Although the Greeks had always prided themselves on their piety (eusebeia), by the Hellenistic period many of them would have viewed the Olympian gods somewhat differently from their predecessors.

To begin with, some radicals had long maintained that the stories of the poets (Homer, Figure 74, and Hesiod, in particular) were fictions, for they were clearly blasphemous and self-contradictory. Reason dictated that gods do not fornicate or lie; imprison or fight each other; commit adultery; or die. Discontent increased during the fifth century, when the attacks of the Sophists – those itinerant, rationalist, and often agnostic freethinkers and teachers – began to sharpen and strike home.

In Euripides’ Iphigeneia among the Taurians, for example, the heroine declares that Artemis could never demand human sacrifice, as the Taurians believed, for the goddess of purity could not be hypocritical or evil. And in his Herakles, the hero states flatly:

1. I don’t believe the gods condone unlawful love.

2. Those bondage stories are unworthy, too.

3. I can’t accept them; nor that any god

4. Is tyrant of another. A true god

5. Needs nothing. Those are poets’ stupid myths.

These remarks not only anticipate Epikouros’s beliefs, discussed in Chapter 6, by a century; they also demolish Greek tragedy’s very foundations, and even – with typical Euripidean irony – Herakles’ own existence. (He was the uncrowned king of bondage.)

As will be evident by now, the Hellenistic world – or at least much of it – was enormously rich, for Alexander’s conquests had flooded it with treasure. The Persian capitals of Susa, Persepolis, and Pasargadae alone had yielded more than 150,000 talents (about 4,000 tons) of gold and silver bullion, not to mention a fortune in coin and precious metal vessels. Much of this soon went into circulation in the form of gifts and benefactions, military pay, and outlays for construction projects. (Building all those Alexandrias cost money.) It was this vast haul, augmented by loot from the king’s subsequent campaigns, those of his successors, and massive exactions from the conquered, that fueled the Hellenistic world for two centuries and, from 200, also began to flow westward to Rome.

Schooled by Aristotle that self-regulation is a cardinal virtue and liberality a technology of power, Alexander himself was personally quite austere but could be overwhelmingly generous when the occasion merited it. As Chapter 4 showed, such generosity creates and cements friendships, generates obligations, reinforces one’s status, and hugely impresses others. (Thus, when asked by an impecunious friend for dowries for his daughters, Alexander gave him fifty talents; advised that ten would be enough, the king replied, “Enough for you to accept, but not enough for me to give.”) Yet several of his successors – and their followers – were much less self-controlled.

As we have seen, Alexander changed the arts of power forever. In addition to immortalizing him in every major medium, Greek sculptors and painters soon employed at least five basic scenarios to showcase him and his exploits: battles (Figures 3, 37), hunts, processions, marriages, and “pageants” that paraded him alongside gods and personifications in order to frame, contextualize, and universalize his achievements.

Although such scenes were old favorites in Greece, typically they had tended to minimize, or even suppress, individual achievement in favor of the collective and the generic. Hellenistic ones, by contrast, celebrated a single, omnipotent personality – the king – and thus took on new significance. Above all, these military monarchs needed divine favor, victory in war, and viable heirs. These five scenarios neatly fit the bill.

Just as Alexander’s city foundations, attendant cults, and portraits anchored his name and fame in the landscape of his empire, and his coins circulated his renown throughout the civilized world, these sculptures and paintings concretized, publicized, and applauded his achievements, complementing the writings of the historians and poets. Recognizing a good thing when they saw one, and wrestling with the tumult that Alexander had left behind, his successors eagerly embraced all of these practices, as did the Romans when eventually they inherited his legacy of empire.

Because most Hellenistic painting is lost, and what remains is mostly funerary and uneven in quality and distribution, mosaics constitute the only surviving, high-quality pictorial corpus that can stand comparison with its best sculpture (see, for example, Focus I: “The Great Altar”). Moreover, although mosaic production in the Greek world predated the Hellenistic age by a century, only during this period did two key techniques reach their apogee, namely, pebble and tessellated mosaic: reason enough for a focused study.

MACEDON: THE MATURITY OF PEBBLE MOSAIC

Although many pebble mosaics have been recovered from Macedonian palaces and houses, two roughly contemporary sets at Pella, dated to the last quarter of the fourth century, justly stand at the forefront of the art. Both houses, which – excluding their upper floors – cover a staggering area of 25,300 and 32,300 square feet (2,350 and 3,000 square meters), are better called luxury mansions and must have belonged to elite – probably military – families massively enriched by Alexander’s conquests. Only the Macedonian royal palaces at Pella and Vergina surpass them in size.

The foregoing chapters have amply documented the prowess, or aretē, both real and contrived, of Alexander and the kings, and scrutiny of the Great Altar has reintroduced that of the gods and heroes. Our focus now turns to those heroes, to which we must add – even at the risk of some overcrowding – two more paradigms of aretē: athletes and (in Chapter 6) intellectuals.

As we saw in Chapter 2, anyone who achieves success thanks to his or her own abilities and divine favor, by definition possesses aretē and deserves the respect that goes with it. Being innate, it must be discovered within oneself and then fostered by an arduous regimen of nurture and training. As Pindar remarked:

1. One born to excellence

2. May be whetted and stirred

3. To win huge glory

4. If a god is his helper.

This is why Greek heroes such as Telephos (see Figure 62) and his father Herakles (Figure 63) are basically monoliths. Once past the perils of infancy, they could only battle their way into the privileged space that Fate and the gods allotted them. En route, they had learned how to be extraordinarily effective, using all of their faculties and mobilizing all of their powers to achieve concrete, lasting results. Yet because such high rollers often make mistakes, and the Greeks instinctively structured the world in tragic terms, their images often appear under the sign of tragedy.

Sprawling across two million square miles of the earth’s surface, Alexander’s empire (Map 1) was a geographic, ecological, ethnic, and cultural patchwork. Its multiple heartlands (Figure 11) included the rocky but intermittently lush Mediterranean coasts of Greece, Macedonia, and Anatolia; the abundant Nile Valley and Delta; the then “fertile crescent” of present-day Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq (watered by the Jordan, Orontes, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers); and, to the east, the high plains of Afghanistan and the vast and verdant Indus Valley.

Densely populated, these regions were ringed and punctuated by high peaks and arid deserts: the mountains of Greece; the dry Anatolian plateau and the Taurus Range that severs it from Syria; the Caucasus, linking the Black and Caspian seas; the Egyptian and Arabian deserts to the far south; the arid and mountainous Iranian plateau; and the mighty peaks of the Hindu Kush.

The Persian kings had controlled most of this vast area for two centuries, ruling a volatile collage of Greeks, Anatolians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Jews, Arabs, Egyptians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Baktrians, and Indians – to name but a few. Crisscrossed by a dense web of trade routes, their empire was highly urbanized and divided into two dozen provinces, or satrapies, each ruled by a provincial governor, or satrap (thus, for example, Hellenistic writers called the Iranian plateau the Upper Satrapies). Alexander inherited this system, and his successors happily perpetuated it.