The Phoenician cities: a case-study of Hellenisation

Abstract

When Alexander was civilising Asia, Homer was commonly read, and the children of the Persians, of the Susianians and of the Gedrosians learned to chant the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. And although Socrates, when tried on a charge of introducing foreign deities, lost his cause to the informers who infested Athens, yet through Alexander Bactria and the Caucasus learned to revere the gods of the Greeks. Plato wrote a work on the one ideal constitution, but because of its forbidding character he could not persuade anyone to adopt it; but Alexander established more than seventy cities among savage tribes and sowed all Asia with Grecian magistracies, and thus overcame its uncivilised and brutish manner of living. These familiar words of Plutarch (Mor. 328 D-E, Loeb) begin to seem not quite as foolish as they did, in the light of modern discoveries in Ai Khanum and Kandahar. They may thus serve to raise some larger questions. Firstly, it is curious how Plutarch concentrates on remote central Asian areas which were no longer Hellenised in any obvious sense in his own day. Secondly he emphasises, as we would expect, the creation of new cities with Greek constitutions. Here we might well turn to a neglected passage of his older contemporary, Josephus, concluding his account of the tower of Babel (Ant. 1. 121).