6 ‘BECOMING GREEK’ 322 BCE–27 BCE

If Alexander had ever intended to create a ‘new world order’, those who came after him failed spectacularly to see the project through. For thirty years after his death in Babylon, his former commanders fought among themselves—much as the Greek city-states had been doing for hundreds of years, only on a much larger geographical scale.

Starting in the east, wherever the Macedonian armies had passed and Alexander had left behind garrisons to protect their gains, a Greek-speaking population remained. Almost immediately, the easternmost of these regions was won back by the Indian king Chandragupta (Sandrakottos to Greek historians). The dynasty he founded, the Mauryans, would go on to dominate much of the Indian subcontinent. Those Greeks and Macedonians who lived in the territories reconquered by Chandragupta would be absorbed into the kingdom of his grandson, Ashoka. This king was an enthusiastic convert to Buddhism. An inscription from Alexandria-in-Arachosia, today’s Kandahar in Afghanistan, announces the success of the new religion, written in two languages, one of which is Greek. Evidently, Greek speakers were among those converted. And indeed one by the name of Menander would play a part in the development of Indian Buddhism a century later.²

As the Mauryan Empire in turn crumbled, new petty kingdoms emerged in the area of today’s Pakistan.

We know slightly more, but still tantalisingly little, about the Greek speakers of Bactria. This was a region geographically equivalent to today’s Afghanistan and the southern part of Uzbekistan. Conquered by Alexander, Bactria would maintain its political independence as a minor Macedonian kingdom on the fringes of the Hellenistic world for at least a century and a half. During that time, Kandahar and Samarkand were flourishing Greek cities. In 1966, the remains of another were discovered in eastern Afghanistan, on the border with Tajikistan. The site is known by the modern name of Ai Khanoum. Some of the buildings uncovered there by archaeologists are in the Persian style; others are immediately recognisable as Greek.

Carved on a monument at Ai Khanoum are several of the famous moral maxims that had first been displayed in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, more than two thousand miles distant. The author of the inscription identifies himself as one Clearchus, probably to be identified with Aristotle’s former student of that name who had gone from his native Cyprus to study in Athens before winding up in this far corner of the Greek-speaking world.

Then, tracking westwards, there was Mesopotamia, the ‘land between the two rivers’, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Lying at the centre of the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture is believed to have begun, this had been one of the world’s most densely populated regions for several millennia already. Susa, built on a tributary of the Tigris, had been the administrative capital of Persia. Babylon, on the Euphrates, had once ruled over an empire of its own and boasted one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens, supposed to have been built by its king, Nebuchadnezzar, of biblical fame. Alexander had moved his headquarters from Susa to Babylon shortly before his death. Uruk, farther south on the Euphrates, had an even older history. Once the wars of succession were over, all three of these historic cities would continue to flourish as the main centres of power of the largest of the great Hellenistic kingdoms. Known as ‘Asia’, this kingdom reached westwards all the way to the Mediterranean and across Anatolia to the Aegean. The rulers of Asia were the Seleucids, the name of the dynasty founded by Seleucus I, who proclaimed himself king (basileus) in 305 BCE.

Archaeology shows us that these historic Mesopotamian cities changed remarkably little under the new dispensation.

The nearest thing the Seleucid kingdom had to an official capital was another new foundation, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, not far from Babylon at the point where the two rivers come closest together and were linked by a canal. Seleucia-on-the-Tigris very quickly grew to become home to a hundred thousand people—between two and three times the population of Athens in its classical heyday. All these new cities were laid out on the same rectangular grid plan. Said to have been the brainchild of one Hippodamus of Miletus, back in the fifth century BCE, this system of town planning was now the hallmark of every new city throughout the Greek-speaking world.⁵

The language of the former Persian administration, Aramaic, continued in use alongside Greek for official purposes. Local people adopted Greek names, often in tandem with their original non-Greek ones. Many, perhaps even the majority, would have been able to function in several languages—as indeed they had been doing for centuries before this. The difference was that the prestige language was now Greek. It was in Greek that the Babylonian historian Berossus wrote what has been described as a ‘sophisticated history’ of the ancient city and its civilisation. Not enough of his work survives for us to form any idea of his motives.

Out of these meetings of Greek with Babylonian minds, during the first century of Seleucid rule came a far-reaching innovation that would ever afterwards affect the way in which history is written and people everywhere think about the distant past. The ancient Babylonians had measured time by the reigns of kings. An event was recorded as having happened in the tenth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, for example. With the accession of each new king, the clock started over. Similar systems were in use all over the ancient world. Greek city-states measured time by the names of the highest officials elected in each year. But after Seleucus I was assassinated in 281 BCE, the record keepers in Babylon kept the clock running. Time, from then on, was measured not by the year of each new reign but by the years that had passed since Seleucus had first gained control of his kingdom. This was in 312 BCE (seven years before he took the title of king). It was the first ever universal system for measuring historical time.⁷

Fifteen hundred miles to the west, and stretching far to the south into Africa, lay the second in size of the three great ‘successor’ kingdoms, Egypt. It was also by far the richest. This time, there was no question about where the centre of power lay. From its foundation by Alexander in 331 BCE to the time when his former general, Ptolemy, took the title of king in 305 BCE, Alexandria had grown exponentially to become a brand new, purpose-built capital city, comparable to Saint Petersburg in the eighteenth century or New Delhi or Brasilia in the twentieth.

Egypt had been a prosperous, developed, and relatively stable kingdom for some two millennia before this time. The land and its people were intimately connected with the Nile, whose annual flooding brought both fertile silt and the means of irrigation to make agriculture productive. But Alexander’s decision to build a city on the coast, close to the westernmost mouth of the river, suddenly turned the geography of the kingdom on its head. The new Macedonian rulers built a canal between the river delta and the sea, in this way connecting the ancient Egyptian artery of trade with Greek networks that reached across the Mediterranean.⁸

Before long, the city’s population would rise to about a million, making it one of the largest anywhere in the world at the time. The Ptolemies could command wealth to lavish on public projects that had been unimaginable in the straitened conditions of the mountains or islands of the Greek heartland. The new fashion for enormous size was spectacularly manifested in the lighthouse built during the first half of the third century BCE on the island of Pharos, overlooking two newly constructed harbours. Named after the island and rising to something over three hundred feet in height, the lighthouse remained for centuries one of the tallest buildings in the world—topped only by the Great Pyramid at Giza.⁹ But unlike a famous monument to a long-dead pharaoh, this new skyscraper had a practical function: to guide ships safely to port. Safer trading would be more lucrative, making the huge investment in manpower and resources also an economic one. The Pharos would stand for almost a millennium and a half until an earthquake caused much of it to fall into the harbour, where divers would discover the remains in the 1990s. Long before that, what was left on land was reused in the fifteenth century to build the Qaitbay fortress that dominates the seaward skyline of Alexandria today.

On the mainland, on the seafront opposite the lighthouse, an extravagant complex of buildings housed the royal palace. It used to be thought that the foundations of these must lie beneath the modern city, which still preserves much of the original street plan. But thanks to excavations that began in the 1990s, we now know that the sea level and shoreline have changed dramatically since the time of the Ptolemies. The monumental architecture of their palace and other public buildings has begun to yield treasures from beneath the sea.¹⁰ Included in the palace complex was a sanctuary dedicated to the nine Muses, the divine powers that had once inspired Homer and Hesiod and that were credited by the Greeks with being the source of every form of imaginative creativity—in the sciences as well as the arts. The name of the sanctuary, Mouseion, has passed into many of today’s languages with the sense of ‘museum’. But the colonnades of the original Mouseion seem to have been empty of exhibits. In modern terms this creation of Ptolemy I was more like a research institute or a learned society.

Alongside the Mouseion was the famous Library of Alexandria, the first of its kind in the world. Scholars based there invented the discipline of establishing authoritative texts from among the dozens, or even hundreds, of competing versions available, commenting on them, elucidating their obscurities—and above all, cataloguing them. Alexandrian scholarship has ever since been caricatured as being as dry as the sand of the Egyptian desert. There was much more to it than that. But it is true that Alexandrians had a passion for making lists and classifying things. And it is also true that everything they collected, preserved, and catalogued was written in Greek.

What can have been the motive behind such an exclusive, and indeed expensive, fixation upon things Greek? Why invest on such a scale in commemorating and promoting cultural achievements that were not even native to their own kingdom of Macedonia but that belonged to the much more widely diffused Greek-speaking world? A rather crude but not unreasonable answer might be that Macedonia, world conqueror though it had proved itself to be, had nothing comparable of its own to offer. In any case, it was an astute move. And it brought results. Just as the famous lighthouse served as a beacon for trading ships, so the Mouseion and the library together performed the same function, for centuries, as a beacon to attract talent from every part of the Hellenistic world. And the research that went on there was by no means confined to what we would call the arts and humanities.¹¹

Eratosthenes of Cyrene, a polymath and one of the first directors of the library, came from a long-established Greek-speaking city on the coast of today’s Libya, that had been absorbed into the Ptolemies’ kingdom. Eratosthenes was the first to use a scientific method to calculate the circumference of the earth by comparing the angle of the sun’s shadow measured simultaneously at two points on the same longitude but separated by the length of the kingdom, from Alexandria to Aswan. And the answer that he came up with was very close to being right.

From the Asian shore of the Bosphorus came Herophilus of Chalcedon; from the Aegean island off the coast of Attica, Erasistratus of Keos. Working at the Library of Alexandria under the patronage of the first two Ptolemies, these two Greek speakers were the first anatomists to base their research on the dissection of human bodies. Exactly what they learned remains unclear. But they certainly added to the accumulation of medical knowledge that would be bequeathed to the modern world—along with issues of medical ethics that are still with us. Cutting up dead people for research would soon, once again, become taboo until well into the nineteenth century. And it seems that not all of the bodies cut up by these early anatomists, with the blessing of their royal patrons, were dead.¹²

The Ptolemies proved remarkably successful in progressively establishing Greek as the chief (though never the only) language of culture and communication throughout Egypt for a thousand years—long after their dynasty had been extinguished. This was the climate in which an Egyptian priest by the name of Manetho, during the reign of one of the early Ptolemies, wrote the history of his own people in Greek, just as Berossus would do in Babylon. Although his work has survived only through later excerpts and summaries, it remains today an invaluable source of information about the much older history of Egypt under the pharaohs.

And it may have been under the patronage of Ptolemy II that the Torah, the sacred scriptures of the Jews, began to be translated into Greek. This was the beginning of the corpus that would later become known to Christians as the Old Testament and that is today the oldest surviving witness to the ancient Hebrew scriptures. Some believe that the translations were made for the benefit of Jews who had settled in Alexandria and were rapidly adopting the Greek language, while keeping faith with their own distinctive religion. But there is also a story, dating from the second century BCE, that Ptolemy wanted a version that would be accessible to his own scholars working in the Alexandrian library. If this is true, it would show an openness to other cultures not otherwise in evidence in the activities of the library that we know about. But whatever the original motivation for these translations, their existence testifies to the unassailable position of the Greek language in Hellenistic Alexandria.¹³

Not that the Ptolemies were indifferent to the people who made up the great majority of their subjects, or their traditions. Beginning with Alexander himself, and just like the Seleucids in Mesopotamia, the Macedonian rulers of Egypt went to great pains to present themselves as the legitimate successors to the native rulers whose role they had usurped. In this case, that meant the pharaohs, whose dynasties were traced by Manetho back to the time of the first pyramids. Some of the best-preserved temples of the Egyptian gods, carved images, and inscriptions in hieroglyphics, the oldest form of Egyptian writing, that can still be seen along the course of the Nile today were in fact either first built or newly restored during the centuries of Macedonian rule.

Alexandria was something of a special case: native Egyptians, like the Jews, had their own quarter in the city and were clearly a minority. Egyptian antiquities and ancient Egyptian rituals seem to have been given less prominence in the capital than elsewhere. But they had their place even there. We know this from some of the finds made by archaeologists working in recent decades on the seabed in the Eastern Harbour of Alexandria. These include statues of Egyptian gods that were already more than a thousand years old before anyone ever lived on this bare stretch of desert shore. They had been brought by barge down the Nile from temples hundreds of miles away to adorn the royal palace of the Ptolemies.¹⁴

All this added up to a curious blend that was neither quite ‘cultural apartheid’ nor cultural fusion. Entirely typical was the practice first established by Ptolemy II when he married his own sister, Arsinoe, and made her his queen in 274 BCE. Marriage between royal brothers and sisters had been part of the ancient mystique of the pharaohs. For Greeks, on the other hand, incest of any kind had only ever been allowed for the gods of Olympus, who could do anything, even those things that they punished in mortals—as witness the story of Oedipus, hounded by the gods for marrying his mother, even in ignorance. But learned Alexandrian courtiers took the incestuous royal marriage of Ptolemy Philadelphus (‘Sibling-Loving’) in their stride. From that time on, most of the Ptolemies would marry within the family—at a stroke burnishing their credentials as true Egyptian rulers while actually ensuring the exclusivity of their Macedonian bloodline.¹⁵

By comparison with the regularly planned wide boulevards of Alexandria, bustling with horse-drawn wheeled traffic, Athens in the middle of the third century BCE was described by a contemporary visitor as having ‘narrow and winding’ streets, ‘as they were all built long ago’. The water supply was poor and food scarce unless you could afford exorbitant prices. True, the same visitor concedes, in the city you will also ‘see the most beautiful sights on earth’, among them the temples on the Acropolis and the recently completed Theatre of Dionysus. But even so, he warns his readers, ‘a stranger would find it hard to believe at first sight that this was the famous city of Athens’.¹⁶

Indeed, despite the grandeur of its public buildings, Athens had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Inexorably, political power was draining upwards, towards the third of the successor kingdoms, Macedonia. There, the descendants of another of Alexander’s commanders, Antigonus Monophthalmus (‘One-Eyed’), were in charge and known as the Antigonids. The actual arrangements in force at any one time and the precise relationship between the city of Athens and whichever king was in power in Macedonia were in a constant state of flux, particularly during the early years of the century. Outwardly, the forms and the locutions of democracy, abolished after the defeat at Crannon in 322 BCE, had soon been restored and would more often than not be maintained thereafter. We know this from the many decrees and proclamations that were inscribed on stone for all to read. But how truly democratic was Athens at this time? The reality seems to have been that the self-determination of a few thousand citizens, acting (theoretically) as a body, was no longer a political force capable of directing events except at the most local level. The dynamics of a citizen assembly, galvanised by a charismatic individual such as Themistocles or Pericles, that had guided Athens through the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, had become an anachronism in a Greek-speaking world that operated on the scale of the new kingdoms. Athenians still went through the motions. But that is all they were.¹⁷

In the face of these realities, Athenians continued to talk and to write down what they said and thought. Very little of what they wrote during the third century BCE has survived—in part, no doubt, because decisions about what was worthy to be preserved for the future were now being taken by the librarians of Alexandria. The most influential innovation of the time was a new style of comedy. In place of the bawdy humour and topical satire that had been the staples of Aristophanes and the earlier Athenian comic dramatists, New Comedy was tightly plotted. The action of these plays is built around a limited number of stock situations and characters. Romantic young lovers overcome all obstacles to win through to a happy ending. In melodramatic twists, long-lost family members turn up and are recognised. Along the way, the audience would be entertained by running repartee between masters and their wise-cracking slaves. From its beginnings in Athens, New Comedy would spread during the third century BCE right across the Greek-speaking world.¹⁸

In philosophy, too, Athens continued to lead. The schools that had been founded by Plato and Aristotle in the previous century were still flourishing, while new ones emerged to rival them. These were ‘schools’ in the double sense of institutions that involved an element of instruction, and ‘schools of thought’, which perpetuated the ideas of the original founders. But the quest for universal truths, or the highest purpose of human life, gave way to a more utilitarian approach. The new philosophy that emanated from Athens was designed to teach people how to make the most of their lives in the situations in which they found themselves. According to Epicurus, active in Athens until his death in 270 BCE, the secret was to make the best of life’s good things. Zeno, from Citium in Cyprus, would gather an audience in the Painted Stoa (a kind of shopping arcade) in the Athenian marketplace during the same years and tell them, on the contrary, to minimise the worst. The followers of these two men would be known respectively ever afterwards as Epicureans and Stoics (after the arcade).

Both alike envisaged a world ruled by gods who are remote and indifferent. Both agreed that any kind of concerted action by groups or by society as a whole is ultimately futile. Instead, the key to happiness and fulfilment lies in what we would call a psychological attitude on the part of the individual. Crucially, they believed, this can be acquired by teaching and practice. Modern stereotypes brand Epicureans as seekers after sensual pleasure, often associated with the motto, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. By contrast, the word ‘stoical’ has entered the languages of today to describe patient endurance in the face of suffering. In reality, the teachings of both schools, as we know them from later times, were a great deal more nuanced than those stereotypes. Stoicism, in particular, would become hugely influential in the ancient world for the next eight hundred years. Some Stoic beliefs and practices would even lay the foundations for aspects of Christianity. But unlike a religious faith based on revelation, both philosophies were founded on a principle that was deeply ingrained in all ancient Greek philosophy: the way to truth was through the exercise of reason and rational judgement.¹⁹

Athens and the Greek peninsula marked the western limit of the three great Hellenistic kingdoms that had come into existence in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. But the Greek-speaking world of the third century BCE did not end there. Farther west, Greek cities were still thriving on the coasts of Sicily and all over the toe and heel of Italy. Beyond Italy, Massalia (today’s Marseille) was still very much a going concern and a Greek one at that. The greatest of the Greek cities in the western Mediterranean was now Syracuse. Not to be outdone by the new kings when they divided up the domains that had been won by Alexander, in 304 BCE the ‘tyrant’ of Syracuse also took the title of king (basileus).²⁰

Ever since the time of the Persian Wars far to the east in the early fifth century BCE, the Greek city-states of Sicily had been fighting off their rivals, the Carthaginians, with varying success. Carthage, in modern Tunisia, had grown from its origins as a Phoenician settlement on a par with many others scattered throughout the western Mediterranean to become the most powerful state in the region. By the time that Syracuse became officially a monarchy on the Hellenistic model, Sicily had been effectively divided between the Greeks in the east of the island and the Carthaginians in the west.

During the century that followed, Syracuse would become the birthplace of two of the leading figures in Hellenistic poetry and science. Both of these men also benefited from the patronage of the Ptolemies and worked for part of their lives in Alexandria—a reminder of how interconnected the Hellenistic world was, even across political boundaries. The poet Theocritus single-handedly invented the genre of literature that we now call (from its Latin equivalent) ‘pastoral’. His dialogues in verse, known as ‘idylls’, were very often set in an idealised Sicilian landscape of shepherds and pastures. The story of Daphnis, the singing shepherd who dies of unrequited love and is lamented by all of nature, is perhaps the best known of these.²¹

Archimedes of Syracuse, a friend and kinsman of the ruling dynasty, has been described as ‘one of the greatest creative geniuses that Greek science produced’. He is still remembered for Archimedes’s principle—a means to determine the specific gravity, and therefore something of the chemical composition, of an object submerged in water—as well as for the story that he made the discovery in his bath and emerged naked to proclaim to all who would listen, ‘Eureka!’ (‘I have found it’).²²

It was during the lifetime of Archimedes, and on this western edge of the Greek-speaking world, that a new power began to rise, one that would soon create an empire to eclipse even Alexander’s. Indeed, the final exercise of Archimedes’s ingenuity would cost him his life, in 212 BCE, after he had devised anti-siege engines to keep this enemy at bay for two years encamped outside his city. The new world power, and the enemy laying siege to Syracuse, was Rome.²³

Once upon a time, Rome was no more than another city-state on the outer fringe of the Greek-speaking world. For hundreds of years, the borders of the Roman state had extended no farther than Latium, the city’s immediate hinterland in west-central Italy. Early Rome had developed as many a Greek city-state had done before it. The Romans had expelled their last king in 509 BCE. Since then, the Latin expression that defined their state was res publica, literally ‘the thing belonging to the people’, and the origin of the modern term republic. By the time of Alexander’s conquests in the east, the Roman Republic had established a nominal balance of power between the Senate—in effect an oligarchy made up of the wealthiest citizens—and the majority of the people. This balance was enshrined in the initials SPQR, representing the Latin phrase ‘the Roman Senate and People’. But it was a very unequal balance. By Greek standards, the Roman Republic was an oligarchy, though technically it was a hybrid that included some elements of democracy, such as the popular franchise for certain offices of state.²⁴ Of the Greek city-states, the one that Rome in its early years most closely resembled was Sparta. The Roman state was highly militarised. For its citizens, the highest goal was invariably to win honours in battle against the state’s enemies. Eventually, this became a recipe for aggressive growth.

As the ambitions of Rome reached southwards towards the toe of Italy and Sicily, they were bound to collide with those of Carthage, expanding in the opposite direction. When that happened, the Greek city-states would find themselves caught in the middle. The First Punic War (so called from the Latin word for ‘Carthaginian’) began in 264. Until this time, Rome had been a formidable power on land but had no navy to speak of. With great risk, the Romans took to the seas. After a series of closely fought battles on both sea and land, many of them in and around Sicily, the war ended in 241 BCE. The Romans won and claimed Sicily as their prize. In this way, not just the Carthaginian cities of the island but the Greek ones too lost their independence to Rome.

That was only the beginning. Hostilities were renewed in 218 BCE. The Second Punic War is best remembered for the daring exploit by the Carthaginian general Hannibal bringing an army supported by war elephants all the way from Spain, through southern France and over the Alpine passes through winter snow and ice, to take the Romans from the rear and defeat them in a series of bloody battles fought in central Italy. Rome’s survival hung by a thread. In the course of a dozen years of mutual attrition, the Romans slowly regained the upper hand. Hannibal was forced back to Africa and defeated in 202 BCE at the battle of Zama, fought not far from Carthage itself.

The Greek historian Polybius, writing a little over half a century afterwards, was the first to notice that with the outbreak of that war, history had become what today we would call global. Up till that time, as Polybius expresses it, events and their causes had been limited in their impact to the part of the world where they happened. But from then on: ‘History works like an organism; actions taking place in Italy and North Africa are interconnected with those in Asia and Greece and the direction of all is towards a single end.’ That end, as Polybius saw it, was the supremacy of Rome. He wrote his history for the express purpose of making sense, for his fellow Greeks, of how this had come about within, as he put it, the space of ‘just fifty-three years’.²⁵

The Second Punic War again drew in the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily. Several of them picked the wrong side to win—tempted by Hannibal’s offer to ensure the ‘liberty of the Hellenes’—and as a result shared the fate of Syracuse. From the other side of the Adriatic, the Antigonid kingdom of Macedonia also made an alliance with Hannibal. This had the effect of bringing the Roman legions into the southern Balkans once the Carthaginians had been dealt with. Some of the Greek city-states sided with the Macedonians led by Philip V, others with Rome. When Philip was decisively defeated in Thessaly in 197 BCE, it fell to the Roman Senate to settle the affairs of the Greek states. A commission arrived at Corinth headed by the victorious Roman general Titus Quinctius Flamininus. If we are to believe the word of Polybius, Flamininus persuaded the Senate that

if [the Romans] wished to gain universal renown among the Greeks, and to convince the country as a whole that the Romans had originally crossed the Adriatic not to advance their own interests but to secure the liberty of the Greeks, they must withdraw from every place and set free all the cities which were now garrisoned by Philip [V].

When this settlement was announced, at the panhellenic festival of the Isthmian Games, held near Corinth in 196 BCE, the crowds went wild with excitement. Flamininus was mobbed. His herald had to make the announcement twice before he could even be heard. ‘Every factor’, wrote Polybius, who would have been a babe in arms at the time:

combined to produce this crowning moment, when by a single proclamation all the Greeks inhabiting both Asia and Europe became free, with neither garrison nor tribute to burden them but enjoying their own laws.²⁶

Flamininus was as good at his word. The legions departed. It was now up to the Greek city-states to manage their own affairs once again, and to keep the peace among themselves.

But five years later, the Romans were back. This time it was the Seleucid king Antiochus III (the Great), who had detected an opportunity to aggrandise his kingdom and sent troops across the Hellespont, apparently in an attempt to win over the Greek states to his own cause. This was too much for the Senate in Rome. In a series of battles, the legions under Scipio Africanus, the victor in the war against Carthage, pursued Antiochus back to Anatolia. There they inflicted a final defeat at Magnesia (today’s Manisa, not far from Izmir) in 188 BCE. It was the first time that Roman soldiers had fought on the Asian landmass.

From that time on, Rome became increasingly confident, some would say arrogant, in its dealings with the Greek-speaking world. The last king of Hellenistic Macedonia was called Perseus. He seems to have harboured ambitions to live up to his mythological namesake, who had slain the monstrous gorgon, Medusa, and founded one of the oldest Greek dynasties. The army mustered by this new Macedonian Perseus, in 171 BCE, according to the Roman historian Livy, was the largest since the time of Alexander.²⁷ Once again, the Greek city-states took different sides, some supporting Macedonia, others, including Athens, supporting Rome. All of Perseus’s plans came to grief in the battle of Pydna, fought on the coast of southern Macedonia in June 168 BCE.

A year later the former king would be paraded through the streets of Rome among captives led in chains in the public spectacle that the Romans reserved for such occasions and called a ‘triumph’. By that time, defeated Macedonia had been split into four subject states, all directly answerable to the Roman Senate. Thousands of those who had fought alongside the Macedonians were sold into slavery. To ensure good behaviour, prominent citizens of other Greek states were shipped off to Rome as hostages. Among them was Polybius, who would spend the next twenty years of his life there, writing the greater part of his History and trying to make sense of it all.

After the battle of Pydna, on the other side of the Mediterranean, the latest in a series of ‘Syrian Wars’ between the Macedonian kings of Asia and Egypt had just ended with the defeat of Ptolemy VI at the hands of Antiochus IV, the son of his namesake who had lost the battle of Magnesia to the Romans. A large portion of Alexander’s former empire was poised to be reunited under the Seleucids and to become all-powerful. Once again, the Roman Senate decided to take a hand. Just as Antiochus was about to seal his victory, leading his victorious troops into Alexandria, a high-level envoy arrived by ship from Rome.

Caius Popilius Laenas had not even brought a significant military force with him. Instead of returning the king’s greeting, as Polybius tells it, the Roman handed him a sealed wax tablet and told him to open it and read it on the spot. When Antiochus complied, he found himself instructed by the Senate to give up the war and return home empty-handed. When he tried to prevaricate, the Roman drew a line around him in the sand with his stick ‘and told him to give his reply to the message before he stepped out of that circle’.²⁸ Antiochus had no choice. The episode is the origin of the phrase we still use, ‘a line in the sand’. The ‘day of Eleusis’, as it has been known ever since, after the suburb of Alexandria where the meeting took place, marked a turning point. From that moment, the grateful Ptolemies and their Egyptian kingdom would be under the protection of the most powerful state in the world.

Rival Greek states now appealed to Rome as they had once done to Persia. In a last-ditch effort to assert their political independence, the cities of the Peloponnese had revived a cooperative venture that they called the ‘Common State (Koinon) of the Achaeans’. Better known as the ‘Achaean League’, the name given to it by modern historians, the attempt has been hailed as ‘one of the great constitutional innovations of the Hellenistic world’ and has even been credited with inspiring the federal Constitution of the United States.²⁹ The historian Polybius was also a fan, as his father had been one of the leading lights in its formation. But if the Achaean League represented a real constitutional breakthrough by the Greeks, it was too little and it came too late. The trouble with this latest attempt at confederation was the same as it had always been. How much autonomy could be allowed to individual members? What forms of coercion did it take to get them to work together? Sparta, in particular, had never wanted to be part of any federal state and violently resisted being dragged into this one. Others followed the Spartan lead. And so, as the year 146 BCE approached, the Romans had all the excuse they needed to intervene once more.

The timing was the worst possible for the Greeks. Quite why Roman policy should have taken such a savage turn that year was already a puzzle in the ancient world and remains so today.³⁰ But it seems that drawing lines in the sand was no longer enough for the senators. Even the humbling of Carthage at the end of the Second Punic War had not been decisive enough. Nothing less than total destruction would do. And so, without much regard for pretexts, a Third Punic War followed in 149 BCE. Three years later, Carthage was razed to the ground.

At almost the same time, during the summer of 146 BCE, an army fielded by the Achaean League was defeated outside Corinth by the Roman consul Lucius Mummius. The Greek city was singled out for the same treatment. Many of its people had already fled. Of those who remained, most of the men were killed, the women and children sold into slavery. Public buildings were torn down and set on fire. Art treasures were pillaged and shipped off to Rome. By order of the Senate, no one was allowed to return to the ruins or ever live there again. A hundred years would pass before the decree would be rescinded and Corinth would begin to rise once more, this time as a colony for settlers from Italy. In the meantime, at Corinth just as at Carthage, the wrecked houses and temples would be left as an empty wilderness—and a terrible warning to any other would-be enemies of Rome.³¹

Rome was not yet the capital of an empire, ruled by an emperor. That still lay more than a century in the future. But all the time that the Roman Senate and Roman legions were wresting political influence and military power away from the Greek-speaking world and into their own hands, the future Roman civilisation was being formed. The process of ‘becoming Greek’ could work just as well through being conquered as through conquering others.

Most Greeks had not taken a great deal of notice of Rome until they had been forced to by events. Romans, on the other hand, had always been aware of the stories and the art of the Greeks. Even before the foundation of Rome itself, as we know from archaeology, large numbers of Greek painted pots had found their way onto tables and into graves throughout western Italy. Romans spoke a different language, of course—Latin—though it still belongs to the same Indo-European family of languages (unlike Etruscan, the language of their neighbours). The gods they worshipped had different names. But Jupiter, his wife Juno, and the rest of the quarrelsome tribe of gods and goddesses worshipped in Rome bore strong family resemblances to Zeus, Hera, and the Greek gods of Olympus. According to a story that had been current since at least the fifth century BCE, the ultimate ancestor of the Romans was Aeneas, a hero from the Iliad, who had led the remnant of the defeated Trojans to make a new home in Italy. Through the myths about their gods and the legends of their heroes, the Romans from an early stage had been inserting themselves into older narratives that already existed in Greek.³²

But it was during the third and second centuries BCE, at exactly the time when the Roman state was bursting out of its central Italian heartland and making conquests abroad, that Romans most obviously went out of their way to emulate the culture of this one group among the many peoples they conquered. Roman writers began to compose history, epic poetry, and tragedies, not only in the Greek manner but also very often actually in Greek. Theatre came to Rome in the year 240 BCE. During the next century, the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, based closely on the plot devices and stock characters of Athenian New Comedy, would establish a tradition that would last for centuries. And while Latin established itself as what a later age would call a ‘language of culture’, most of those who made up the Roman elite were thoroughly bilingual in Latin and Greek.³³

Writing in Latin not long after the Second Punic War, a Roman author commented that it was the very violence of Rome’s conquests abroad that had brought the Muses, those divine patrons of the arts according to Greek mythology, to impose themselves ‘on the fierce inhabitants of Rome’. And a century and a half after the destruction of Corinth by Lucius Mummius, one of the greatest of all Roman poets, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace, would famously acknowledge: ‘Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror, and introduced her arts into rude Latium.’³⁴

Farther east, in places still beyond the reach of Rome, a double process was going on. On the one hand, the once-vast Seleucid kingdom of Asia was being steadily whittled away. On the other, all round the edges of what remained, new independent states were springing up, but still modelling themselves on the Hellenistic kingdoms and their Greek ways.

Beyond the Tigris, a nomadic people, the Parthians, annexed the Iranian heartland of the old Persian Empire and in time would become the principal rival in the region, first to the Seleucids and then to Rome. But Parthian rulers minted coins in the Greek style. They had their names inscribed on them in Greek, along with the Greek title basileus (king), and sometimes for good measure, ‘philhellene’ (literally, ‘Greek-loving’). A Parthian palace on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, a place never reached even by Alexander, was designed in the Greek manner, with statues that imitated classical Greek originals.³⁵ On the other side of their kingdom, the Seleucids were losing their grip over Anatolia to breakaway rivals. In the northwest, the city of Pergamum, not far from the Aegean coast opposite Lesbos, became the capital of a newly independent kingdom. The rulers of Pergamum, the Attalids, were Macedonians and the region had been Greek-speaking for centuries. But farther east along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Bithynia was now ruled by Thracians, the non-Greek-speaking people from the European side of the Dardanelles; Pontus, by a Persian family whose name in Greek became Mithridates. Inland and to the south, another Persian family set up a dynasty in Cappadocia, yet another in the tiny enclave of Commagene on the borders of today’s Turkey and Syria.

Some of these dynasties intermarried with the Seleucids. But in origin none of them, other than the Attalids of Pergamum, was Greek-speaking. Greek would have been a foreign tongue to most of their subjects. And yet, in all these places, the Greek language and the trappings of the Hellenistic kingdoms were seized upon by rulers and filtered through to their people. The elites of these non-Greek kingdoms seem to have vied with one another to show how ‘Greek-loving’ they could be—not in terms of political alignment, but culturally. And a common language that could be used across great distances must have had a practical appeal, too, particularly in Anatolia where none had existed before. ‘Becoming Greek’, quite simply, was the fashion everywhere during the second century BCE.

Only in one place, and by one group of people, was the trend seriously resisted. And even there, resistance had its limits. The exception that proves the general rule is the story of the Jews. Before the coming of the Macedonians, the people of the former kingdoms of Israel and Judaea had for several centuries maintained a form of ‘extreme ethnic separatism’. Key to this was their worship of a sole god who was not only the creator and ‘saviour’ of this one people but also the only god who had existed or could ever exist anywhere. Among peoples who worshipped many gods, it could be an easy matter to recognise equivalences, as had happened with the Roman Jupiter and the Greek Zeus. There are many such examples throughout antiquity. But the Jewish belief in a single god, or monotheism, explicitly forbade the worship of any other.³⁶ The trade-offs that allowed the polytheistic religions of the ancient world to rub along together were not possible in the case of a different type of religion altogether.

While their lands had formed part of the Persian Empire, the Jews had been ruled by the high priest of the Temple at Jerusalem, the chief city of Judaea, without much interference. At first, the same arrangement continued after Alexander’s conquest. But in 301 BCE, at a crucial moment during the wars of succession, according to later Jewish sources, Ptolemy I sacked Jerusalem and took thousands of Jews from Judaea back with him to Egypt as prisoners of war. For the next hundred years, most of what was then called Syria remained under the control of the Ptolemies of Egypt, not the Seleucids of Asia. In Egypt, the captives were given their freedom and encouraged to settle. This marked the beginning of the Jewish community of Alexandria. Before long, other Jews came of their own accord to join those already there. Just as Egypt under the Ptolemies proved a magnet to Greeks from elsewhere, so it seems to have been for Jews. By the middle of the third century BCE, substantial Jewish communities existed in Ptolemaic Egypt as well as in their traditional homeland.³⁷

Back in Jerusalem, after the upheaval caused by the first Ptolemy, the high priests seem to have been left once more to rule over their people in the traditional way for a century. Then in 200 BCE, Antiochus III ousted the Ptolemies from Syria and took over. At first it seemed as though little would change. The new ruler reconfirmed the rights and privileges of the high priests. The separate laws and customs of the Jewish religion were once more to be protected. Nonetheless, whatever had been the practice before, it seems that now candidates for the high priesthood would be expected to pay for the privilege.

In 175 BCE, on the accession of Antiochus IV, the brother of the reigning high priest outbid the incumbent and obtained royal patronage to depose him. The usurper was probably named Joshua but seems to have chosen to be known by the Greek name of Jason. Jason’s first act was to establish a gymnasium in Jerusalem. This was a traditional Greek complex of indoor and outdoor spaces combining something of the modern gym, gentlemen’s club, and sixth-form college. Another innovation was an ephebeion: a cadet corps for young men. Both of these were modelled on institutions that had long been established in Athens and other Greek cities. We know nothing of Jason’s motives, because we have only the word of his opponents. Currying favour with the patron to whom he owed his position no doubt played a part. But he may also have aspired to bring his people into line with a fashion that was sweeping the world around them.

For seven years, under Jason as high priest, the traditional Jewish rituals of the Temple seem to have coexisted with these innovations. Young men enrolled at the gymnasium and volunteered for the cadet corps. Jewish athletes were to be seen exercising wearing wide-brimmed sunhats called petasoi. In Athens and other Greek cities, of course, athletes wore nothing at all. The petasos was a Macedonian addition. Whether the young men of Jerusalem wore anything else when they exercised we are not told by the anonymous Jewish historian who wrote up these events, in Greek, some decades afterwards. But the author was not shy of expressing his opinions. The sense of outrage to Jewish sensibilities comes through loud and clear. As the writer sums it up, ‘It was prime-time for “becoming Greek” (hellenismos) and for the rise of adopting alien customs (allophylismos)’, both terms used for the first time in Greek, so far as we know. All this was due to the ‘overweening and abominable wickedness’ of the ‘impious Jason,’ who, behaving ‘quite unlike a High Priest’, had set about ‘transforming the people of his own race to [conform to] the Hellenic character’.³⁸

The last of the Syrian Wars, that ended in 168 BCE with Antiochus IV trapped by the line in the sand drawn by the Roman envoy Popilius Laenas, had shocking consequences for Jerusalem. Exactly what happened, and in what sequence, has been much debated. Jason lost office when an even higher bidder went over his head to Antiochus. The deposed Jason then led a rebellion against the new high priest, who had also adopted a name out of Greek mythology: Menelaus. Fighting broke out in Jerusalem between supporters of Jason and supporters of Menelaus. It may have been on the way to his humiliation in the Alexandrian suburb of Eleusis or on the way back that Antiochus diverted, with his army, to Jerusalem to quell the violence there. If the intention had been to restore order, the effect was to prove the exact opposite. Whether or not they were acting on orders, the royal troops ransacked the city and desecrated the Temple. To compound matters, shortly afterwards, Antiochus issued an edict which has no known parallel in the whole Hellenistic world but which chillingly prefigures any number of stories of religious persecution in much later times.

Thanks to a second Jewish chronicler, again anonymous, whose words would later be translated into Greek, we can read this summary of the edict: ‘The whole of his kingdom… should all form one people and they should each give up their own customs.’ Not content with that, according to the same chronicler, Antiochus went on to build an ‘abomination of desolation’ on Temple Mount. By this was probably meant an altar dedicated to the Syrian god Baal. The writer does not say that Jews were compelled to worship at it. But the sacrilege in such a place was obvious. And it does appear that throughout the Jewish provinces sacrifices to pagan gods became compulsory. Some Jews even considered them a price worth paying in return for peace and royal favour.³⁹

All this was the very opposite of what Alexander, or any of his successors, had done in the lands he had conquered. What could account for such a departure? No doubt Antiochus was still smarting from his humiliation by the Romans. The instinct of the bully, in such circumstances, to turn on an inferior might have been part of it. But there could have been a subtler calculation, too. What could be the secret of Roman power, Antiochus may have been asking himself, that his own still-powerful kingdom lacked? If Seleucid Asia were ever to stand up against a unified and homogeneous ‘Roman Senate and People’, maybe there would be no better place to start homogenising than with this recalcitrant group of subjects in Jerusalem?

In Judaea, the effect was incendiary. A revolt was led by a family known to history as the Hasmoneans, and also by the nickname of ‘Maccabees’ or ‘Maccabaeans’ (from the Hebrew word for ‘hammer’). Antiochus himself died on campaign far to the east in 164 BCE, just when the revolt led by Judas Maccabaeus had succeeded in defeating the Seleucid garrison in Jerusalem and restoring the Temple. This is the event still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Shortly afterwards, a decree issued in the name of the new king, Antiochus V, revoked the earlier one.⁴⁰ The persecution was over—though it could be said that its long-term effects are still with us, more than two thousand years later.

The consequences of these actions would prove very different from anything that could have been intended by Antiochus IV. In 140 BCE, another of the Maccabees would take the Greek title of king (basileus), effectively making Judaea independent. Over the next eighty years, under the Hasmonean dynasty, the boundaries of the Jewish kingdom would expand to include all the geographical area of Palestine west of the River Jordan, reaching to the Mediterranean coast. The revolt of the Maccabees had been directed not only against the political power of a Hellenistic kingdom but also against the cultural penetration of Greek ideas and Greek ways of doing things. It was probably the only time, in the whole history of the period, when this happened.

But even here, the rejection of ‘becoming Greek’ would only ever go so far. The Hasmoneans, like every other breakaway dynasty in the east, whether originally Greek-speaking or not, ran their kingdom along Hellenistic lines. Their rulers adopted Greek names along with Jewish ones. Their coins were inscribed in three languages: Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. And for the next three hundred years, the history of these and subsequent struggles of the Jewish people for self-determination would be written and disseminated in Greek. Indeed, it is only through the surviving Greek sources that we know about them at all.⁴¹

The way the story has been told ever since, the period of a little over a century after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE saw the most rapid and continuous expansion of Roman power that would culminate in the establishment of Rome as an ‘empire without limit’.⁴² But for anyone alive during those years, and particularly in the Greek-speaking east, it cannot have seemed like that. While the Hellenistic dynasties were collapsing into internecine warfare, and breakaway kingdoms fought against one another, Rome was just one of many players in a crowded and bewildering field. Not even the Romans could be relied on to win all their battles. And even when the legions did carry the day abroad, at times the Roman res publica itself seemed on the verge of internal collapse. The abrupt rise from city-state to world power during the previous century had hollowed out the venerable institutions of the Republic. Over a sixty-year period, from 91 BCE to 31 BCE, at the same time as fighting external enemies, Rome was frequently at war with itself.

It began with a vicious war in Italy. By 91 BCE, the whole of the Italian peninsula was subject to laws made in Rome. But only citizens of the citizen-state could vote or have any say in the making of these laws. The misleadingly named ‘Social War’, that broke out in that year, was fought between the city of Rome and its ‘allies’ (socii in Latin) in the rest of the Italian peninsula over their respective rights. The original aim of the allies may have been to break away and regain their independence. Most of those in the south, after all, had originally been Greek-speaking city-states; plenty still were and kept up their cultural and economic links with the rest of the Greek world. Their citizens may still have been susceptible to the lure of the ‘liberty of the Hellenes’. If that had been the aim, the outcome was the exact opposite. The Senate, threatened with losing the war, granted Roman citizenship and some of its traditional rights to almost all the inhabitants of Italy in 88 BCE. There would be no more talk of breaking away. And at the very time when the Roman elite was still becoming Greek culturally, the mass of the Greek-speaking population of southern Italy overnight became Romans legally. A precedent had been set.

Of greater concern to most Greeks than upheavals in Italy was the war that dragged on for almost half a century between Rome and Mithridates VI, the part-Greek, part-Persian strongman ruler of Pontus. During its heyday in the early first century BCE, this kingdom had expanded from its base in northern Anatolia to draw in the Greek settlements all the way round the Black Sea, and then to dominate the entire Anatolian subcontinent. In a single year, 89 BCE, Mithridates defeated Roman armies no fewer than four times. The following spring, he instituted a new kind of warfare that would reverberate down the centuries.

Secret orders sent to every Greek city in Anatolia orchestrated a massacre of ‘Romans and Italians, together with their wives and children and freed slaves, everyone of Italian descent’. Modern historians draw the obvious parallels with genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’. Somewhere between eighty thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people were killed on a single day throughout Anatolia. Horrific as it is, this story also highlights how many civilians must already have followed in the path of the Roman legions to make a home and livelihood for themselves in these eastern possessions, that had now fallen under the sway of Mithridates. Some will have been officials, such as tax gatherers, others former soldiers who had been granted land in return for service, others again engaged in business and trade. Those who carried out the order, concluded a Greek historian writing almost two centuries later, can have been motivated only in part by fear of Mithridates. They must also have ‘hated the Romans enough to behave towards them in this way’.⁴³

Many Greeks who followed these events from across the Aegean shared the same balance of sentiments. For all the savagery of his methods, might Mithridates be the best prospect, in the new circumstances, for the still-cherished ‘liberty of the Hellenes’? Some thought it was worth taking a chance. Even Athens, which had traditionally been careful to cultivate close ties with Rome, switched sides. Retribution was swift and deadly. Now it was the turn of Athens to suffer as Thebes and Corinth had done in previous conflicts. The Roman general Sulla laid siege to the city and its port, Piraeus. The siege lasted until the spring of 86 BCE. By this time, some of the citizens had been reduced to cannibalism. When Sulla’s forces broke in,

there was a great and pitiless massacre: for the inhabitants were unable to escape because they were starving, neither was there any pity shown to children or women. Sulla ordered the killing of anyone who was found.

Archaeology cannot confirm the sufferings of the defenders. But clear signs of the devastation done to buildings came to light during twentieth-century excavations in the Athenian Agora.⁴⁴

It would take another twenty years after this for the Romans to defeat Mithridates. In the meantime, in a sure sign of a growing power vacuum in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, maritime communities were putting to sea and taking the law into their own hands, seizing goods and slaves on their own account. In 69 BCE, a raid on the island of Delos all but obliterated this thriving, multicultural, polyglot centre of the international slave trade. The perpetrators are invariably called ‘pirates’ in the ancient sources. But modern historians suspect that behind these upheavals must have lain deeper causes, rooted in widespread disaffection and the decay of law and order during a time when Macedonian power was collapsing and it was not yet clear whether Rome would prove strong enough to replace it.⁴⁵

It was not until the 60s BCE that Rome convincingly began to regain the upper hand in the Greek-speaking east. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (the Great), better known in English as Pompey, was sent into the Aegean by order of the Senate in 67 BCE with five hundred ships and over a hundred thousand troops. Not only did he destroy the pirates’ bases, Pompey went on to roll up what little was left of the Seleucid kingdom of Asia three years later, and the Hasmonean kingdom of Judaea a year after that in 63 BCE.

When Pompey returned to Rome to celebrate his ‘triumph’ in 61 BCE, it must have seemed as though he had brought the Greek-speaking east back with him. Thousands of captives from almost every part of the empire that had once been conquered by Alexander were paraded behind Pompey’s chariot through the streets of the city. The victor himself wore a shirt which he claimed had once belonged to Alexander. The title ‘Magnus’, that he had granted himself some years earlier, further placed the victorious Roman general in the shoes of the Macedonian conqueror. Statues of Pompey that still survive show him with the quiff or forelock that had long been the trademark of Alexander’s public image.

A more lasting testimony to the same effect was the complex of buildings that Pompey commissioned at the same time in the centre of Rome. Pompey’s Theatre opened its doors in 55 BCE. It was quite possibly the largest permanent theatre ever built on the standard Greek pattern. Its capacity is said to have reached forty thousand. And the complex housed more than the traditional semicircular auditorium. Anterooms and side halls accommodated a dazzling range of exhibits mostly trawled from the east. So opulent and capacious were the buildings that when the Senate House burned down in a riot shortly afterwards, the Senate took to meeting in one of the theatre’s halls. The unmistakable trappings of Hellenistic kingship were coming to Rome.⁴⁶

Rome now ruled the southern Balkans up to the River Danube, the whole of Anatolia and the Aegean, and in the east had become embattled against the Parthians for the spoils of what had once been the Seleucid kingdom of Asia. In the west, Roman power had spread even farther, and even faster, to take in Spain and Gaul (all of France, plus parts of Switzerland and Germany up to the Rhine). The conquest of Gaul and the first, brief landing by Roman legionaries on the coast of Britain had been the work of Pompey’s younger rival, Gaius Julius Caesar. Military leaders who could command the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and leave their mark on the urban landscape of Rome itself were carving up the world among them, while the traditional institutions of the Roman Republic were visibly struggling to contain their ambitions.

Civil war broke out in 49 BCE. From then on, the battles of Romans against Romans would all be fought in the Greek-speaking east. The last survivor of the great Hellenistic kingdoms, Egypt, found itself caught fatefully in the middle. For more than a century, the Ptolemies had relied on Rome for the external protection of their kingdom. Latterly, different branches of this incestuously ramified family had been at one another’s throats, and Rome had become the arbitrator in these quarrels, too. Ptolemy XII Auletes (‘the Oboe Player’) had held his throne thanks to the patronage of Rome until his death in 51 BCE. Pompey had taken good care to nurture this relationship while he had been in the east. So when Caesar routed his army at the battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly in 48 BCE, it was to Alexandria that Pompey fled.⁴⁷

Egypt was now ruled by the most famous of all the Ptolemies. This was the Oboe Player’s daughter, Cleopatra VII. But the young queen was locked in a deadly struggle against her brother, Ptolemy XIII. The kingdom was in chaos. One faction murdered Pompey on his arrival in hopes of currying favour with Caesar. Caesar chose, instead, to back Cleopatra and secured her position on the throne, while her youngest brother, aged only twelve, became nominally the fourteenth Ptolemy—until he disappears from the record, presumed murdered, a few years later. Shortly after Caesar left Egypt, Cleopatra gave birth to a son, who would be nicknamed ‘Caesarion’ or ‘little Caesar’ because he was reputed to be Caesar’s son.

Then came the murder of Caesar, while the Senate was meeting in a hall in Pompey’s Theatre, on the Ides of March 44 BCE. The murder and its sequel make up one of the best-known stories of the ancient world, thanks in large part to the two plays that Shakespeare based closely on the biographies of the protagonists written in Greek by Plutarch a little over a century after the events: Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Violence once more tore through Rome and the Roman world of the east. It took two years before the armies of Brutus and Cassius, the principal conspirators in the murder, were defeated outside Philippi, the city in Macedonia that owed its name to Philip II. The victorious legions on that occasion were led by Mark Antony, a former supporter of Caesar who had whipped up the Roman crowd to a frenzy at his funeral, together with a distant relative of Caesar who had been only nineteen years old at the time, by the name of Gaius Octavius.

A decade later, a new power struggle broke out between these two. By the time battle was joined, in 31 BCE, Antony had made common cause (and a bigamous marriage) with Cleopatra of Egypt. Each side had a powerful claim to Caesar’s legacy. Cleopatra ruled jointly (at least in name) with Ptolemy XV, who was none other than Caesarion, her teenage son whose father was generally supposed to have been Caesar. But the former Gaius Octavius could go one better. Caesar, in his will, had adopted him as his only legitimate son and heir, in the process changing his name to Octavian and adding to it the family name of Caesar. Cleopatra’s son had (in all probability) much the closer relationship by blood. But in those days there was no way of proving it. Legitimacy counted for much in ancient Rome.

The decisive battle, this time, was fought at sea. But the nearest land was once again Greece: the cape on the west coast, near the modern town of Preveza, by the name of Actium. The outcome could have gone either way. If Antony and Cleopatra had won, Plutarch’s account of a pageant held in Alexandria not long before gives a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. In sumptuous surroundings, the couple’s three infant children and Caesarion were paraded before the people. Each was assigned a set of kingdoms in the east. Antony’s twin sons by Cleopatra were proclaimed ‘kings of kings’.

The scene would be reimagined almost two thousand years later by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, writing in the same city, Alexandria. With characteristic wistful irony, Cavafy suggests that the Alexandrians present ‘knew of course that this was words and play-acting’. But the day was warm and the sun was shining, so they went along with the spectacle, even though ‘they knew what these things were worth, what empty words these kingdoms were’.⁴⁸ Shorn of the hindsight enjoyed by a Plutarch or a Cavafy, this was simply Hellenistic kingship on show, in all its fantastical glory. There would have been a role for Rome, too, surely, as the greatest kingdom of all. In the event, it was Octavian’s side that won at Actium. But the outcome, in the long run, minus the fantasy and dressed in a more brutal sort of glory, was perhaps not so very different.

Antony and Cleopatra fled back to Alexandria, where both committed suicide in the summer of 30 BCE. Caesarion, or Ptolemy XV, aged just seventeen, ruled alone for only a few weeks before being executed on the orders of Octavian. The Hellenistic kingdom of the Ptolemies was no more. Egypt became a Roman province at once. ‘Achaea’, meaning most of today’s Greece, followed in 27 BCE. In the same year, Octavian proclaimed himself sole ruler in Rome. The mantle of Alexander, coveted by so many, had finally fallen on the shoulders of this man, who at the age of thirty-six took for himself yet another name: Augustus, or ‘Revered One’. What we now know as the Roman Empire had begun.⁴⁹