ABSTRACT
A change in the course of Western history was initiated by the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon (356-323 bce) who successfully united the Greek peoples in opposition to Persian hegemony and, in the process, established a Graeco-Macedonian empire that extended from the Aegean in the west to the Indus River in India and from the Black Sea in the North to Nubia and the Sahara in Africa. Scholarly neglect of the historical period after Alexander until late in the nineteenth century had much to do with the prevailing assumption among scholars in Christian Europe that a new historical era had been inaugurated during the reign of Augustus with the birth of Jesus. The scientific framework of the Hellenistic world is well exemplified by the Ptolemaic cosmology, the first comprehensively scientific view of the cosmos. More complex than the more or less commonly assumed cosmological framework of the Hellenistic world was its diverse socio-political structure.
