Epilogue

However constrained Cleopatra VII’s policies were by developments at Rome, she had striven hard to keep Egypt independent. She was the last Hellenistic monarch worthy of the name. All the same, as the sun steadily set on the Hellenistic world, a few other monarchs, minor figures it is true, remained (like Juba and Ptolemy in Mauretania far in the West) to rule by Rome’s grace over bits and pieces of the East. The Roman emperors, by way of convenience to themselves, occasionally fashioned formally independent statelets here and there and set up kings to rule over them. These princelings enjoyed playing the part with splendid courts (Lk. VII 25), grand public entrances (Acts, XXV 23), and magnificent banquets (Mk. VI 21). But their desire to be real kings rather than pretend ones on occasion tempted them to aspire to higher matters.

Josephus preserves a curious story (Ant. XIX 8,1 [338-341]) which is probably typical of these pathetic puppets’ occasional attempts to break free of their strings. Herod Agrippa I, during his brief reign as King of Judea (AD 41-44), invited five other kings to a conference with him at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee: Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the King of Commagene; Sampsigeramus, the King of Emesa (a city in Syria on the Orontes); Cotys, the King of Lesser Armenia; Polemon II, the King of Pontus; and Herod (Herod Agrippa I’s brother), the King of Chalcis. Josephus does not say what these six kinglets discussed at Tiberias, and the question is probably moot. For C. Vibius Marsus, the governor of Syria, intervened before these would-be Ptolemy Soters and Seleucus Nicators could do anything of consequence - he went to Tiberias

And ordered them to disperse, which they obediently did. Vibius thus extinguished one of the last gleams of political independence in the long twilight of the Hellenistic world.

The end of the Hellenistic world did not, of course, mean the end of the Greek world, even under Roman rule. The Hellenization which had begun in the late fourth century BC (see chap. 21) had seen to it that the urban culture of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor was by now thoroughly and (at least until the Arab conquest in the seventh century AD) inalterably Greek. People from all walks of life could at least make do in Greek and a few had even forgotten their “native” language: thus in the early first century AD, when the son of a Galilean carpenter met a woman who “although she was a Syro-Phoenician by race, spoke [only] Greek,” he could hold up his end of the conversation in Greek without apparently surprising anyone, because knowledge of Greek went without saying, unlike the Greek monolingualism of a woman who by ethnicity ought to have been speaking Aramaic or Phoenician (Mk. VII 26 - though the passage is usually translated unintelligibly).

The elite, of course, functioned fully in Greek throughout the eastern half of the Roman Empire. In the first century AD, a Jew such as Joseph, son of Matthias, could become a Roman citizen and take a Roman name - T. Flavius Josephus -, but when it came to writing the history of his people, he did so in Greek (as opposed to Latin or Aramaic). At about the same time, another Roman citizen, Paul, a Jew from the Cilician city ofTarsus, composed an epistle to the Galatians, the descendants of the Celts who had settled in Asia Minor in the 270s (see chap. 21) - again in Greek. In the second century AD, a Bithy-nian such as Arrian - L. Flavius Arrianus - could have a stellar career in the imperial administration and even serve as consul of Rome, but he wrote the history of Alexander the Great in Greek. In the towns and cities of Greece itself life went on under the Romans as well. The civic institutions of Athens continued to function, and at Sparta old customs such as the agoge were kept alive (Plut. Lyc. 18,1). Plutarch held civic offices in his native Chaeroneia where he composed his erudite biographies and numerous essays - all in Greek, of course. The end of political independence had meant little culturally, and the eastern half of the Roman Empire remained stoutly Greek. It was the lasting and most important legacy of the Hellenistic World.