Paperback ISBN: 9781119043201
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For Jamie
List of Figures
Figure 2.1
Clay tablet inscribed with the Astronomical Diary for 255/54
BCE
:
ADART
II, ‐254; BM 34728 + 35418.
Figure 6.1
Halike
clay sealing, Seleukeia‐on‐the‐Tigris: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology 37549.
Figure 8.1
Phrygetron
, Athens, c. 350–late 290s
BCE
: Agora Object P 4462.
Figure 8.2
Lopas
with lid, excavated together at Athens, c. 150–100
BCE:
Agora Objects P 19938 + P 19913.
Figure 8.3
Brazier, Corinth, c. second century
BCE
: Corinth Object C 1947 836.
Figure 9.1
Tanagra figurine with the melon hairstyle, yellow
chiton
, and blue
himation
, said to be from Babylon, third century
BCE: BM 1930,0414.1
.
Figure 9.2
Meander motif drawing, bottom of
P.Tebt
. 1.166, late second century
BCE
.
Figure 11.1
Terracotta boar rattle, Hellenistic Cyprus: BM 1982,0729.89.
Figure 12.1
Sign of the Cretan dream interpreter, Saqqara. Two lines of iambic verse: “I interpret dreams by command of the god. / With good fortune, the interpreter of these is Cretan.” Cairo Museum, CG 27567.
Figure 15.1
The carpenter Dorion’s elephant and inscription thanking Pan of the Good Road. Paneion, El Kanais, reign of Ptolemy II.
Preface
I first encountered the Hellenistic world, as do many students of ancient history, after a few years of studying the Greeks and Romans. During my master's program at the University of Victoria, my professor of Greek history, Dr. Gordon Shrimpton, suggested that I finish up the year by doing a research paper on some inscriptions from the Hellenistic period. He recommended that I read through Stanley Burstein's anthology of sources in translation to find something to work on, and I selected no. 50, the bilingual inscription of Asoka from Kandahar, Afghanistan. I was astounded to discover just how far east Greek culture had travelled, and found an enduring fascination for all things Hellenistic and especially the people who had shaped and inhabited that culture.
You might find yourself in a similar position, having some experience with either the Classical Greeks or the Romans and now embarking on a course of study in the Hellenistic period. Perhaps this is your very first foray into ancient Mediterranean history. In any case, may you find in these pages some details, topics, and themes about Hellenistic life which will inspire your own research questions.
There is some initial information which will help with navigating the contents of this volume. The term “Classical” is used in two possible ways: to refer to Classical antiquity in general (the historical era of the ancient Greeks and Romans) or to refer to the Classical period of the ancient Greeks, which lasted from approximately 480 to 323 BCE. All the dates in this volume are BCE, unless they are specifically noted as CE.
This volume, for the most part, follows the convention of writing ancient Greek terms, personal names, and place terms using English letters which most closely mirror the Greek letters. This will be most noticeable to anyone more familiar with the Latinized spellings where “k” is written “c,” and “‐os” name endings become “‐us.” I do follow the convention of keeping the personal names of very famous people in their Latinized or Anglicized forms, so Alexander the Great instead of Alexandros. The kings of Egypt are called Ptolemy, but any ordinary person with the same name is Ptolemaios. Personal names are spelled here the way they appear in their source document, so there are a few possible spellings for the same name, for example Heraklides and Herakleides.
At various points, notable terms will be given using a transliteration of the ancient Greek, Akkadian, or Demotic words, and there are a few non‐English letters used. The inclusion of these terms is either as a point of interest or to enable readers to research that term further, since scholarship often uses the ancient language term instead of its English translation.
Throughout each chapter many different ancient sources are referenced. Any textual source, such as a literary passage, inscription, cuneiform tablet, or documentary papyrus, will have a citation included. In addition, if there is an English translation available for that textual source, its reference (usually to an anthology of translated sources) will be included. This is so that readers can look up those passages right away, if they wish. In the vast majority of instances, these citations follow the various scholarly conventions for standard abbreviations, which are given in the abbreviations list. Art objects from museums with online catalogues will also have a citation included, since it is often possible to go immediately and find an image of the artifact online by searching for its accession number on the museum website. Archaeological materials will have their publication information provided in the further reading section, since one usually needs to read the full report to get the context, description, and analysis of those findings. All other information derived from modern scholarship is outlined in the further reading section for each chapter.
A book like this requires a great deal of research and library assistance, so many thanks are owed to the librarians at the University of Toronto Libraries, the Dr. John Archer Library at the University of Regina, the Campion College Library, Luther College Library, and specifically to Elaina Lawn, Angela Carnall, Jennifer Hall, Doris Hein, and Kelly Jackman. Thank you also to Jordan Ryan and Janet Johnson for answers to questions. Thank you to Graham Shipley; at my first academic job I was privileged to have an office next door to his, and our many conversations about Hellenistic history were so enjoyable and formative to my growth as a scholar. I will always be grateful to Alasdair Livingstone, who passed away in 2021; he kindly permitted me to attend his immensely engaging Akkadian seminars at the University of Birmingham. Someone who I will forever remember with gratitude and fondness for his generosity of spirit, enthusiasm for epigraphy and ancient history, and wise mentoring is my PhD supervisor, Stephen Mitchell, who passed away early in 2024.
My great thanks go to the editors Will Croft and Pascal Raj Francois for their patience and support, and also to Louise Spencely and Maryanne Reed for their invaluable assistance. Thanks go also to the anonymous readers of this volume, for their attention to detail and helpful suggestions and corrections. Any mistakes here are solely the fault of the author.
Gillian Ramsey Neugebauer
Maps
Map 1
Map of the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean and Near East.
Map 2
Map of the Hellenistic Aegean.
Map 3
Map of Hellenistic Egypt.
Map 1 Map of the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean and Near East.
Map 2 Map of the Hellenistic Aegean.
Map 3 Map of Hellenistic Egypt.
1Introduction
The Hellenistic world is, in its broadest sense, every region and time period impinged upon by the presence and influence of ancient Greek culture. Geographically, it traverses the entire Mediterranean, the Balkans, around the Black Sea, across North Africa and the Near East as far as the Indian subcontinent, and possibly beyond. Chronologically, it extends throughout Classical antiquity, as long as Greek literature and scholarship remained formative within cultures and ways of knowing. All this makes for a large world, not so distant from our own.
This volume addresses the Hellenistic world within somewhat narrower confines, in keeping with how scholars of antiquity generally define historical periods. By this measure, the Hellenistic world encompasses places and peoples affected by the conquests of Alexander the Great, across the parts of the world controlled by his successors until the time when the Romans annexed them into their empire. In terms of dates, the Hellenistic period runs from one monarch's death to another's: Alexander's in 323 to 30, when the last Macedonian monarch, Kleopatra VII, died and left Egypt to the Romans. In practical terms, this periodization actually means that the Hellenistic period has different durations in different places, depending on when the Romans appeared on the scene – 146 for mainland Greece, 64 for Syria, never for areas east of the Euphrates.
A way to make sense of such a geographically and chronologically varied world is to follow the ups and downs of the different political actors who tried to hold it and govern it, starting with Alexander. There are many excellent political histories of the Hellenistic period (see the reading list below). This volume takes a different approach, that of a social and cultural history. It opens up a window on the fascinating circumstances faced by people living in the Hellenistic world, some things seeming perhaps quite odd, some startlingly familiar.
When it comes down to it, every history is truly written about the historian's present. That is, whatever world the historian inhabits sets the tone, aims, approach, and concerns of their investigation. Thus, this volume probably has a certain perspective reminiscent of the second and third decades of the twenty‐first century, making its assumptions and focus different from the studies of Hellenistic society and cultural life written in the 1940s, 1990s, or even the early 2000s. This might be evident in how the chapter topics are framed and which topics are brought into the foreground versus which ones are allowed to recede. This is due partly to some areas of life being less written about and seeming to deserve some attention, and partly to other areas being so well studied that to go over them in minute detail seems a little redundant. The desire here was not to reinvent Hellenistic history but to add another chapter to it, knowing that more will continue to be written down the road.
What Is Hellenistic?
“Hellenistic” is a word coined in the modern era using ancient Greek grammatical forms to express the concept of “being or becoming Greek,” or we might say, it is an adjective meaning “Greek‐ish.” The ancient Greeks called themselves Hellenes, after a mythical hero, Hellen. They had an adjective hellenikos to describe Greek things; the word hellenikon was sometimes used to describe Greek culture, and they called their language Hellenikē. Before going on, we should note that our word “Greek” comes via Latin from the original Greek word Graikos which also denoted a Hellene. In his study of the hydrological cycle, Aristotle happens to mention that the Graikoi were predecessors of the later Hellenes and lived in central Greece during mythical times around the time of the flood – from the myth of Deucalion the father of Hellen (Mete. 352a–b). The Marmor Parium, an inscribed chronicle of Greek history set up in 263/262 on the island Paros, also records that once Hellen took over from Deucalion, the Graikoi came to be called Hellenes (IG XII,5 444, 6.10–11).
The verb hellenizo referred to speaking Hellenikē, but people often defined it in contrast to speaking other languages or, interestingly, dialects. So the early‐third‐century comic Poseidippos of Cassandreia had a character in one of his dramas say of an Athenian “You speak Attic … but we Hellenes speak Hellenike” (Harmost 28). He seems to be distinguishing between the Athenian Attic dialect and the common Greek in circulation elsewhere, with a bit of cultural prejudice thrown in. Aristotle alludes to this notion of an acceptable common Greek language in a discussion of grammatical errors which show someone to be speaking improperly (Sophistici elenchi 182a). A real‐world example of this comes to us from mid‐third‐century Syria, where someone, perhaps an Arab, laments to his boss that people treat him badly because he does not know how to hellenizein (P.Col.Zen. 4.66; BD 137). He might have been referring to his poor grasp of the Greek language (his letter was penned by a scribe on his behalf), or to his lack of Greek‐ish manners, or perhaps both.
The word hellenismos meant speaking or behaving in a Greek way. The second‐century Stoic philosopher Diogenes of Babylon stated that hellenismos was the prime characteristic of good communication and required that a speaker be precise and polite (Diog. Laert. 7.59). In terms of hellenismos as behaviour, the most famous ancient usage of it is not favourable. The author of 2 Maccabees condemns the Jerusalem high priest Jason for a corrupting and unlawful hellenismos, typified by attending the gymnasium and wearing a certain type of Greek hat (the petasos, see Chapter 9), which was making him contemptuous of Jewish traditions and an embarrassment to the community of the faithful (4.12–13). Jason had also abandoned his Hebrew name Joshua for a new one (Joseph. AJ 12.239).
Hellenism in antiquity was a complex notion; it could be learned and perfected, but it existed in the eye of the beholder and required the approval of others, or it could earn condemnation either as a failed attempt at Greekness or as a rejection of another culture. Calling an entire historical period of Mediterranean and Near Eastern history “Hellenistic,” or the era of Hellenism, is thus a leap of semantics and, perhaps, logic. But it was done long ago, and so, for better or worse, we continue to use the designation and grapple with the terminology's implications for how we understand what culture, and Greekness, meant to people in the past.
More will be discussed in Chapter 3 about the Hellenistic as an historical period, and how we study it. For now, let the introductory description in terms of geography and chronology above suffice. To it we can add the consideration of cultures present in those spaces and times, and there were many. A theme running throughout Hellenistic scholarship is how these different cultures encountered and reacted to the arrival of Greekness. Hellenism could be communicated and lived out in so many specific ways: language use, personal names, manners, education, clothing, cuisine (the petitioner from the papyrus above complained that his sub‐par Greekness made people give him bad quality wine for his rations). Hellenism could be found in systems of governance, the kinds of taxes people paid, favourite board‐games, house décor, music, religion – in short, all the possible dimensions of society and culture. An important factor in the reactions to Hellenism was the mode of the encounter: whether through trade, immigration, warfare, or colonization – essentially, asking what was the power dynamic in the intercultural relationship. So when scholars investigate the Hellenistic, there is always present some thread of curiosity over cultural identity and what Greekness meant to the people under study.
Why Social History?
Social history, or “history from the bottom up,” puts the focus on the ordinary people at the base of society. The method for doing social history embeds the analysis of historical processes, trends, and events in the physical and economic conditions of life, and considers how social relationships and culture shaped the experiences of individuals, families, and wider communities. It also means that we work with the assumption that a full understanding of any society must be rooted in knowing the circumstances of the majority of ordinary people's lives.
When the social history discipline appeared in the mid‐twentieth century, it upturned traditional “top‐down” methods which sought to understand past societies through the unfolding of political events and the attitudes held by people in power. Knowing the political context helps, and Chapter 3 provides an outline of this for the Hellenistic period, but it is only part of history. The reality in the Hellenistic period, and in many other eras, is that a small minority of mostly men held power, and the vast majority of people were poor and politically unimportant. Social history seeks to redress the marginalization of past peoples and bring their lives into the centre of attention.
Practically, this means that every topic in what follows is discussed after considering questions like “Does this relate to poor people?,” “Is there evidence for the phenomenon outside of high society?,” or “Are these ideas evident in the testimonies of ordinary people?”. Thanks to the abundance of Hellenistic‐period evidence, this means that, for most topics, there is at least one example, and often many times more than one. There are, however, significant gaps across regions. For example, the arid climate of Egypt has meant that huge quantities of papyri have survived to the present day, and many of these provide very specific data about the mundane details of people's ordinary lives: shopping lists, household budgets, personal letters, tax registers listing the sizes of households, and so forth, not to mention all the governmental documents with their economic and administrative data. Nothing comparable exists for anywhere else in the Hellenistic world, although logic dictates that people living in the Aegean region, Asia Minor, or the Near East had comparable things. Other sources of ancient evidence, such as archaeology or literary accounts, do often provide a window on these comparable situations outside Egypt, and so the task of the Hellenistic social historian is to juxtapose different types of evidence for the same phenomena across these regions. Serendipity occasionally steps in and provides exact matches from disparate evidence types in totally different regions, as in the case of the papyrus and ostrakon examples of alphabet exercises for primary schoolchildren (see Chapter 10). Such instances provide a sharp clarification on how similar life could be in Hellenistic communities, even though they were on the other side of the Mediterranean from each other and embedded within regions with totally different historical and cultural backgrounds.
Sometimes, the most that can be said is that somebody existed. Yet naming this person is a valuable exercise. Anonymity in history‐writing perpetuates the idea that the poor and lowly are not worth much attention. So often, scholars are pressed for space and time and so in the effort to complete an argument will cite sources of evidence according to what broader practice, system, or topic they reference. For example, we might mention that when people drew up contracts for loans or property sales in Ptolemaic Egypt they identified the main parties by writing out their physical description. When we actually look at one of these descriptions, we find out that in 232 in Samaria of the Arsinoite nome in Egypt, Andromachos agreed to an advance payment on rent from Diphilos, and that Andromachos was 30 years old, middling in size, with honey‐coloured skin, and a scar on the left side of his forehead; Diphilos was 40 years old, large, dark‐skinned, and round‐faced (CPR 18.10). When Herakleides agreed to marry Histiaia (both also from the Arsinoite nome in the late third century) for a dowry of 400 bronze drachmas, we see that he was 25 years old, large, dark‐skinned, and round‐faced, and Histiaia's father Theodoros was in his fifties, middling, dark‐skinned, with a long face – but no description is given for Histiaia (CPR 18.6).
This volume tries, wherever possible, to give the name, date, location, gender, and circumstances of the person whose life is memorialized for us in the ancient evidence. Perhaps not all this information is germane to the exact topic under discussion, but at the same time, including it reminds us of the social and cultural context and the real‐life details for each historical moment.
Mapping Out the Hellenistic World
Labelling the historical period “Hellenistic” came from the notion that Alexander the Great, through his extensive conquests, brought Greek people, language, and culture to a world much bigger than their traditional homeland. Since these Hellenes had the upper hand politically, their culture enjoyed preferential status in the wider world, which therefore came to be Hellenized. Intercultural contacts indeed characterized the Hellenistic world, but a point often overlooked is just how multicultural the ancient world already was. In fact, many of the areas of the Hellenistic world had very long histories of conquest, settlement, and acculturation by earlier empires, and by the 300s BCE they were home to diverse communities.
Alexander III “the Great” was king of ancient Macedonia, a land situated in what is today northern Greece and the neighbouring countries of North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo. He inherited it from his father, Philip II, in 336, along with a desire to defeat the Achaemenid Persian empire, the nemesis of the Greeks living around the Aegean Sea. By this point in time, the Macedonians were mostly accepted by the Greeks as Hellenic. Polybius, writing in the second century, said the Achaeans and Macedonians were “of the same race” (9.37.7), although that had not always been the case. Philip II had taken on a hegemonic role in Greek interstate politics, although Alexander needed to re‐establish this authority for himself after he became king. In 334 he began a campaign of conquest in Persian territory which was to endure essentially until his death in 323, although he had defeated the last Achaemenid king, Darius III, in 330.
The political map of the Hellenistic world will be sketched out more in Chapter 3, but it is useful to give here an initial outline. After Alexander's death his empire was divided up among various of his generals and relatives, who fought a series of wars over these territories. What resulted were a few major kingdoms and a number of smaller states. The large kingdoms were those of the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleukids in the Near East and part of Anatolia (or Asia Minor), the Attalids in Western Asia Minor, and the Antigonids in Macedonia and Greece. Scholars will often refer to these dynasties as means to identify the period and territory of their investigations.
The Greeks thought of themselves as belonging to different tribes, associated with various legendary heroes and coinciding with dialect families within the Greek language (see below). They all shared a legendary homeland in what is now west‐central Greece – the home of Deucalion, Hellen, and the Graikoi (above). In their Iron Age past, the Greeks of the Cyclades and mainland Greece had been prolific sailors, traders, and colonizers, sending out parties who established settlements along the west coast of Anatolia, around the north of the Aegean, around the Black Sea, at a few points along the North African coast, and in the south of Italy and the coast of Sicily (called Magna Graecia). This brought them into contact and coexistence with numerous peoples in those regions, including Sicels, Italiotes, Celts, Thracians, Scythians, Phrygians, Lydians, Carians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others. The Phoenicians were themselves adventurous sailors, establishing colonies in the far west of the Mediterranean, notably Carthage on the coast of what is now Tunisia.
Throughout the Archaic period (c. 800–480), Greek civilization is characterized by the polis city‐state. This was the main state formation among the Greeks, although some in the northwest organized according to tribal confederacies. In its idealized form, each polis was autonomous and self‐sufficient, no matter how small its population. In actual fact, for most of the Archaic period the Spartans dominated Greek foreign affairs (that is, relations between the poleis), and they not‐infrequently staged interventions in the internal politics of different poleis, notably Athens. Although they shared a sense of being the same people, Hellenes, the Archaic Greeks spent many years at war among themselves.
In the period of their history after wars with the Persians began, which scholars call the Classical period, the Athenians embarked on an imperial project called the Delian League. It was ostensibly an anti‐Persian defensive alliance, but in fact became a thalassocratic empire, with all the trappings of resource extraction, forced relocations of people, military dominance, and political control. Resistance to this arose as others of the larger poleis established hegemonic leadership over smaller cities. It was into this milieu that Philip II stepped as the supreme hegemon.
The Achaemenid Persian empire had its origins in the conquests of Cyrus II “the Great,” heir to kings of Anshan in Elam in the highlands of modern Iran. Over his career, he defeated a long list of rival kingdoms and states: the Medes and Urartu in 550, Lydia in 547, the Greek cities of western Anatolia or Asia Minor in 546, Babylon in 539, and Bactria by the time of his death in 530. The conquest of Babylon – ending the Neo‐Babylonian empire – brought a large swath of Near Eastern territory under Achaemenid governance, in particular Syria and Judaea, known as the “Land beyond the River.” (In the Hellenistic period, the part of this territory which is now most of Lebanon and Israel north of the Sinai Peninsula was known as Koile Syria.) In 525, Cyrus' heir Cambyses II conquered Egypt, which had most recently been ruled by the Saite pharaohs of the Twenty‐sixth Dynasty.
Thus, when Alexander laid claim to the lands of the Persian empire, and subsequently realized these intentions by physically campaigning throughout their breadth, he entered a part of the world populated with a multitude of diverse cultures, from the Fish‐Eaters of the Iranian coast to the matriarchal chariot‐driving Drangianai of the Scythian north, to the ancient civilization of the Egyptians, to the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia. At its heart was the Fertile Crescent, spanning from the Nile Delta through the Levant around to the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. This region had already experienced millennia of imperial activity resulting in long‐standing traditions of bureaucracy, social organization, and language use, and the coexistence of different ethnic communities.
Greeks were also part of this older, pre‐Hellenistic multicultural context. Achaemenid iconography depicts Greek tribute‐bearers, and documents from the Persepolis Fortification Tablets record the rations provided to Ionian slave women who worked on irrigation structures (PF 1224). Greek mercenaries of the sixth century left graffiti on the statue of Rameses II at Abu Simbel (Jeffery, LSAG 354–355, 358). Memphis in Egypt had several neighbourhoods named after their non‐Egyptian inhabitants: Canaanites were known as the Phoenico‐Egyptians, Ionians living in the Hellenion neighbourhood were known as the Hellenomemphites, Carians in the Karikon neighbourhood were the Caromemphites. Elephantine was home to a community of Jewish immigrants, well known from their archives of Aramaic papyri found there. A papyrus from Elephantine dated to c. 300 lists a harvest collected from community members whose names are a mix of Jewish and Greek, for example, Obadiah, Simeon, Haggai, Jonathan, Nikias, Isidoros, Lysimachos, Bacchias (Cowley 1923, no. 81).
A Polyglot World
With so many regions and peoples present in the territories which were to become the Hellenistic world, language diversity is also an important feature. Language is central to cultural identity, evident from the usages and meanings of Hellenike and hellenizo (above). Historians can only work with whatever written evidence survives today, meaning that not all the languages spoken in antiquity are known if their speakers were not literate and did not produce any documents. We should thus remember that the linguistic landscape was more diverse than what surviving sources would indicate.
One aspect of this linguistic diversity concerns the Greek dialects. These are represented in writing – through spelling and grammatical differences – and so historians of language have been able to identify the dialect groups and their areas of circulation. The main groups were Doric (spoken in the Peloponnese, west‐central mainland Greece, Crete, parts of the Cyclades, Caria, and Magna Graecia); Aeolic (spoken in Boeotia, Thessaly, and the Aeolis in western Asia Minor); Ionic (spoken on Euboea, around the north Aegean, Black Sea, parts of the Cyclades, and in Ionia of western Asia Minor); Attic spoken in Attica; Arkadian spoken in the central Peloponnese. There was also a related language, Cypriot, spoken on Cyprus, and scholars are still unsure whether to classify Macedonian as a Greek dialect or a separate language. The level of detail to which scholars can study ancient Greek is thanks to the sheer number of its written sources, and ancient Greek authors themselves talked about their dialects, sometimes in a technical sense, sometimes more anecdotally. In Theocritus' Idyll 15, a passerby speaks down to some women for their annoying Doric Greek accent, which one of the women defends as an honourable pattern of speech: they are Syracusan settlers in Alexandria with a proud Peloponnesian heritage.
In Mesopotamia, the main (written) languages were Semitic: Aramaic and Akkadian. Aramaic had been the lingua franca of the Persian empire and was still used by different groups around the Near East and Egypt. Idumaeans (Edomites) living in the Transjordan and southern Judaea still spoke and wrote Aramaic, as did their Judaean neighbours. As already noted, the Jewish community living at Elephantine also continued using Aramaic. Akkadian was very old, dating back to the Old Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Its name comes from the city Akkad, built by Sargon c. 2300. Akkadian went through several phases, since languages do shift over time, and the Akkadian of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods is called Late Babylonian. The very ancient, non‐Semitic language Sumerian survived as a literary language and with certain words and phrases incorporated into Akkadian. Both Sumerian and Akkadian used cuneiform script.
In Egypt, the phase of Ancient Egyptian spoken and written in the Hellenistic period is known as Demotic. It had already been in use since the seventh century for both administrative and literary purposes. What distinguished Demotic from the form of Egyptian language known as “Traditional Egyptian,” used mainly for religious texts, is the script. Traditional Egyptian was written in hieroglyphics and hieratic, whereas Demotic used a script derived from hieratic but which functioned phonetically (like an alphabet). We should also note that historically there were several different regional dialects of Egyptian spoken across Upper and Lower Egypt.
Other Near Eastern languages are known, either through references to them or to a few surviving documents. Phoenician is attested in inscriptions from all around the Mediterranean. Diodorus Siculus, writing of events in the late fourth century, refers to a letter purporting to be from a Persian ruler of Armenia and “written in Syrian writing” (19.23.3), and on another occasion in the same period, a group of Nabataean Arabs sent to the Macedonian general Antigonos Monophthalmos a letter written in Syrian (19.96.1). Perhaps Diodorus meant Aramaic, the only candidate for a language and writing system current in both northern Mesopotamia and the Arabian Desert. Because Aramaic, like Greek, used an alphabetic script, it could be employed to write out other languages phonetically. A later example of this practice comes from Avroman in Kurdistan, where in 1909 a local peasant found a sealed jar containing three parchment documents dating to the first centuries BCE and CE, two written in Greek and one using Aramaic letters to write out Parthian.
As the following chapter explains, all these languages and writing systems appear in the sources of written evidence for the Hellenistic period, all with different interpretive challenges. Not least among these challenges is the distribution of surviving evidence, with Aramaic documents, for example, being quite rare due to the materials on which they were written not surviving in the archaeological record. Conversely, Greek papyrus documents survive in huge numbers in the dry climate of Egypt, but are virtually non‐existent elsewhere, even though we know they were being created. Other Greek writing, like the corpus of poetic, historical, and philosophical literature, also weights our knowledge of the period in a Hellenic direction. The cultural cachet of ancient Greek literature in the modern West has also had a disproportionate effect on historiography of antiquity. That is, we have valued these centuries of the ancient world as “Hellenistic” because of the preference given to Classical culture.
Through a social history, bottom‐up approach, we can consider the experiences of Hellenistic people as they lived them, in their own context and on their own terms. In finding how historical significance and meaning emerges from the stories of real people, we might also hold them up as a mirror for our own world now.
Further Reading
For the descriptions of Herakleides and his father‐in‐law, see Fikhman (1999). For the ethnic communities at Memphis, see Thompson (2012: 76–78). For the Avroman parchments, see Minns (1915), Cowley (1919), and Haruta (2001).
For further reading on Hellenistic history and culture, and for the historiographic development of the Hellenistic history discipline, see Rostovtzeff (1941), Walbank (1984), Boardman et al. (1986), Walbank (1992), Green (1993, 1996), Shipley (2000), Ogden (2002b), Erskine (2003), Bugh (2006), Errington (2008), Erskine and Llewellyn‐Jones (2011), Chaniotis (2018), and Kaizer (2022). For foundational and recent studies on Hellenism as a cultural process and historical phenomenon, see Lewis (1986), Kuhrt and Sherwin‐White (1987), Bilde et al. (1997), Cartledge et al. (1997), Burstein (2008), Stavrianopoulou (2013), Ager and Faber (2013), Mairs (2014), Chrubasik and King (2017), Bonnet (2019), and Bru et al. (2021). For the Macedonians, see Hatzopoulos (2020), Howe and Pownall (2018), Lane Fox (2011a, 2011b), and Roisman and Worthington (2010). For background on the Greek polis, see Hansen and Nielsen (2004). For the Greek language see Colvin (2014) and Bakker (2010) (especially the chapters by Colvin, Hawkins, Brixhe, and Torallas Tovar).
Several university and academic publishers developed book series on Hellenistic history, each now with numerous titles in their lists. Aarhus University began Studies in Hellenistic Civilization in 1990. The University of California Press ran the Hellenistic Culture and Society series between 1993 and 2021. Since 1984, Biagio Vergillio has run the Studi Ellenistici series, which now numbers over 31 volumes. The Studia Hellenistica series began in 1942 at the Université Catholique de Louvain and now has 62 volumes and counting. For Hellenistic Egypt specifically, the Prosopographia Ptolemaica project, run by the Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, aims to identify and catalogue people of political, economic, military, and social significance in the Ptolemaic kingdom (so not every single person, but very many of them).
2Sources of Evidence
With its diversity of people groups and languages, studying the Hellenistic world means working with an astounding variety of sources of evidence. These include written documents in several languages, media, and genres, in addition to material sources emerging from archaeological contexts like coins, architecture, art, and household, commercial, and industrial items. Within the realm of written sources, there are two branches: literary and documentary (basically, anything that is not literary in nature, although there is overlap between the two). Historically, Classical literary sources have received preference in scholarship, as is discussed below. Given the social history methodology of this volume, the physical forms of Hellenistic written and documentary sources are instead treated first, and the literary sources in a later section. All of these sources of evidence – documentary, archaeological, literary – have their own idiosyncratic cultural histories, and the accounts of how they survived to be studied today further illustrate the workings of Hellenistic life.
Written Sources
Historians are at the mercy of the environment and chance for recovering written documents, and each medium faced its own challenges for surviving the millennia. The only surviving papyri are those found in arid conditions, those which were carbonized in house fires, or those recycled in antiquity as cartonnage, a type of papier‐mâché used to make Egyptian mummy wrappings. Few other biodegradable writing materials like parchment, wood, linen, and wax tablets have survived, but we know they were commonplace. Clay tablets last only if dried or fired, making them more stable like terracotta pots. They do, however, remain breakable and subject to cracking as salt encrustations form, and many surviving clay tablets are broken or chipped and quite challenging to read. More durable stone inscriptions are also weathered through exposure to the elements, or they have been recycled as building materials, feeding troughs, and fountainheads. Metal inscriptions were most susceptible to ancient recycling, since metal was too valuable to leave unsalvaged, and so metal inscriptions generally survive only if they were buried in a grave or sacred deposit.
The languages written in these media were many, but most of the Hellenistic documentary sources are in ancient Greek, Demotic, and Akkadian, because the bulk of the surviving documents come from areas where these languages dominated. Greek appears most widely, as inscriptions or written in ink on papyri, parchments, shards of fired clay pots (ostraka), or on wood tablets. A rare example of Greek waxed wood tablets survived in Egypt: red on one side, black on the other, it is a set of seven hinged tablets containing an account book (SB 7451). In Egypt, Demotic was also widely written on papyri, ostraka, and inscriptions, while in Babylonia Akkadian was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets. Babylonian scribes also wrote on waxed wood tablets (called lē'u), papyri, and parchments; these have all perished, but we have references to their existence.
When Alexander the Great came on the scene, the Greeks had been using their current alphabetic system of writing for about four centuries. With his conquest, he brought Greek‐speakers and writers into contact with the scribes of Egypt and Mesopotamia, who were trained in writing systems that had been in constant use for nearly three millennia. With these writing systems came also long‐established expertise in scribal training, accounting methods, filing systems, literary criticism, and the interpretation of myths and literature. Handling Greek‐language materials was simply one additional specialism which Egyptian and Babylonian scribes added to their list of skills. We assume that most scribes specialized in one language and medium of writing, although they probably needed to be multilingual to do their jobs, for example when writing a document in Greek for a non‐Greek speaker.
Papyri
The papyrus plant (Cyperus papyrus) grew in the freshwater marshes of the Nile valley, Koile Syria and the Euphrates valley, and other parts of Africa (Plin. HN 13.72–73). Egyptians had been producing a lightweight, flexible, and durable papyrus paper since the Bronze Age. They harvested papyrus from the lower Nile and its Delta, split the stalks' sticky pith into long, thin strips, laid these out, and pounded or pressed them together on a wet board until the fibres merged into a single flat sheet. Papyrus sheets had two layers, one of vertical and one of horizontal strips, and scribes generally preferred to begin writing on the front or “recto” side of the sheet where the papyrus fibres ran horizontally (see Plin. HN 13.74–83). If needed, they would then use the backside, or “verso,” where the fibres ran vertically. People stored papyrus sheets by rolling them into scrolls. Often several sheets were attached end‐to‐end, with the right edge of the left sheet glued on top of the left edge of the next sheet. When rolled up, the recto lay on the inside of a scroll, the verso on the outside. Papyrologists refer to scrolls containing literary texts like poetry or history as “bookrolls.” Given that bookrolls were often metres long, scribes penning lengthy documents would section off the text into columns several centimetres wide, for ease of writing and reading.
Greek scribes in Mesopotamia, called sepirus in Akkadian, used papyrus. Their papyri decayed long ago, but many clay seals and bullae, or “envelopes” (small donut‐shaped rings) used to secure papyri rolls have survived in the archaeological record. Some seals and bullae bear impressions of the papyrus fibres and the strings used to tie the scrolls shut, and they typically bear impressions from private or governmental signet rings or other stamps, and brief inscriptions in Greek noting the date and location of the document's creation.
Papyri are divided into two rough genres: documentary and literary. The latter are, as their name suggests, papyrus copies of literary works. Documentary papyri include letters, lists, reports, inventories, receipts, legal records, memoranda, and governmental records. People often recycled papyri, and we sometimes find documentary texts penned on scraps of paper or the backs of other texts, or two types of documents on a single sheet. One rather charming juxtaposition comes from the archive of Dryton from the second‐century Thebaid: on the verso of a contract for a loan of wheat he copied out the lyrics for a love song (P.Dryton 11 and 50).
Ordinary people often dictated whatever they needed written, like a letter, to a village scribe and appended personal greetings in their own hand. Merchants, landowners, or those with government jobs might have their own secretaries. Papyrologists can study these scribes' handwriting in collections of documents dating to the same period and determine how many scribes worked in a given area and what items they wrote, getting a sense of preferred spelling, writing styles, and formulaic phrases for certain document types.
Parchment
The first‐century Roman author Varro recounted that because the kings of Egypt and Pergamon competed over copies of books to stock their royal libraries, a king Ptolemy banned the export of papyrus to hinder Eumenes II's collections, causing the Pergamenes to invent parchment as an alternative medium (Plin. HN 13.21.70). In fact, people across the Aegean and the Near East had used animal skins as writing material for centuries, and pre‐Hellenistic Greeks were familiar with parchment documents for writing Greek and other languages. Ancient Greek historians of the Persian empire mention consulting royal records written on parchment. If the Pergamon origin story holds weight it refers more to the new mass production of high‐quality parchment suitable for a royal library.
The Babylonian Astronomical Diaries (see below) of the Parthian period regularly refer to letters from the king arriving on skins to be read aloud to the Babylonian citizenry. An earlier record from Uruk, dated to the summer of 228, mentions how legal records were kept on parchments in that city (OECT 9, 24, l. 32).
Clay Tablets
A cuneiform scribe (tupsarru) wrote Babylonian cuneiform by impressing a reed stylus into a damp clay tablet, and often packed hundreds of tiny wedge‐shaped signs onto tablets the size of credit cards or mobile phones. Tablets were fairly thick in order to preserve their structural integrity, and scribes used both front (obverse) and back (reverse) sides, and often the edges too. Cuneiform script from the Hellenistic period, or Late Babylonian, characteristically has simpler grammar and vocabulary than the flourishing Middle Babylonian and Assyrian of previous centuries. Late Babylonian tablets tend to have more slanted handwriting, whereas tupsarrus from earlier periods favoured a more rectilinear and upright style. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of tablets produced in earlier periods, there are fewer Late Babylonian tablets, coming from just a few cities in central and southern Babylonia – Babylon, Borsippa, Nippur, Larsa, Uruk – where Akkadian scribal schools still operated.
Much of this decline was due to historical change: the Babylonians who had once ruled over the Near East were now merely inhabitants of the aforementioned cities and subjects of other kingdoms. Their towns had for a long time been surrounded by habitations of tribal Aramaeans, whose language the Persians preferred for their empire's lingua franca and who remained prominent during the Hellenistic period. The ancient schools of scribes who had once led cutting‐edge scientific research and literature were largely gone, although one group of priest‐scribes operating out of the Esangil temple of Marduk in Babylon maintained an admirable level of productivity for their day. One of their long‐term projects was the Astronomical Diaries, a corpus of clay tablets unearthed in the early days of excavations at Babylon, with a large collection now residing in the British Museum.
The Esangil astronomers recorded nightly celestial observations on wooden boards or clay tablets which were kept moist, and therefore rewritable, by wrapping in wet cloth. They added a few lines each day, including notes on daily weather, the Euphrates' water level, market prices for six key commodities, and (occasionally) current events. About twice each year the temple scribes transcribed the collected short observations onto larger tablets.
The Astronomical Diaries are invaluable to scientific, economic, and social historians. They provide a mostly continuous record from 652 to 61 of sky events, allowing astronomers to calibrate ancient calendars and the reigns of Neo‐Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic kings against the celestial calendar. BCE dates appear as negative numbers according to the modern celestial dating. The diary for month IX, year 57 Seleukid Era (4 December 255–3 January 254) reads:
(obverse) 9 The 28th, moonrise to sunrise: 12° 30′; clouds, I did not watch. The 29th, Sirius' acronychal rising 10 [… dates,] 1 pan 4 sut; mustard, 1 kur 2 pan 3 sut; cress, 3 sut 3 qa; 11 [sesame …; wool, NN minas f]or 1 shekel of wrought silver. At that time, Jupiter was in the end of Aries; Venus was in Aquarius; around the 20th, Mercury's last appearance in the west in Capricorn; 12 [around] the 29th, Mercury's first appearance in the east in the end of Sagittarius; Saturn was in Scorpius; Mars was in Pisces. That month, the river level rose 4 fingers, 24 was the na (gauge). That month, the thieves 13 [….] and had taken things away from the property of Zababa and Ninlil in Babylon, (lower edge) 1 were burned in Babylon. That month, there was heavy fog from the 12th to the end of the month. (ADART II, ‐254 obv. 9–lower edge 1) (see Figure 2.1)
The winter weather's cloud cover prevented the astronomer from seeing much of the night sky, but he managed to record the locations of the planets, giving us a confirmation of the date. The acronychal rising of Sirius refers to when it appears on the eastern horizon at sunset. One shekel, or 2 Greek drachmas, bought you 60 litres of dates, 270 litres of mustard seed, or 21 litres of cress. The Euphrates rose several centimetres; the na gauge measured the river level in relation to the springtime peak flood mark, and a na of 24 was relatively low.
Figure 2.1 Clay tablet inscribed with the Astronomical Diary for 255/54 BCE: ADART II, –254; BM 34728 + 35418.
Source: Alberto Giannese/The Trustees of the British Museum (https://www.ebl.lmu.de/fragmentarium/BM.34728?tab=photo, last accessed 25 June 2024)
Inscriptions
The habit of carving certain noteworthy information on a stone or metal surface is inextricably linked with how we know about Greek literacy, since the earliest examples of written Greek appear as inscriptions. Epigraphic (from Gk. epigraphē
