39 Facts About Hellenistic

1.

The period of Greece prior to the Hellenistic era is known as Classical Greece, while the period afterwards is known as Roman Greece.

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2.

The Hellenistic period saw the rise of New Comedy, Alexandrian poetry, the Septuagint, and the philosophies of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Pyrrhonism.

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3.

The Hellenistic period was characterized by a new wave of Greek colonization which established Greek cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa.

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4.

Idea of a Hellenistic period is a 19th-century concept, and did not exist in ancient Greece.

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5.

The term Hellenistic implies that the Greek populations were of majority in the areas in which they settled, but in many cases, the Greek settlers were actually the minority among the native populations.

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6.

Hellenistic then invaded Phoenicia, laid siege to Tyre, stormed Gaza and began building a fleet.

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7.

Hellenistic laid siege to Athens after they turned on him, but then struck a treaty with the Athenians and Ptolemy, which allowed him to cross over to Asia Minor and wage war on Lysimachus' holdings in Ionia, leaving his son Antigonus Gonatas in Greece.

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8.

Hellenistic was quickly hailed as king of Macedon and went on to rule for 35 years.

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9.

The great centers of Hellenistic culture were Alexandria and Antioch, capitals of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria respectively.

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10.

Many Greeks migrated to Alexandria, Antioch and the many other new Hellenistic cities founded in Alexander's wake, as far away as modern Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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11.

The Hellenistic period saw the Greek alphabet spread into southern Gaul from Massalia and according to Strabo, Massalia was a center of education, where Celts went to learn Greek.

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12.

Macedonian and Hellenistic monarchs were expected to lead their armies on the field, along with a group of privileged aristocratic companions or friends which dined and drank with the king and acted as his advisory council.

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13.

Hellenistic was successful, bringing back most of these provinces into at least nominal vassalage and receiving tribute from their rulers.

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14.

Hellenistic considerably enlarged the Temple, making it one of the largest religious structures in the world.

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15.

Hellenistic expanded the kingdom further east into Punjab, though these conquests were rather ephemeral.

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16.

In some fields Hellenistic culture thrived, particularly in its preservation of the past.

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17.

The states of the Hellenistic period were deeply fixated with the past and its seemingly lost glories.

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18.

Undoubtedly Greek influence did spread through the Hellenistic realms, but to what extent, and whether this was a deliberate policy or mere cultural diffusion, have been hotly debated.

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19.

Hellenistic brought Persian and other non-Greek peoples into his military and even the elite cavalry units of the companion cavalry.

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20.

The degree of influence that Greek culture had throughout the Hellenistic kingdoms was therefore highly localized and based mostly on a few great cities like Alexandria and Antioch.

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21.

The plots of this new Hellenistic comedy of manners were more domestic and formulaic, stereotypical low born characters such as slaves became more important, the language was colloquial and major motifs included escapism, marriage, romance and luck .

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22.

Hellenistic promoted short poetic forms such as the epigram, epyllion and the iambic and attacked epic as base and common .

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23.

Hellenistic wrote a massive catalog of the holdings of the library of Alexandria, the famous Pinakes.

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24.

Hellenistic had been a student of Callimachus and later became chief librarian of the library of Alexandria.

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25.

Pastoral poetry thrived during the Hellenistic era, Theocritus was a major poet who popularized the genre.

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26.

However, Athens had now lost her political freedom, and Hellenistic philosophy is a reflection of this new difficult period.

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27.

In spite of this shift, Hellenistic philosophy continued to influence these three religious traditions and the Renaissance thought which followed them.

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28.

Science in the Hellenistic age differed from that of the previous era in at least two ways: first, it benefited from the cross-fertilization of Greek ideas with those that had developed in older civilizations; secondly, to some extent, it was supported by royal patrons in the kingdoms founded by Alexander's successors.

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29.

The cultural competition among the Hellenistic kingdoms produced seats of learning throughout the Mediterranean, of which the most important was Alexandria in Egypt, which became a major center of scientific research in the 3rd century BC.

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30.

In mathematics, Hellenistic geometers built upon the work of mathematicians from the previous generation such as Theodorus, Archytas, Theaetetus, and Eudoxus.

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31.

The most characteristic product of Hellenistic mathematics was the theory of conic sections, reaching its greatest achivement in the work of Apollonius.

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32.

Hellenistic might have determined the distance from the Earth to the Sun and invented the leap day.

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33.

The library of Alexandria presumably included a zoo for research and Hellenistic zoologists include Archelaos, Leonidas of Byzantion, Apollodoros of Alexandria and Bion of Soloi.

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34.

Technological achievement of the Hellenistic age is masterly displayed in the Antikythera mechanism, a 37-gear mechanical analog computer which calculated the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets, including lunar and solar eclipses.

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35.

Armies of the Hellenistic period differed from those of the classical period in being largely made up of professional soldiers and in their greater specialization and technical proficiency in siege warfare.

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36.

Term Hellenistic is a modern invention; the Hellenistic World not only included a huge area covering the whole of the Aegean, rather than the Classical Greece focused on the Poleis of Athens and Sparta, but a huge time range.

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37.

Greek temples built during the Hellenistic period were generally larger than classical ones, such as the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the temple of Artemis at Sardis, and the temple of Apollo at Didyma .

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38.

Females during the Hellenistic period were often given opportunities to show off they athletic abilities in similar ways to men.

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39.

Many 19th-century scholars contended that the Hellenistic period represented a cultural decline from the brilliance of classical Greece.

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