The Hellenistic World: What Came After Alexander | Ancient Greece Ep. 10 (Finale)

500 war elephants. That was the price. A king named Seleucus gave up the easternmost part of his realm to an Indian ruler, Chandragupta, and in return received 500 of the beasts. Seleucus was not born a king. He was a general. Few of the men who ran the world after Alexander the Great were born to the job. When Alexander died, his mother, Olympias, fought for years to put his infant grandson on the throne. She failed. Alexander's commanders were willing to do whatever it took to seize power for themselves. Within 20 years, three of them had carved kingdoms out of his conquests. This is the story of what they built, and how the Greek world lived on under them. Antigonus and his son Demetrius took Macedonia and Greece. Seleucus took Syria and the old Persian Empire. Ptolemy took Egypt. They were called the successor kings, although none was related to Alexander. Their problem was legitimacy. They had no royal blood, no ancestral claim. Only their power, their prestige and their ambition. Historians call this personal monarchy. Seleucus put it bluntly, whatever the king decrees is always just. In 301 BC the other kings joined forces and killed Antigonus at the battle of Ipsus. His son Demetrius ended his days as a guest in luxurious captivity. Egypt was the easiest to defend, as the deserts on its borders made invasion by land difficult. Its kings, the Ptolemies, kept it longest of all. Smaller kingdoms rose too. At Pergamum, the Attalids defeated invading Gauls. In Bactria, in today's Afghanistan, Greek settlers rebelled and formed their own kingdom. And what of the old city-states? Some banded together, like the Achaean League. But kings sent governors and garrisons wherever loyalty was suspect. As Martin puts it, never again would Greeks live free of the shadow of monarchy. To run these kingdoms, kings needed administrators who could read and write Greek. The Greek they learned was Koine, Common Greek, a simplified form based on the Athenian dialect. For centuries it was the common language of trade and culture all the way from Sicily to the border of India. The New Testament was later written in it. Koine is the parent of Byzantine and modern Greek. A man from Sidon, in Lebanon, took a Greek name, raced chariots at Nemea, and when he won, put up an inscription in Greek. Even Ashoka, the Buddhist king of India, used Greek on some public inscriptions. Kings founded new cities on Greek lines, with gymnasiums and theaters. But Greeks and Macedonians generally refused to mix with locals, and rarely let them into the highest ranks. Wealthy citizens funded grain handouts, schools, and doctors. On Samos, donors paid for free grain for every citizen each month. In some places girls went to school as well as boys. Royal women had more wealth and influence than any woman in classical Greece. Arsinoe too married a Macedonian king, then her own brother, Ptolemy II, and exercised at least as much influence as he did. But for most people, little changed. Perhaps 80% of men and women worked the land. Many in Egypt and Syria were tenants on royal estates, not allowed to leave. Martin says this too is part of the story. The greatest city of the age was Alexandria in Egypt. It had a lighthouse 300 feet tall, the Pharos, whose fire was reflected by polished metal mirrors and shone many miles out to sea. The Ptolemies also built the world's first scholarly research institute, the Museum, Place of the Muses. Its library aimed to collect every book in the world and grew to half a million scrolls. The scholars were paid, and dined together. Kings competed to attract intellectuals, and the Ptolemies won. One scholar, Callimachus, wrote more than 800 works. Poets there praised their royal patron in return for benefactions. Mathematics made the greatest advances. Euclid taught at Alexandria around 300 BC and changed how we analyze space. His geometry is still taught. Archimedes of Syracuse estimated the value of pi, invented a way to handle huge numbers, founded hydrostatics, and devised a screw for lifting water. According to the story, he shouted, I have found it, as he sat in a bath. Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the earth goes around the sun. Later astronomers rejected it, because his model did not match what was observed. He had assumed a circle, not an ellipse. It took about 1800 years for Copernicus to confirm his idea. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth with astonishing accuracy, by comparing the shadows of two identical towers far apart at the same moment. Martin adds a caution. Precise experiments were impossible because no one could measure very short times or tiny quantities. But a spirit of invention prevailed. There is a mood behind all this. City-states had lost their freedom to distant, sometimes fickle kings. Individual lives seemed to spin out of control. So philosophers asked a new question, how can one person find peace? Epicurus founded his school in a house with a garden. He admitted women and slaves as regular members. He taught that true pleasure is an absence of disturbance, best found among friends. Death is nothing but the scattering of atoms, and the gods take no notice of us. The Stoics took a more active path. They took their name from the painted Stoa in Athens. They taught that we should live in harmony with nature, and act against evil, even in politics, while enduring pain without anger. What mattered was the striving for good, not the result. Cynics rejected comfort and convention entirely. Diogenes was reported to sleep in a big storage jar. Skeptics held that secure knowledge was impossible, so one should suspend judgment. Religion changed too. Greeks and Egyptians borrowed each other's gods. Isis, an Egyptian goddess, became the most popular female divinity in the Mediterranean world. Ptolemy I helped make a new god, Sarapis, from the Egyptian Osiris in a Greek mold. People turned to gods who promised protection from chance. The healer Asclepius drew the sick to his shrines, where they slept and And waited for the god to appear in a dream. Cities also gave living kings the honors of gods. The end came from the West. Mistakes by Macedonian kings drew the Romans into Greece in the 3rd century, and by the middle of the 2nd century BC they were dominant there. From then on, Greek history became part of Roman history. The Seleucid kingdom lasted two centuries more, then fell to the Romans in the mid-1st century BC. The Ptolemies lasted longest. Cleopatra VII chose the losing side in a Roman civil war. In 30 BC the Romans invaded, and Egypt became Roman territory. The long chain of Ptolemaic rulers ended with her. Yet Martin ends with a warning against neat endings. Greek history does not stop here, he says. And that is also true of the people, who went on toiling in the fields, workshops and markets as they always have. A Greek writer named Strabo, in the 1st century AD, knew his people would never regain political independence. So he did something very Greek. He criticized his own culture, complaining that the way Greeks lived had brought luxury and deception to almost everybody. Which brings us back to a soldier named Thersites, beaten for calling a king greedy. Greeks prided themselves on one thing, freedom of speech. For them, its heart was saying what others do not want to hear. I think that is the thing worth carrying away. Over 10 episodes we watched Greeks climb out of ruin, argue their way into democracy, win and lose wars, and build a language that carried their ideas across a world. Martin's final advice is to go to the sources and reach your own conclusions. Thanks for watching the series.