It was against this shifting political background that
the cultural
history of the Mediterranean world unfolded. The Mediterranean in 1000
B.C. must have been a world of many cultures, though none of them
outside Egypt and the Near East could be called civilizations. It would
hardly have seemed likely at the time that the most important of these
cultures in historical terms would prove to be that of the Greeks. The
Mycenaean civilization of the Bronze Age had collapsed a couple of
centuries before, and the Iron Age had yet to generate a new one.
There is no evidence that the Greeks in this period possessed any form
of writing. But two things can perhaps be identified that gave their
culture a degree of advantage. One was the relative ethnic and
linguistic homogeneity of Greece, and the other was the beginnings of
the Greek colonization overseas. These features meant that Greek
culture would have a larger constituency and a wider distribution than
any likely competitors.
The literary culture that developed among the Greeks
in the mid-first
millennium B.C. shared a couple of significant features with those of
contemporary India and China. In all three the Bronze Age past played a
central role in the culture—the Greek equivalents of the Vedas and the
older Chinese classics being the Homeric epics. But alongside this
archaic heritage, in all three cultures a novel interest appeared
around the middle of the millennium: rigorous philosophical and
scientific thought. One feature of Greek culture, however, set it apart
from Indian, Chinese, and other literary cultures of the day: its close
relationship to the city- state. Greek society lacked the kind of
powerful bureaucracy that elsewhere might provide a locus for the
formation of an elite culture (for example, in ancient Egypt); its
temples were not prominent in the appropriation of economic resources
(as was the case in the ancient Near East), and there was no entrenched
and hereditary priesthood (as there was in ancient India). Greek
culture was thus marked by a focus on the political that is largely
absent from Indian culture as it has come down to us. Spiritual
developments that renounced the world became a prominent theme among
the Greeks only with the demise of the independent city-state, and even
then a philosophy of renunciation like Epicureanism never became a mass
movement in the manner of Buddhism. At the same time this focus was
significantly different from that of political reflection in ancient
China, where even under conditions of fragmentation the scale of
political organization was much larger. In this way the culture of
Greece stood out in being what we might call a citizen culture.
The spread of Greek culture to non-Greeks was a prominent
theme in the
history of the ancient Mediterranean world. One major process by which
the culture spread was conquest effected by the Greeks themselves or,
more, precisely by their Macedonian overlords. In 334 B.C. the
Macedonian ruler Alexander set out to conquer the Persian Empire. When
he died in Babylon, in 323, he had brought Macedonian rule, and with it
Greek cultural dominance, to a region extending from Anatolia and Egypt
in the west to Central Asia and northwest India in the east. Over much
of this territory he had established Greek urban settlements. Greek
elite culture was accordingly to have a long history in this region,
but over the centuries it was gradually to lose its hold. Only in
Anatolia did the mass of the population become Greek-speaking, and even
this gain was eventually to be reversed.
In the end the adoption of Greek culture by politically
independent non-
Greek societies was to prove of much greater historical importance. The
rulers of Lydia seem to have been honorary members of the Greek
cultural world, and there is evidence both here and around the
Mediterranean for the adoption of elements of Greek culture by
indigenous elites in the neighborhood of Greek colonies. Thus, the
Gauls of southern France are said to have learned from the Greeks "a
more civilized way of life," tilling their fields, walling their towns,
living by law rather than force, and cultivating the vine and olive. A
particularly thoroughgoing example of such assimilation took place in
the first half of the fourth century B.C. when Mausolus, who ruled the
Carians in southwestern Anatolia, set about imposing the Greek way of
life on his people, among other things by forcibly resettling them in
cities. But the crucial reception of Greek culture took place in Italy.
As where the Etruscans acquired the alphabet from the Greeks and passed
it on to the Romans. But this early borrowing, though far from
isolated, does not seem to have been part of a wholesale adoption of
Greek literary culture, and led rather to the establishment of Latin as
the local literary language.
It was at a later stage that the Romans came into much
closer contact
with the Greek world through their conquest of Greece and the eastern
Mediterranean. The Roman elite of the second century B.C. then embarked
on a massive assimilation of the civilization it had conquered. As a
result, any educated Roman knew Greek, and the Greek heritage became an
integral part of Roman culture. Yet the primary literary language of
the Romans was still their native Latin. It was this Greek culture in
Latin dress that was spread by virtue of Roman conquest throughout the
western Mediterranean.
What is at first sight surprising in all this is that
the lands ofthe
most ancient civilizations, Egypt and the Near East, should not have
played a more prominent role in the westward spread of civilization in
the first millennium B.C. Mesopotamia, of course, was some way away
from the Mediterranean, and Egypt, though located on its southeastern
shore, had never shown much interest in maritime expansion. It lacked
the indigenous timber resources to build ships, and in any case its
civilization never spread far beyond the frontiers of Egypt. It is more
puzzling that the Phoenicians did not play a greater role in the
outcome, as opposed to the initiation, of the process. But their
expansion clearly lacked the demographic pressure that fueled that of
the Greeks; and their one major colony, Carthage, was defeated in its
struggle with Rome. The result was that what the ancient Mediterranean
bequeathed to Europe was Greek culture in its Latin form.
