ABSTRACT
The conquests of Alexander the Great extended the horizons of the Greek world and established Greek cities in the interior of Anatolia, in the Near and Middle East and in Egypt. It is customary to assert that the extension of the Greek world into Egypt, Syria and points still further east, the subjugation of the Greek city-states by Macedonia, the loss of autonomy entailed by their subjugation and the elimination of democratic institutions that followed induced in men a sense of dislocation, made them feel that they had lost familiar bearings and caused them to search for a new identity. The feeling of rootlessness effected by these changes is supposed to have led men to a quest for personal fulfilment that centred on the emotional well-being of the individual and not in his realizing his potential by participating in public life. We are told that philosophical systems promising personal fulfilment and happiness now came to the fore. We are also informed that the less educated took other routes to allay the anxieties with which the age filled them: they gave themselves up to the irrational, by enrolling in mystery-cults and turning to the practices of astrology and magic. 1 A further factor is sometimes added to explain the supposed flight to the irrational and the occult from the rationalism of the Classical Age. It is that the non-rational cast of mind of the Egyptians and the Semitic-speaking peoples of Syria had led to an erosion of the Greek commitment to rationalism.
