Hellenistic Period

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The Hellenistic period is the era of Greek history running from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt in 31–30 BCE — the centuries in which Greek language, learning, and habits spread across the lands Alexander had taken, and met the older cultures of Egypt and the Near East. The name itself is a modern coinage, given currency by the nineteenth-century historian Johann Gustav Droysen, who used Hellenismus for the mingling of Greek with Eastern that he saw as the era’s defining trait.

When Alexander’s empire broke apart among his generals, it left a scatter of Greek-speaking kingdoms — the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids across Syria and Mesopotamia, and others — ruling populations who were not Greek. Greek became the language of administration and the educated class from the Nile to the Indus, and into it flowed religious ideas, astronomical lore, and forms of worship that were not Greek at all. Cities founded on the Greek model rose far from Greece; the largest of them, Alexandria in Egypt, grew into the period’s intellectual capital, its Library and Museum gathering scholars who advanced mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and the editing of texts.

The religious life of the age was marked by motion and mixture. Egyptian, Greek, and Mesopotamian gods were identified with one another and given new combined forms; the cult of Sarapis, devised under the early Ptolemies, is a deliberate example. The mystery cults — of Isis, of the Great Mother, of Mithras later on — spread along the trade routes and offered initiates a personal relation to a deity and hopes for the soul after death. Astrology arrived from Babylonia and took on a Greek philosophical frame. This is the matrix from which, in the early centuries of the Roman empire that followed, the Hermetic writings and the Gnostic currents would draw their materials — Greek philosophical vocabulary, Egyptian priestly prestige, and the conviction that saving knowledge could be had directly.

Historians distinguish the political period, which ends with Rome, from the broader cultural diffusion, which continued for centuries under Roman rule; the texts most associated with the period’s religious ferment were in fact composed later, in that long aftermath. The older verdict that Hellenistic thought was a decline from the Classical age has given way to a fuller picture: an age of unprecedented contact, when the categories of one civilization were translated into the words of another, and the results were not always either. That translation, partial and uneven, is much of what the later esoteric traditions inherited.

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→ Related: Classical Antiquity · Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Mesopotamia