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Updated: August 18, 2024
Persia was under pralaya, in retreat among its original mountains; and submergence under Hellenisticism might have meant for its oblivion of its own native Persianism. Consder: of the two great centers of West-Asian culture, Egypt fell under Greek, and then under Roman, dominion; and the old Egyptian civilization became, so far as we can tell, utterly a thing of the past.
And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one little wink of sleep over. "Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
So you see, he came right upon a Greek cycle; right upon the dawn of what should have been a new Greek day, with the night of Hellenisticism in between. And he took, how shall I put it? the forces of that new day, and transmuted them, in himself as crucible, from Greek to Roman... A sort of Channel through which the impulse was deflected from Greek to Latin...
He sent out his gilded youth to govern the provinces, which they simply fleeced and robbed shamelessly; worse than Athens of old, and by much. The old predatory instinct was there still: Hellenisticism had supplied no civilizing influence to modify that. But it was there minus whatever of manliness and decency had once gone with it.
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