Alexander's Empire Without Alexander: Culture Went East, Politics Stayed Home

The idea

The exam's Hellenistic questions have one hidden theme, and the anchor states it in its conclusion on philosophy: Greek culture spread across the Middle East while Greek politics did not. Follow the theme through the chapter. Philip ended the polis at Chaeronea in three thirty-eight, and from then on Greeks lived under kings. Alexander conquered Persia in twelve years and ruled it as Persia had been ruled, keeping the satrapies, marrying his officers to Persian women, and dying in Babylon in three twenty-three as a Great King, not as a citizen of anything. His generals made three kingdoms by two eighty, and each was a monarchy over a non-Greek majority, governed by a Greek minority through inherited Persian methods. What went east with them was everything the Classical Age had made except its politics. Cities were built on grids with theaters and gymnasia. Koine became the language of state and trade from Egypt to the Indus. The Library of Alexandria gathered the world's texts, and Euclid, Archimedes and Eratosthenes worked in the kingdoms, not the poleis. Greeks adopted Isis and fused Serapis from Egyptian and Greek gods, the case the exam's fourth sample question tests. Women in the kingdoms held property and queens held power. And the philosophers taught how to live under a king: Epicureans withdrew, Cynics mocked, Stoics served, and none asked Socrates' question about the good city, because the answer no longer mattered to anyone who could act on it. Citizenship itself became an ornament held in several cities at once. The polis had been the state; the Hellenistic city was an outpost. That is the anchor's point in one sentence: Greek culture's influence spread without its political analysis.