The Hellenistic age; aspects of Helenistic civilization, treated by J.B. Bury and others

159 Pages·1968·1.466 MB·English

by  John Bagnell Bury

The
HellenisticA ge
Aspects of Hellenistic civilization
treated by J.B. BURYL, itt.D., F.B.A.,
Regius Professor of Modem History
in the University of Cambridge;
E. A. BARBl!RM, .A., Sub-Rector
of Exeter College, Oxford; EowYN
BEVA N, D.Litt., LL.D., Honorary
Fellowo f New College,O xford; and
W.W. TARNM, .A., Trinity College,
Cambridge
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1925
KRAUS REPRINT CO.
New York
1968
SECOND EDITION
L.C. Catalog Card Number 24-12227
First published 1923
Reprinted by permission of the Cambridge University Press
KRAUS REPRINT CO.
A U.S. Division of Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited
Printed in Germany
PREFACE
(By the Curatoro f the Lewis Collection)
T
HE essays here collected were, with the
exception of Professor Bury's, delivered as
informal lectures during the Lent Term of this
year at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
On at least two occasions in its history the Col
lege has benefited in a fashion quite out of the
ordinary by the munificence of its alumni. In 1574
the manuscript collection of Archbishop Parker was
deposited in our Library; and a little over three
hundred years later Sainuel Savage Lewis, Fellow
of Corpus and sometime custodian of the Parker
Manuscripts, left to the Society a collection of
objects of a.ncient art, vases, coins and gems, the
accumulation of which had been a life-work Dif
1.
ferent as they are, these gifts have two features in
common-compassable bulk and extreme variety,
characteristics which have given them, apart from
any other, a special educational value. Not a few
with their triposes recently behind them have learnt
at first hand under the auspices of the Elizabethan
archbishop or the Victorian fellow the alphabet of
advanced study.
1 An indication of the contents of the Lewis Collection is
given in an appendix.
*
1
.
VI PREFACE
It is at least arguable, in the case of abler men,
whether the three years which follow graduation be
not as important as the three years which precede it.
For those pursuing an academic career this can
hardly be in question. Few go far in that career,
who can not point back to some kind of inspiration,
personal or impersonal, which at this critical period
turned their energies to work which provoked their
powers. A series of informal discussions of the
Hellenistic Age, conducted by experts and open to
the classical and historical scholars of Corpus and
other colleges, was but a logical development of
the employment of the Lewis Collection as a
stimulus to graduate work. How suitable was the
choice at this moment of this period, how instant
its problems, how romantic this vast new sea of
history which still remains inadequately charted,
can best be told by the distinguished mariners who,
with at present but few others, have sailed often
and far upon it and brought back their argosies.
To them not merely conventional gratitude is due.
All scholars might not have been so prodigal of
their unpublished results, but their generosity made
the course of lectures as it now makes this book.
No attempt has been made to rewrite the three
addresses for publication. Their charm and fresh
ness, when first delivered, suggested the desirability
of preservation in permanent shape, and the value
of an additional essay by Professor Bury requires no
comment.
..
PREFACE vu
The book which has resulted is not exhaustive,
for there are other aspects of the Age which might
have been similarly treated, but no one can read it
without understanding better both the nature of
the material which exists for a study of the period
as also the aim and the methods with which scholars
are at work upon it.
G. B.
Micfuulmas1 923

CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE
V
THE HELLENISTIC AGE AND THE HIS
TORY OF CIVILIZATION
J.
By Professor B. BuRv I
ALEXANDRIAN LITERATURE
By E. A. BARBER • • • 31
HELLENISTIC POPULAR PHILOSOPHY
By EnwvN BEVAN
· 79
THE SOCIAL QUESTION IN THE THIRD
CENTURY
By W.W. TARN
108
APPENDIX:
CONTENTS OF THE LEWIS COLLECTION • • 141
INDEX .
• 147

THE HELLENISTIC AGE AND
THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION
T
HE habit of treating what is, not very happily,
called the Hellenistic age as if it were no more
than a wayside inn in which a historical student
travelling from Athens and Sparta to Rome is forced
reluctantly to halt for a few tedious hours is not yet
obsolete. This short survey is designed to illustrate
and underline its importance and interest for the
subsequent history of civilization.
The period of Greek history from the conquest
of Alexander the Great, who worked a miracle that
seemed to break the continuous course of history
by a long leap, down to Rome's completion of her
Eastern conquests by the annexation of Egypt, has
been until comparatively recent years exceptionally
unfortunate, in not being studied for its own sake,
and therefore in not having its definite and emi
nent place in the general history of the world pro
perly understood. It has entered little into liberal
education except so far as it is involved in the
history of the Roman Republic; An ordinary reader
of Roman history will just hear of the brilliant
Academician Carneades and the wise Stoic Panae
tius of Rhodes, because they visited and impressed
Rome ; but he knows hardly anything as a rule of
the Greece in which these men of light and leading
had been brought up. The art of that period can
not be ignored ; it appeals to the eye, in originals
HA I
2 THE AGE IN HISTORY
or copies, in every large European collection; but
the visitor to the museums who knows all about
the ages of Pheidias and Praxiteles is astonishingly
ignorant of the world in which the Venus of Melos
or the Dying Gaul was chiselled. A generation ago
boys used to learn geometry in the handbook of
Euclid, but the few who had a vague notion that
"Euclid" was the name of the author had no idea
who he was or when he lived ; if he had lived in
the fifth century and not in the age of Ptolemy
Soter, many of the schoolboys, and possibly some
of the masters, would have known at least that he
was a Greek. For there was a notion prevalent
that the Greeks were already decadent in the third
century; it has perhaps hardly died out yet, and has
probably been the principal cause of the neglect of
the post-Demosthenic age. Nothing could be more
untrue. That vague and facile word "decadent"
is often misused, but no misuse could be more
flagrant than to apply it to the Greeks of the third
and second centuries. The age of the political
greatness of their cities was indeed over, but they
still possessed creative strength and were as hot as
ever on the quest of truth. In completely altered
circumstances they were doing new and valuable
things and were expressing the Hellenic spirit in
new and valuable ways. Their highest intellectual
endeavours were now in the field of the exact
sciences and this was the age of their greatest
mathematicians.
For anyone who is interested in exploring the
history of European civilization and finding out
how the past is stored in the present, this period
of Hellenism may be said in a certain way to count