Rome, the Greek World, and the East: Volume 3: The Greek World, the Jews, and the East

2. The Phoenician Cities: A Case-Study of Hellenisation

  The Phoenician Cities: A Case-Study of Hellenisation* 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 Alexanderestablished more than seventycities 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.  D–E, Loeb trans.) begin to seem not quite as foolish as they did, in the light of modern discoveries in Aï 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. *First published in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society  (): –. Earlier versions were read at the Cambridge Philological Society in April  and subsequently at the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich and at the Istituto di Storia Antica at Pavia. Since it cannot pretend in any case to be more than a sketch, it has been left in the same form, with added annotation.  The Phoenician Cities  Of the peoples, some still preserve the names which were given to them by their founders, some have changed them, while others have adopted a form of name designed to be more intelligible to thosewho are settled among them. It is the Greeks who are responsible for this. For when they subsequently rose to power they appropriated to themselves even the glory of the past, adorning the peoples with names which were intelligible to themselves and imposing on them a form of constitution as if they were descended from themselves. (Ant. , , Loeb trans.) A little later he gives a specific example: ‘‘Amathus . . . which is still called ‘Amathe’ by the local people [epichorioi], though the Macedonians named it ‘Epiphaneia’ after one of the epigonoi [Alexander’s successors]’’ (Ant. , ). Jerome confirms that ‘‘until our own time’’ the town was still called Hamath ‘‘both by the Syrians [Syri] and by the Hebrews [Hebraei]’’ (Hebr. Qu. Gen. , –, in CCL LXXII, ). It is of course an unquestionable fact that there was large-scale city foundation by the Seleucids, primarily Seleucus I, in North Syria, in the Orontes valley, and in Mesopotamia. I need only refer to Seyrig’s classic study of the urbanisation of North Syria by Seleucus I.1 The effect in both areas was to produce, in the first instance, societies with two separate cultures: the Aramaic culture of Hellenistic Syria remains, it is true, almost invisible to us; the Akkadian culture of Babylonia, using the cuneiform script,was to survive at least until the first century .. It is not irrelevant to the present study that it produced one native-born interpreter in Greek, Berosus of Babylon, in the early Hellenistic period.2 It was this world of contrasting cultures in Mesopotamia and Syria, cultures whose nature and functioning in the Graeco-Roman period remain almost wholly unintelligible , which eventually produced something like a fusion of cultures, in the form of Syriac Christianity. To illustrate this point I need only mention that Syriac literature originally stemmed from a Macedonian colony, Edessa. All recent studies of Hellenisation or ‘‘Hellenism’’ have emphasised that a fusion of Greek and native cultures was categorically not what Greeks of the fourth century and after had intended. We have all learnt from Momigliano ’s Alien Wisdom () how slight an interest Greeks took in other cultures . Martin Hengel in Jews, Greeks and Barbarians () and Claire Préaux . H. Seyrig, ‘‘Séleucus I et la fondation de la monarchie syrienne,’’ Syria  (): . Note also the important study, by P. Briant, ‘‘Colonisation hellénistique et populations indig ènes: la phase d’installation,’’ Klio  ():   P. Briant, Rois, tributs et paysans: études sur les formations tributaires du Moyen-Orient ancien (). . FGrH . See S. M. Burstein, The Babyloniaca of...