Page 120 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

0 300 600 0 300
900 Kilometers 600 Miles
Antigonid kingdom Ptolemaic kingdom
Pergamene kingdom Seleucid kingdom Achaean League Mauryan Empire
Aetoli
an
L
eague
A
ra
THRACE Pella
Aegean Sea
Sardis Athens
Black Sea
Sea
l
Pergamum
Caspian
Sea
Sparta
Ephesus
Crete
Cyrene
Bactra
Rhodes
Alexandria Memphis
Antioch
Cyprus
Seleucia
Tyre
Babylon Susa
Arabian Desert
Persepolis
Sahara
INDIA
Red
Sea Sea
MAP 4.2 The Hellenistic Kingdoms. Alexander died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-two and did not designate a successor. Upon his death, his generals struggled for power, eventually establishing four monarchies that spread Hellenistic culture and fostered trade and economic development.
Q Which kingdom encompassed most of the old Persian Empire?
Arabian
thousand Celts into Greece itself and caused consider- able damage until he was defeated in 278 B.C.E.
Other groups of Celts later attacked Asia Minor, where the Greek Attalus I defeated them in 230 B.C.E. After his victory, Attalus gained control of much of Asia Minor and declared himself king of Pergamum. Such attacks led the Celts to be feared everywhere in the Hellenistic world.
Political and Military Institutions
The Hellenistic monarchies created a semblance of stability for several centuries, even though Hellenistic kings refused to accept the new status quo and periodi- cally engaged in wars to alter it. At the same time, an underlying strain always existed between the new Greco- Macedonian ruling class and the native populations. Together, these factors generated a certain degree of ten- sion that was never truly ended until the vibrant Roman state to the west stepped in and imposed a new order.
82 Chapter 4 The Hellenistic World
The Hellenistic kingdoms shared a common political system that represented a break with their Greek past. To the classical Greeks, monarchy had been an institu- tion for barbarians, associated in their minds with peo- ple like the Persians. But the Greeks of the Hellenistic world were forced to accept monarchy as a new fact of political life, even while they retained democratic forms of government in their cities.
Although Alexander the Great had apparently hoped to fuse Greeks and Easterners—he used Persians as administrators and encouraged his soldiers to marry Easterners, as he himself did—Hellenistic monarchs relied primarily on Greeks and Macedonians to form the new ruling class. It has been estimated that in the Seleucid kingdom, for example, only 2.5 percent of the people in authority were non-Greek, and most of them were commanders of local military units. Those who did advance to important administrative posts had learned Greek (all government business was transacted in Greek) and had become Hellenized in a cultural
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