ABSTRACT
The first fact to strike one on approaching the study of the period in the history of economic life which commences with the expedition of Alexander, is the increase of the actual area directly covered by that life. It is true that that area was reduced about the middle and in the second part of the third century b.c., when the eastern Satrapies broke loose from the authority of the Seleucids. While Hellenism continued to exert influence in various forms as far as Bactriana and the banks of the Indus, Iran and the adjoining regions on the north and east fell away from the Hellenistic world. Nevertheless, in spite of that loss, Hellenism extended considerably to the east and south of the Eastern Mediterranean. Henceforward it was bounded on the east by the mountains overlooking the Tigris and on the south by the Arabian desert in Asia, the strait of Bab el-Mandeb at the end of the Red Sea, and the cataract near Syene on the Nile. From now onwards, in the conquered and reorganized East, there was not a single patch of the Mediterranean seaboard which did not take part in the economic life of Greece, and further away the basin of the Euphrates and Tigris and the African coast of the Red Sea assumed a place of increasing importance in that life and played a more and more active part in it.
