ABSTRACT
The cultural and emotional antecedents of the various classes in the Hellenistic cities differed as widely as those of Parisians, Victorian Londoners and New Yorkers. Priapos represented by a grotesque and not over-decent human figure, was originally worshipped at Lampsakos on the Hellespont, but became widely popular all over the ancient world in the Hellenistic age. Between the decline of Epic and the full development of Prose one characteristic has been common to all the writings discussed; they have been the native expression of the Greek world, and the best of them, Attic literature. The new capitals, and not least Alexandria, were no longer Greek city-states, though they might and did mimic something of the forms of them, but the seats of great imperial governments. Shakespeare makes Don Armado use excrement to mean mustachio, so Kallimachos, for instance, uses, which in all Greek before his time means rainless, to signify waterless, having no rivers.
