Notes on The Hellenistic Age: Cultural Diffusion

Chapter 5

During the first phase of Hellenism, the polis was the center of political life. With the coming of the Hellenistical Age, this situation changed. Kingdoms and empires eclipsed the city-state power and importance. Cities retained a large evaluate of autonomy in domestic affairs but woolly their freedom of action in foreign affairs.

* Monarchy--the essential puzzle out of government in the Hellenistic world.

* As a go out of Alexander the outstandings conquests of the lands between Greece and India--it widened the Greeks horizon and weakened their ties to their native cities.

* Greek philosophers had a limited conception of humanity, dividing the world into Greek and barbarian. In the Hellenistic Age, the intermingling of Greeks and pecks of the Near East caused a shift in focus from the city to the oikoumene (the inhabited world); parochialism gave way to cosmopolitanism and universalism as people began to think of themselves as members of a world community.

* Alexander the Great:

- After the assassination of Philip of Macedon in 336 B.C., his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, succeeded to the throne.

- His conquests brought West and East adjacent together.

- Although Alexander never united all the peoples in a world-state, his career pushed the world in a bare-assed direction, toward a fusion of disparate peoples and the intermingling of cultural traditions.

* HELLENISTIC SOCIETY--Cosmopolitanism:

- Hellenistic hostelry was characterized by a mingling of peoples and an interchange of cultures. Greek traditions break up to the Near East, while Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Persian traditions--particularly religious beliefs--moved westward.

- In the Hellenic Age, the law had expressed the will of the community, but in this new age of monarchy, the kings laid down the law.

- The greatest city of the sentence and the one most representative of the Hellenistic Age was Alexandria,

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