Approaches and Sources

The period name ‘hellenistic’ is one of the most frequently discussed terms in the study of the ancient world. ¹ It derives from the ancient Greek verb hellênizô, ‘I behave like a Greek’, ‘I adopt Greek ways’, or ‘I speak Greek’, and therefore ultimately from the Greeks’ name for themselves, Hellênes. It is however, a modern coinage, based on the term Hellenismus, which the mid-nineteenth-century Prussian historian J. G. Droysen employed to describe the period when the spread of Greek culture to parts of the non-Greek world was given new impetus by the invasion of Asia by Alexander. ² Droysen’s work focused attention on the period as a distinctive phase of Greek culture; ³ sweeping views of a distinctive, unified hellenistic world-culture appear in more or less explicit forms in such magisterial treatments as those by Kaerst ⁴ and Beloch, ⁵ and are occasionally met with even now. ⁶