The Hellenistic World: societies and cultures, ca. 300 B.C. -100 B.C.

An explosion of ideas, horizons, communications, power-structures at the end of the fourth century tripled the size of the world to be studied by the ancient historian. We now have to make sense of what was happening from what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan all the way to the Strait of Gibraltar. Persian, Macedonian, and Greek were blended with a host of more local cultures and societies across the world experienced by those who traveled with the armies of the end of the classical period. The result of these changes was a new version of Greek culture, conventionally known as Hellenistic, which exhibits fascinating patterns of artistic, economic, institutional and social change which can be compared and contrasted in extremely diverse settings. Inscriptions and archaeological discoveries illuminate the farthest east reaches of the new culture, in the valleys of the Hindu Kush; a wide range of material and textual evidence shows the different accommodations of local culture with Hellenism on the Iranian plateau, in the plains of Mesopotamia, in Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, or in the Nile valley and at the archetypal Hellenistic city of Alexandria, capital of the Ptolemies. The explosion of the classical world also transformed the Aegean heartland of the Greeks, and their interactions with their neighbours to the west, including Carthage and Rome. The scope of the paper is thus very wide, and its historical problems challenging, but this is an area of scholarship in rapid transition, and there is a constant supply of important new evidence, especially from archaeology. This is therefore a particularly good subject for those seeking to combine historical and archaeological techniques.

If you offer this topic, you are expected to show a familiarity with the texts, cities, sites and monuments listed in the appended Examination Regulations, in translation, from which passages for comment will be set. Lectures on this topic normally take place in Hilary Term.
Choosing your combinations- this subject makes an excellent sequel to I.3, The end of the Peloponnesian war to the death of Philip, or I. 8 Alexander the Great and his early successors. It would make an interesting and instructive combination with I. 4 Polybius, Rome and the Mediterranean. This period also offers excellent historical background to literature paper III.8, Hellenistic poetry.