The Hellenistic Age

The Hellenistic Age is the name of a book by Peter Green I just finished reading. It’s a history and cultural overview. It quickly marches through the history from 334 to 31 B.C. in 130 pages with the cultural themes pulled in at appropriate points as the history moves briskly along. It opens with Alexander’s conquests, the wars among his successors and the emergence of his three strongest successors. These three, Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Syria and Turkey and Antigonus in Greece founded kingdoms that lasted until Rome triumphed. In 31 B.C. Egypt, the final remaining kingdom, was defeated by the man who was to become Augustus Caesar. But a good piece of the book is taken up with the wars among these three kingdoms as well as revolts, dynastic squabbles, divorces, incestuous marriages, and assassinations. And many of the rulers chronicled were gluttons, drunks or given to excessive sexuality.
Intellectual life was to a great degree taken up with the study and preservation of the great works of the glorious Greek past such as Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, the Pre-Socratic’s, Plato, and so on. Scholars minutely listed and classified these older works. There were good writers during this time but none that are essential to the great conversation of the Western tradition.
The dominating philosophical systems of this period were Stoicism, cynicism and Epicureanism. They have been characterized as useful in assisting one in accepting and fitting into a world in which the individual has reduced control over his own life and no control over political systems . Loss of power was their dilemma and their answer was to focus on self and seek the most happiness possible under the circumstances.
For the past couple of years I have been drawn to the Hellenistic age and the last century of Habsburg rule. I sense that this is because I feel some affinity between these times and our present world. I see an unmoored emptiness in the present day: so many things, so few values. Tens of millions of Americans have a knee jerk hatred of America. Scientology makes sense to millions. Keith Olberman and Geraldo Rivera can make decent livings just being themselves: what kind of weird world is that?
That’s this week’s book report
Something unrelated that some might find as interesting as I did. In my reading about the Habsburgs I came across something I hadn’t known about Ludwig Wittgenstein. I had always thought of L. W. as a part of the 20th century tradition of English philosophy. But I came across a writer who saw him as a Kantian. He was motivated not to make Moore or Russell or whoever happy but rather to solve some of the puzzles Kant had left floating around the Continent.