This is the first time I have posted an historical post here so I hope I have got it right. I have written below two quotes on Hellenism. The ideas are not mine, but the subject is a wide one to write about so I thought it best to add some quotes. The first one concentrates on the textual meaning and how the term was used in antiquity. The second one discusses more recent views of Hellenism and the views expressed by scholars on the term.


“Greek culture and the diffusion of that culture, a process usually seen as active. The relation between the two modern words [Hellenism and Hellenization] is controversial; should the longer word be avoided because of its suggestion of cultural imperialism? (cf. G.W. Bowerstock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (1990) xi; ‘Hellenization is … a modern idea, reflecting modern forms of cultural domination.’)

The ancient terminology is interesting but treacherous. The earliest use of the verb ‘Hellenize’ is in a linguistic context: Thucydides 2.68 says that the Amphilochian Argives were ‘Hellenized as to their present language’ by the Ambraciots. But the extra words ‘as to … language’ perhaps indicates that the word normally had a wider, cultural sense. Nevertheless ‘Hellenism’ in the Classical period is not quite on all fours with ‘Medism’ (i.e. Persian sympathies), a word which has a political tinge. The asymmetry is interesting because it underlines the absence, in the evidence which has come down to us, of a non-Greek point of view from which political sympathu with Greece could be expressed.

But the most famous use of ‘Hellenism’ is at 2 Maccabees 4:13, cf. Acts of the Apostles 6: 1; 9: 29 for ‘Hellenists’. Here too it seems that more is meant than just speaking Greek. How much more is disputed.

Conventially, Hellenization has in modern times been associated with the post-Alexander period, so that as we have seen the word ‘Hellenistic’ was (and is) regularly confined to the centuries 336-31 BC. But inscriptional evidence, above all that collected and edited by the great French epigraphist Louis Robert, has shown that in the Persian empire of the Achaemenids (5th and 4th cents. BC), Greek language and even constitutional forms were adopted by dynasts in Lycia like Pericles of Limyra and by Mausolus and his family [more details on this example is given] … At Rome too, the acceptance or rejection of cultural Hellenism remained an issue even after the possibility of Greek or Macedonian military or political victories over Rome had evaporated.”

Taken from Simon Hornblower’s essay on ‘Hellenism’ in The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilisation (1998).


The following quote directly refers to the situation after Alexander the Great’s conquests in Asia Minor, but it can be used to illustarte the broader period and geographical area in which Hellenism can be found.

“The search for an overall characterization of Greek-non-Greek interaction tends to presuppose a unified ‘oriental’ culture, quite at odds with reality. Few, if any, scholars now suppose that the peoples of the Near East universally adopted Greek language and customs; there is no evidence that this happened. They prefer to paint a variegated picture of co-existence, interaction, and sometimes confrontation between newly settled Greeks and indigenous populations (some of whom had themselves migrated from elsewhere), and in a dynamic rather than static social context. Occasionally there is evidence of the active promotion of cultural interchange by rulers, but no single explanation fits all cases and each must be examined on its merits. The boundaries defining what it was to be Greek, or to be (as presumably a Greek would view it) non-Greek, were negotiable, not fixed, and had to be renegotiated as society changed – not least when generations of inter-marriage in Asia or Egypt raised issues of who was Greek and who was not.”

Taken from Graham Shipley’s book, The Greek World After Alexander (2000).