Week Nine

Plutarch, Greek Lives, Alcibiades

So you want to be a politician?

It was the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.) with Carthage that saw Hannibal rampaging through the Italian heartland. Roman victory in that war meant Roman control over the western half of the Mediterranean, while the rest of the classical world (comprising the Mediterranean littoral and the Near East) was in the hands of Greeks. After Alexander the Great’s astonishing blitz across the Near East, the latter-day Achilles died in 323 B.C., never having lost a battle, in Mesopotamian Babylon. His massive empire was divided up by several of his generals, who began to war with each other, so that the unified power of Alexander’s empire was exceptionally brief. However, this “Hellenistic” world created by the military brilliance and insatiable ambition of Aristotle’s most prominent pupil, saw Hellenism (Greek culture) saturate the Near East. Greek became the common language of commerce. Greeks colonized as far as India. Cities old and new were physically constituted according to the template of the Greek polis. Alexandria (capital of Ptolemaic Egypt) quickly became the intellectual and commercial capital of the world. Behind it were Antioch (first city of the Seleucids), Athens, Carthage, and a rising Rome. But the incessant rivalry of the Macedonian successor states invited Rome’s incursion into the Hellenic East.

Eventually, the city-state of Rome, drawing on a quasi-national Italian metropole, would bring the western and the eastern Mediterranean together in a single empire. The East was far more civilized than the western Mediterranean: more urbanized, wealthier, culturally advanced, but the phalanx could not withstand the legion—or, rather, disunity could not overcome a unified power. The civil wars of the Roman Republic and the Hellenistic period both come to a close with the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. and the conquest of Greek, Ptolemaic Egypt the following year—Cleopatra and her ally and lover Mark Antony falling to Octavian. A habit of colonizing distant places, the different publics created in the agora of each polis, demographic fecundity, alongside raw military prowess, provided material bases for the Hellenic genius and its immense influence. Its pragmatic dominance was supplanted by Rome, but Greek culture never lost its superiority.

- David Franks