Reading History: The Hellenistic World

The historical era, now traditionally named the Hellenistic Period, is normally – and for convenience here – taken to stretch from the epochal conquest by Alexander the Great of the Persian empire to 30BC when Octavian/Augustus exploited his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium to incorporate Egypt into the Roman empire, the last of the wealthy Macedonian-Greek kingdoms built by Alexander's successors to be engulfed by Rome. But there are problems – perhaps more than in the periodisation of earlier Greek history – as to whether the 'hellenistic period' has the separate reality it is often assumed to possess. The concept of an hellenistic period was itself the creation of the nineteenth-century German historian, J.G. Droysen, and combined in fact two different aspects: the evolution of the new political system of a group of monarchic states in which a Greek-Macedonian minority ruled over the indigenous 'Oriental' peoples and the concurrent development, under Greek influence, of what was deemed a new synthesis of Greek and non-Greek culture.