ABSTRACT
By the end of the period covered by this book, 'the Greek world' will include everything between Italy and India. The westward expansion ofhellenism, that is the Greek way oflife, had long ago been achieved, in the eighth-and seventh-century colonizing phase of Greek history, when Greeks settled in Italy and Sicily. The eastward expansion had also begun several centuries before 479. Thucydides, the great filth-century Athenian historian, speaks (i.12) of the Greeks in this early phase as occupying Italy and Sicily on the one hand, and Ionia (western Turkey) on the other, and treats them as comparable operations. That was not quite accurate in that western colonization after 750 was much more highly organized than the earliest settlement ofGreeks in the east. But there was another and for our purposes more important difference: Carthage, the strongest non-Greek power in the west, mostly left the Greeks in Italy and Sicily alone; but when the Persian Empire moved up to the west Mediterranean coast in the sixth century, a movement of conquest which established firm imperial institutions (chapter 6 ), the presence of this solid power halted for two centuries the natural tendency of the Greeks, 'brought up in the company of Poverty' (Hdt. vii.102), to colonize eastwards in numbers. There is an essential qualification to this. The evidence of inscriptions (see p. 8), and of archaeology - for instance the sixth-century Persian king Cyrus' tomb at Pasargadai in Iran (D. M. Stronach, Pasargadae, 1978) - has shown that individual Greek craftsmen were in great demand from Persian patrons, and moved freely within Persian territory. Herodotus, the fifth-century Greek historian of Persia, was one famous beneficiary of this freedom; so were the Greek mercenary soldiers who found new opportunities with Persian employers after 431. Moreover, on many pages of this book, including the last page of all, we shall show that the fourth-century Persian satraps (governors) in the Mediterranean region were specially active agents of hellenization, and that meant importing
2 The Greek World 479-323 BC
Greeks from the islands and mainland.lt is nevertheless true that it was only when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire c.330 BC that the full-scale colonization of the east could be resumed, with the city-foundations of Alexander himself and of the hellenistic age generally, so that the two hundred years between Cyrus and Alexander can be seen as an interruption in a single process of eastern hellenization achieved by the formal settlement of whole new Greek communities. One main message of this book is that Alexander continues or resumes processes which had already been started or interrupted earlier, and to get that message across it will be necessary to investigate many parts of the Greek world other than the central city-states of the Greek mainland. That is because it is often those 'peripheral' places which anticipate future developments most clearly. Even by the end of the first half of this book, the end of the fifth
century, 'the Greek world' already has an impressive regional spread, and covers very different types of terrain, although Alexander's conquests are still three-quarters of a century away. In this first, fifth-century, half of the book the political and cultural narrative will be punctuated by regional chapters whose purpose is to introduce the main cities and areas of the classical Greek world: Italy and Sicily; Cyrene, Mrica and Egypt; Persia and Asia Minor; Macedon, Thessaly and Boiotia; Corinth; Sparta; and fmally Athens. Then, in the second, fourth-century, half of the book, a unified narrative is offered, which takes the earlier regional discussions for granted. It is one main aim of this arrangement to bring out the way in which the attractions exerted by certain regions determined the policies of other Greek states over long periods. For instance, there is the Thessalian theme. From the time of King Kleomenes of Sparta c.SOO BC to that of Philip II and Alexander the Great ofMacedon, other Greek states tried to get control ofThessaly in central Greece. The reasons for this are given, all at once, in the 'Thessaly' chapter (chapter 7); but the stages of the struggle for Thessaly are distributed over the whole book. Another example might be Sicilian interference, or the fear of it, in the affairs of Greece proper. The permanent importance of such themes helps to connect the fifth century to the fourth, and it is another main aim ofthe book to bring out the closeness of that connection between the two centuries: even in terms of the history of Athens, who lost the 'Peloponnesian War' of 431-404 to Sparta, the end of that war represents only a light break in continuity. For instance, Athenian imperial aims revived very soon indeed after 404.
