The Evolution of The Study of The Hellenistic Period - Vadan
The Evolution of The Study of The Hellenistic Period - Vadan
The Evolution of The Study of The Hellenistic Period - Vadan
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Roman perceptions, early modern historians consequently interpreted the victory of Philip
II of Macedonia over the Greeks at Chaeronea in 338 BC as the death of the Periclean
democratic ideal representative of Classical Greece, and the triumph of the idiotai, as ataraxia (tranquility) became the only realistic goal in life.6 Therefore scholars believed that,
when this society fell victim, finally, to the Roman military machine, with its crass and
philistine efficiency, the feeling was that these degenerate Greeklings had got no more than
they deserved.7 But as J. B. Bury argued, such Rome-centered bias often overlooks the
fact that this was the time which produced the brilliant Academician Carneades, the famous
Aphrodite of Melos and the Dying Gaul statues, and the works of Euclid.8
It took many centuries until these perceptions of the historical period from Alexander the Great to the fall of the last Hellenistic kingdom would be subjected to critical
overhaul. The first serious study of the Hellenistic period came from Johann Gustav Droysen in the 19th century academia of Wilhelmine Germany. In his three-volume Geschichte
des Hellenismus published in 1878, Droysen perceived Alexander the Great as an Aristotelian superman [who] is an instrument of history and of God himself, whose incredible
success caused Greek language and culture to spread in and mix with other pagan cultures
- especially that of the Jews.9 According to Droysen, such cultural and religious syncretism
ignited and sustained by Alexander and his successors, created an environment of religious
and cultural dialogue which facilitated the appearance and dissemination of Christianity.
Despite the later criticism that would attack and finally destroy his thesis, Droysen
nonetheless deserves merit for giving a distinct name and identity to a previously dismissed
historical period. As Ulrich von Wilamowitz commented, Droysen showed great boldness
in building up his history of a period of which no continuous narrative has come down to
us, though it represents the zenith of Greek power.10 However, this new perspective on the
post-Alexander centuries did not immediately impose itself within the discipline of Classical Studies. It took time, however, for this new concept to be considered in the Classical
curriculum. One could not escape the uneasy feeling that what came after the Classical period the name itself evokes primacy is the epilogue of Greek genius, only to be replaced
centuries later by the greatness of Rome. Indeed, when compared to the intellectually innovative and defining texts that embody the prominence of Classical Greece, it is difficult
to resist the first impression that there is something wrong with an age which has left an
34.14, Liv. 38.17, Tac. Ann. 6.42.
6 Idiotes: private individual who did not hold any office and did not participate in political life. Ataraxia: freedom from every kind of excitement, peace of mind.
7 Peter Green, Introduction, in Hellenistic History & Culture, ed. Peter Green (Berkeley, CA: Calif. UP,
1993), 7.
8 J. B. Bury, Hellenistic Age, 2nd Ed (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 1-2.
9 A. B. Bosworth, Alexander the Great and the Creation of the Hellenistic Age, in The Cambridge Companion
to the Hellenistic World, ed. Glen R. Bugh (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 10.
10 Ulrich von Wilamowitz, History of Classical Scholarship, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1982), 154.
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insufficient account of itself.11 Therefore, it should not be a surprise that even as late as
1963 eminent historians such as M. I. Finley characterized Hellenistic political history
as a wearying one, monotonous and often ugly, of unceasing warfare, bad faith and not
infrequent assassination.12 It is due to such dismissive perception that Finley dedicated a
mere eleven pages in his book The Ancient Greeks to the study of the Hellenistic centuries
compared to the 137 pages discussing the Classical City-State.
It is essential to keep in mind, however, that the term Hellenismus rendered
in English as Hellenistic was never conceived of, or used in antiquity as Droysen
presented it. Modern scholars have always been aware that the term was in fact coined
by Droysen [pour] dsigner la langue parle dans le monde issu du mlange des peuples
occidentaux et orientaux du nom de langue hellnistique.13 The root of the term is the
word hellenismos used in a Biblical sense to designate pagans and barbarians imitating or acquiring Greek language, especially in the case of the Jews.14 Therefore, the term
Hellenistic must be used cautiously because otherwise it can pose serious problems for
a historian studying the period of time which it serves to identify. After all, it is a modern
term designating a time period artificially constructed according to modern concerns in
Classical Studies; the ancients certainly did not conceive of historical periods or their own
contemporary times as modern scholars do.
Nevertheless, the precedent set up by Droysen would not be completely overlooked. Although in 1913 J. B. Bury concluded his nine-hundred-page long History of
Greece with the conquests and death of Alexander the Great, ten years later he dedicated a
one-hundred-fifty-page study The Hellenistic Age. In it he wrote that the habit of treating
what is, not very happily, called the Hellenistic age as if it were no more that a wayside inn
in which a historical student travelling from Athens and Sparta to Rome is forced reluctantly to halt for a few tedious hours is not yet obsolete.15 Furthermore, he also observed
that the study of the Hellenistic period has entered little into liberal education except so
far as it is involved in the history of the Roman Republic.16 Burys criticism found important supporters. Around the same time, in 1924, Wilamowitz took up the term proposed
by Droysen and in his Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos he presented
Hellenism as the imperialistic achievement of Greek conquerors.17
Interest in the Hellenistic period grew slowly but surely and by 1941 Michael
11 A. D. Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship, by G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell, trans. by T. J.
Cornell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 148.
12 M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks (London, England: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 173.
13 Droysen quoted and translated by Praux (1978, 7).
14 Peter Green, The Hellenistic Age (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2007), xvi. The term appears in the
Second Book of the Maccabees, 4.13.
15 Bury 1925, 1.
16 Ibid, 1-2.
17 Momigliano 1994, 158.
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Rostovtzeff could write in the preface of his two-volume A Social and Economic History
of the Hellenistic World that as every student of ancient history knows, the old-fashioned
conception of this age as a time of decay of Greek civilization and of a pitiful collapse of
Greek political life is unfounded or at least one-sided and misleading.18 Rostovtzeffs
work was a landmark in the field because for the first time attention was directed from
military and political events to social problems and global economic patterns, making him
primarily the historian of [] traders, gentlemen farmers, and professionals.19 Rostovtzeffs effort is all the more significant for the study of the Hellenistic period because
for the first time a great body of archeological, numismatic and epigraphic evidence was
brought together and given serious consideration. The work of Rostovtzeff signaled that
there was finally serious consideration in academic institutions of the Hellenistic period
and its overwhelming body of evidence. Behind Rostovtzeffs project stood reviewers
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from the State Museum of Berlin, from the University of Oxford and Yale University, as well as from the American Numismatic Society.20 As
a matter of fact, Rostovtzeffs list of acknowledgements including scholars and institutions
from all over the world spans two pages, apparently in an abridged version.21 All of this
points to the fact that the study of the Hellenistic period had finally imposed itself within
Classical Studies and was a serious scholarly effort that could no longer be taken lightly,
let alone ignored.
This conceptualization of a distinct Hellenistic age also brought up important
issues concerning the process of periodization, which recent Hellenistic scholarship does
not shy away from pointing out. In a chapter entitled The Problem of Periodization,
Barry Strauss calls into question the historians tendency to catalogue and arrange events
according to specific criteria and perceptions. He observes that each of these periods [i.e.
Classical, Hellenistic or Republican], indeed any historical period, raises chronological
difficulties. He then asks, when, for example, did the Hellenistic period end? With the
mission of Jesus c. 30 CE? Or earlier, in 30 BCE, with the death of Cleopatra?22 His
point may seem hypercritical but still it must not be taken lightly. Indeed, from a political
approach historical convention decrees that the fall of Ptolemaic Egypt and, consequently,
of the last Macedonian kingdom that grew after the death of Alexander the Great signifies
the end of the Hellenistic period and the rise of the Augustan age.23 However, the ancient
historian Polybios ended the period even sooner in 220 BC when the Romans became in18 Michael Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (New York, NY: Oxford U P,
1941), v.
19 Momigliano 1994, 39.
20 Rostovtzeff 1941, xi.
21 Ibid, xiii-xiv.
22 Barry Strauss, The Problem of Periodization, in Inventing Ancient Culture, eds. Mark Golden and Peter
Toohey (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 166.
23 Green 2007, xv.
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the past. How and why we do it depends ultimately on our epistemological choices.32
Thus the concept of historical periods is but a mimetic construct.
The fact that such deconstructionist efforts have been undertaken is proof that
post-modernism has finally caught up with the study of the Hellenistic age. An important
aspect of this development is the growing use of gender theory to define the Hellenistic
period as distinct from earlier times. Ever since the pioneering work of Grace Harriet Macurdy, Hellenistic Queens: A Study of Woman-Power in Macedonia, Seleucid Syria, and
Ptolemaic Egypt, first published in 1932, the field has been more responsive to the study
of gender relations. Indeed, work from scholars such as C. Schneider in the 1960s and
Sarah Pomeroy in the 1980s has led to the conclusion that women are seen to play more
prominent roles in [Hellenistic] public life, albeit within a male-dominated value system.
33
Moreover, despite complaining that Classics does not offer feminists enough ammunition for a true revolution: the subject matter is too patriarchal, the evidence too scarce, the
history too long, the traditions too deeply ingrained, Barbara McManus has nevertheless
pointed to the crossing of a rational frontier that led to a redirection of the Classical discipline and a redefining of professional boundaries.34
Since Hellenistic history has been exposed as emplotted history, then the
meaning of the past does not lie in the absolute significance of a single event but how that
event is fitted into an appropriate story narrative.35 For decades, therefore, the narrative
of the period has been constructed according to the criteria which define the term Hellenistic. With the definition explained above, its use has proven to be problematic for late
20th century and early 21st century historians. As Barry Strauss has observed, one half of
the term - istic - suggests a mere derivative of the pure and original Hellenic; the other
half - Hellen - ignores the non-Greeks in the lands ruled by Alexanders successors, who
outnumbered and frequently ignored the conquerors and their descendants.36 Indeed, in
a compelling study published in 1993 entitled From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire, Susan Sherwin-White and Amlie Kuhrt have challenged
the Hellenizing achievement of Alexanders successors by emphasizing the continuity of
Achaemenid structures of government under Seleucid administration.37
Around the same time, the concept of cultural and religious syncretism as characteristic of the Hellenistic world has been discarded in a masterful comparative studies project published by Walter Burkert in 1992. The Orientalizing Revolution heralded
32 Ibid, 19.
33 Review of feminist scholarship provided by Graham Shipley. Shipley 2000, 3, and Shipley, Recent Trends
And New Directions, in The Cambridge Companion to Hellenistic World, ed. Glen R. Bugh (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 321.
34 Barbara McManus, Classics and Feminism (Toronto, Canada: Prentice Hall, 1997), 29, 139.
35 Munslow 2007, 38.
36 Strauss 1997, 165-166.
37 Susan Sherwin-White and Amlie Kuhrt, From Samarkhand to Sardis (Berkeley, CA: California UP, 1993),
1-6.
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by Burkert pursues the hypothesis that, in the orientalizing period, the Greeks did not
merely receive a few manual skills and fetishes along with new crafts and images from the
Luwian-Aramaic-Phoenician sphere, but were influenced in their religion and literature by
the eastern models to a significant degree.38 As a result, such syncretism is not limited to
a single period in Greek history, but pervades its entire history and identity since its earliest foundations; as Burkert put it, the Greeks are the most easterly of the Westerners.39
Therefore, Alexanders conquests are beginning to be interpreted simply as an accelerating factor to an already-existing contact in areas such as trade, travel, diplomacy, and the
exchange of ideas, which was in no way an exclusively Greek initiative.40 On the contrary,
there has been a socio-cultural tendency in recent scholarship to focus on multiculturalism
and the barbarians as worthy of study in their own right.41
This constant challenge and overhaul proposed from all corners of the discipline
has ultimately rendered the title Hellenistic meaningless and simply incorrect when referring to the historical period which it was initially meant to designate. Lately, there have
been suggestions to replace the term Hellenistic with post-classical or Alexandrian.42
Most recently, in 2008, Malcolm Errington proposed to describe the centuries between
Classical Athens and Imperial Rome as the Macedonian Centuries since all changes and developments in these years were directly conditioned by regional Macedonian
monarchies.43 Most historians, however, propose that terminology should never be a decisive issue. Instead, they argue that revaluation of the Hellenistic era was overdue and
that recent trends and debates in the field ought not to discourage a young student.44 On the
contrary, Graham Shipley remarks that the fact that so few interpretations and explanations are as yet the subject of a settled consensus is proof that we have barely scratched
the surface of the period.45
The study of the Hellenistic period has witnessed an astonishing development in
the course of its evolution. From its millennial obscurity, it has experienced a growth of
interest on an exponential scale ever since its emergence in academia during the 19th century. In past decades it seemed that the study of the Hellenistic period needed justification,
being taught in few universities until the 1990s. Presently, Hellenistic studies are undergoing what Graham Shipley calls a quiet revolution.46 Indeed, there is a great amount of
archeological, numismatic and epigraphic evidence for the Hellenistic period that has been
38 Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6.
39 Ibid, 129.
40 Shipley 2000, 3.
41 Green 1993, 9.
42 Golden 1997, 176.
43 Malcolm Errington, A History of the Hellenistic World: 323-30 BC (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2008), 8.
44 Green 1993, 11.
45 Shipley 2006, 324.
46 Shipley, 315, 318-319.
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recently made available. Challenging interpretations have also been posited lately, ranging
from socio-cultural and linguistic considerations to gender analysis and narrative theory.
All of this points to the overarching establishment of the field, heralding an optimistic
future for its students because we may be about to see a new generation who cross methodological boundaries more easily.47
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