ABSTRACT
The transition which is the subject of this talk is a very complex phenomenon, as is, in fact, any transition between two periods of history. Old and New, tradition and individual achievement, destruction and creation, all are combined. In a way, of course, all history is history in transition, but only in a way, for the essential things are those which are not transitory. They are those having a life in their own right, though it may happen that they also belong to two periods, and thus have a share in the process of transition; we shall see an example of that later. With regard to our particular epoch, there was much in the world of fifth-and fourth-century Greece that prepared for the great changes ahead, and what is true of Greece can also be maintained of the Persian empire, of Asia Minor, of Egypt. Everywhere during that time there were possible nuclei of a new phase of history. And yet, they would have had little, or at the most a rather delayed, effect if Alexander had not done what so often is the task of the genius: to make the decisive break and to anticipate centuries of future history. Alexander did, in a sense, the same as Caesar did, and his aims were equally superseded by a more fragmentary, though more gradual and more organic, development in which the bridges to the past were still used for some time and those into the future were only slowly built.
