A new map
Alexander inherited a strong kingdom. Under his father Philip II (360/359-336 BCE) Macedonia, in northern Greece, had become a great power, and its royal court the leading centre of Greek culture. Alexander, king from 336, subdued the Persian empire of western Asia and Egypt within eleven years and pushed on into Central Asia as far as the Indus valley. His empire stretched from Greece and Asia Minor through Egypt and the old Persian lands to India.
That scale changed how culture travelled. A world that had been a cluster of Greek cities around the Aegean and the Mediterranean now included Egypt, Mesopotamia and Bactria, under Greek-speaking rulers.
Cities that lasted
Armies open a road; cities keep it open. In 332/331 BCE Alexander founded Alexandria in Egypt, laid out by the Rhodian architect Deinocrates and meant as the capital of his Egyptian lands and a naval base. After his death it passed to his general Ptolemy, whose dynasty ruled Egypt from it. Alexandria became the home of one of the first great libraries and museums, a place where Greek learning was collected and studied, and Pergamon later built another.
A common Greek
Language travelled with the cities. The koine, “common” Greek, based chiefly on the Attic dialect of Athens, was spoken and written from the fourth century BCE in Greece, Macedonia and the parts of Africa and the Middle East that came under Greek or Hellenised rulers. It gradually replaced the other ancient Greek dialects. It is the language of the Greek Bible, from the Septuagint translation to the Christian scriptures, and the basis of modern Greek.
Not one empire, but a shared culture
Alexander died in 323 BCE, and his generals, the Diadochoi, divided the empire into rival kingdoms: the Seleucids in the Near East, the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Antigonids in Macedonia, and later the Attalids of Pergamon. Politically the empire was gone in a generation. Culturally it lasted: the new kings were great patrons of Greek art and architecture, and Greek remained the shared language of their courts and cities. That is the period historians call Hellenistic, from 323 to 31 BCE.
It was never a one-way process. In northern and central Asia Minor, kingdoms such as Bithynia, Pontus and Cappadocia were ruled by local dynasties surviving from the Persian empire, now infused with Greek elements. Greek art, for its part, was exposed to a host of new influences from the cultures it met.
Alexander and art
Alexander cultivated the arts as no patron had done before him. His court sculptor was Lysippos, who made a whole series of statues of him, from his childhood on, a statue of Alexander hunting dedicated at Delphi, and a group of his cavalry squadron that the Romans later carried off to Rome. Lysippos’ portraits created the heroic ruler portrait, and Alexander’s successors adopted the type. Decades after his death, King Lysimachos still put Alexander’s head on his gold coins.
The wider world that Alexander opened, with its kings, cities and mixed populations, is the setting of Hellenistic art: grander, more varied and more dramatic than what came before.
Where to see it
Lysippos’ portraits of Alexander are lost, but coins and later portraits carry his image: the Metropolitan Museum in New York has the gold stater of Lysimachos. Hellenistic collections in Paris, Berlin, Rome and Athens show the art of the kingdoms that followed him. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)” (2008) and “Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition” (2007), Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Koine”; “Alexandria”; “Alexander the Great”.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.63-64, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 52.127.4.
