While Palestine was a Greco-Egyptian province, the influences at work over the whole Levant had been as effectually operative there.

In the matter of government no change had been made that was at all noticeable. The internal autonomy of Persian times had been maintained; the claims of the tax-collector and recruiting sergeant were dealt with by the whole community, not by the individual.

Socially and economically, relative peace had permitted considerable progress. At the close of this period the work of Ben Sira is the best of all possible evidence, both of the literary productivity out of which the book arose and of the society which it implies. We are given glimpses of settled and comfortable life, which could scarcely have been attained unless the preceding century had been one of constantly increasing well-being. It is a well-equipped table at which Ben Sira bids us sit. The graces and little luxuries of life are present, and equally the vices that went with these luxuries.[117]

Nor had the character of the whole spiritual culture essentially changed. The language of daily intercourse was Aramaic, the lingua franca of the whole region. 119But the literary language was still Hebrew. It must have been constantly spoken among educated men, for the changes it continued to exhibit are not such as would occur if it had been quite divorced from life. And the literary activity, which took its forms from the established and already canonical literature, took its substance from the life about it. That this life had been impregnated with Greek elements, there can of course be no manner of doubt.

Not only the old Philistian and Phoenician cities of the coast had acquired a Greek varnish, but Judea was being surrounded by a closer and closer network of new Greek foundations. Ptolemais, Anthedon, Apollonia, Arethusa, and the cities of the Decapolis across the Jordan, brought the external forms of Greek culture so near that even the peasant who went no great distance from his furrow must have encountered them.

What made up the fascination of Greece for the nations she dominated? In the first place it must be insisted upon that there was a national resistance, whether or not it took the form of insurrection. Indeed, insurrection was a thing quite apart from resistance to Hellenism. As we have seen in the case of Egypt, national resistance to the political domination of Greeks did not by any means imply national resistance to the spread of Greek culture. The latter resistance generally took the form of a dull and obstinate clinging to ancestral ritual and language. At Antioch in the fourth century C.E., some men and women still spoke Aramaic, and knew no Greek.[118] It is only within the rather narrow 120limits set by wealth and education that the Hellenization was really effective. Unfortunately most of our available evidence is concerned with this class.

Among these men, who were naturally open to cultural impressions, the attraction of Hellenism was undoubted, and had been growing slowly for years before Alexander, and it had meant for them all the charm of an intellectual discovery. The mere fact that what the Greeks had was new and different could have been of no real influence. There must have been an actual and evident superiority in Greek life or culture to have drawn to itself so quickly the desires and longings of alien peoples.

In one field that superiority was evident, in the field of art. Whatever may have been the origins of Greek art, from the seventh century on no one seriously questioned that Greek workmen could produce, in any material, more beautiful objects than any other people. Artistic appreciation is no doubt a plant of slow growth, but the pleasure in gorgeous coloring, in lifelike modeling, in fine balances of light and shade, in grouping of masses, is derived immediately from the visual sensation. No peasant of Asia could fail to be impressed by his first glimpse of such a city as the Ephesus and Miletus of even the sixth or fifth century. After the extraordinary artistic progress of the fifth century had vastly increased the beauty of Greek cities, every foreigner who visited them must have found greater and greater delight, as his knowledge grew broader and deeper.

121In other branches of art, in music, poetry, dancing, the wealthier Asiatic had a training of his own. But it is likely that even a slight acquaintance with Greek taught him to depreciate the achievements of his own people. Doubtless, in poetic capacity and imagination, Phrygian, Lydian, or Lycian was the equal of Greek. Yet we have no choice but to believe that in sheer sensuous beauty of sound, which made a direct appeal to any partly cultivated ear, no one of the languages could compare with Greek. Nor is it likely that any written literature existed in Asia that could be ranked with Greek.

With the appeal to eye and ear there went an appeal to the intellect. Greek mental capacity was not demonstrably greater than that of the Asiatic peoples to whom the Greeks were perhaps akin, but both imagination and reflection had framed their results in systematic form. The rich narrative material found in every race was available in Greek in dramatic and finished pieces. The philosophic meditation in which others had long anticipated the Greeks was among the latter set forth in clearer and simpler phrasing.

The allurement of all these things was intensified by a franker and fuller exploitation of all physical instincts, and the absence of many tabus and forms of asceticism that existed among non-Greek peoples. A vastly increased freedom over one’s body seemed a characteristic of Greek life, and a vastly greater freedom of political action was characteristic of the Greek polis.

122It is small wonder therefore that the upper classes of Asia and Syria had for two or three centuries before the conquest succumbed to a culture that possessed so visible a sorcery. Then, with the conquest, came a new factor. To be a Greek was to be a Herrenmensch, a member of the ruling caste, a blood-kinsman of the monarch. Syrians, Asiatics, and Egyptians found themselves under the direct sway of a Greek dynasty, supported by a Greek court and army. All the tendencies that had made Greek cultural elements attractive for certain classes were intensified by the eager desire of the Greeks to identify themselves with the dominant race, and this identification seemed by no means impossible of achievement.

What had to be given up? As far as language was concerned, a smattering of Greek was the common possession of many men. Every trading-post had for generations swarmed with Greek merchants. Greek mercenaries were to be found in most armies. It was no especially difficult matter for those classes which knew a little Greek to increase their familiarity with it, to multiply the occasions for its use, to sink more and more the soon despised vernacular. The latter, we must repeat, was not and could not be suppressed, but it became the language of peasants. In the cities men spoke Greek.

But there were other things—the ancestral god and the ancestral ritual. These were not so readily discarded. However, the attitude of the Greeks in this matter made it unnecessary to do so. The gods of 123Greece were often transplanted, but rarely more than the name. In Syria and Asia particularly it was only in wholly new foundations that Greek gods and Greek forms were really established. Generally the sense of local divine jurisdiction was keenly felt. Greeks had a wholesome awe of the deity long in possession of a certain section, and in many cases erected shrines to him, invoking him by the name of some roughly corresponding Hellenic god. Frequently the old name was retained as an epithet. Thus Greek and Syrian might approach the ancient lord of the soil in the ancient manner and so perpetuate a bond which it was ?σ?βεια, “impiety,” to break.

Since the essentials were maintained, the only step necessary to turn a Syrian into a Greek was to purchase a himation, change his name of Matanbal to Apollodorus, and the transformation was complete. He might be known for several years as “? κα? Matanbal”—“alias Matanbal”; he might suffer a little from the occasional snobbishness of real Greeks, but, especially if he was wealthy, such matters would be of short duration. The next generation would probably escape them altogether, and their children, the young Nicanors, Alexanders, Demetriuses, would talk glibly of the exploits of their ancestors at Marathon or under the walls of Troy.

But there was also no inconsiderable group that combined adoption of the new with loyalty or attempted loyalty to the old. Many Syrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and others, conscious of a history not without 124glory, desired to acquire the undeniably attractive Hellenic culture, while maintaining their racial ties, of which they felt no real reason to be ashamed. That was particularly true of the Seleucid dominions where Alexander’s assimilative policy was consistently pursued. Persian or Lydian or Phoenician descent was a thing many men boasted of. It was with a sense of adding something to the culture of the world that natives with Greek training prepared to transmit in Greek forms the history of their people to Greeks and to interpret their institutions to them. And they found a ready enough audience. On many points, especially in religion and philosophy, the Greeks were willing enough to concede a more profound acquaintance to barbarians than they themselves possessed; and often the weariness of civilization made Greeks search among fresher peoples for a sound social life, since that life was tainted, in Greek communities, by many grave diseases.

But people of this class found themselves in a delicate situation, an unstable equilibrium constantly disturbed. It was hard to remain a Grecized Syrian. Generally the temptation to suppress the Syrian was well-nigh irresistible. Now and then, the rise of national political movements would claim some of the younger men, so that the fall was on the native side. In general, the older conservative attitude expressed itself naturally in avoidance of Greeks as far as possible, and precisely in proportion to the value set upon the national and indigenous culture.

125The situation of the Jews was only in so far unique that there could be no question among them of gradual steps in the acquisition of Greek culture, but only of partial acceptance of it. The final step of interchanging gods—of accepting the Greek name and maintaining the old rite and of exercising that reciprocity of religious observance which was a seeming necessity for those who lived in the same region—that, as every Jew was aware, could never be taken. The religious development among the Jews had been fuller than elsewhere, and had resulted in a highly specialized form, which by that fact had none of the elasticity of other cult-forms. It was easy to make any one of the Baalim of local Syrian shrines into Zeus Heliopolitanus, Zeus Damascenus, etc. It was not possible to turn the Lord Zebaoth of Zion, the awful and holy God of psalm and prophecy, into an epithet of Zeus or of another.

Consequently Jews who felt the pull of Greek art and literature, who, like other subjects of Greek sovereigns, were eager to gain the favor of their masters, had to realize to themselves the qualifications of their Hellenism, or determine to discard wholly their Judaism. And this latter step, even to enthusiastic Philhellenes, was intensely difficult. For so many generations “Thou shalt have no other gods” had been inculcated into men’s hearts that it was no simple thing to undertake in cold blood to bow before the abominations of the heathen.

126He who could not do that—and there were many—might feel free to adopt Greek language and dress and name; but, even more than Babylonian and Egyptian, he was conscious of making a contribution of his own to the civilization of the East. An inherited wisdom, which was in effect closer communion with the Absolute, he believed he had, and, as we have seen, he was generally credited with having. He felt no need therefore of yielding unreservedly to the claims of Greeks, but might demand from them the respect due to an independent and considerable culture.

Barriers to mutual comprehension were created by the Jewish dietary regulations as well as by ritual intolerance. Courtesy and good breeding however might soften and modify what they could not remove, and social intercourse between Greek and Jew certainly existed. Nor need we exaggerate the embarrassments these relations would s............