The Greek World

Already by the 5th and 4th centuries BC, the Greeks had attained great political and military power in the area of the Mediterranean. To a considerable degree, this can be explained by the relative overpopulation of the Greek states and the high level of military participation that characterized Greek communities. In Greece, about half of the free male population was normally available for military enterprises, a much higher percentage than was possible in the Persian Empire with its large but demilitarized population. After Macedon had thrust a form of political unity upon the Greek city-states, a considerable military potential could be mobilized for large-scale wars of conquest. It was Alexander the Great of Macedon who was the first to utilize it. His Macedon army was enlarged by thousands of Greek allies, while other Greeks on an individual basis enrolled as mercenaries in his service. And many thousands more would follow in the tracks of his expedition to the newly conquered regions. Alexander’s successors would found their own monarchies in Egypt and western Asia with their armies of Macedonians and Greeks. It was a form of mass migration that would eventually drain the manpower sources of both Macedon

And Greece. From roughly 200 BC on, the population of Greece and Macedon must on the whole have declined. At the same time, however, Greek language and Greek culture spread over enormous areas. After Alexander, “the Greek world” was no longer the world of the old poleis, which became politically less and less important, but of the states in Egypt and western Asia ruled by Greeks and Macedonians that emerged from the empire of Alexander. With Alexander, therefore, a new epoch began, in Greece and in those other regions, as well as a new phase in Greek civilization. For both, the term “Hellenism” is used. It denotes the period from Alexander up to the beginning of our era as well as Greek civilization during that period, when it had spread, in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, as a more or less elite culture over these vast areas outside the regions of the classical Greek world.