All this sudden increase of wealth, all the thousand new
enjoyments with which life was now adorned and enriched, did not work wholly
for good. With luxury there went, as always, laxity in morals. Contact with the
vice and effeminacy of the East tended to lessen the manly vigor of the Greeks,
both in Asia and in Europe. Hellas became corrupt, and she in turn corrupted
Rome.
GREEK INFLUENCE ON THE ORIENT
Yet the most interesting, as well as the most important,
feature of the age is the diffusion of Hellenic culture—the
"Hellenizing" of the Orient. It was, indeed, a changed world in which
men were now living. Greek cities, founded by Alexander and his successors, stretched
from the Nile to the Indus, dotted the shores of the Black Sea and Caspian, and
arose amid the wilds of central Asia. The Greek language, once the tongue of a
petty people, grew to be a universal language of culture, spoken even by
"barbarian" lips. And the art, the science, the literature, the
principles of politics and philosophy, developed in isolation by the Greek
mind, henceforth became the heritage of many nations.
THE NEW COSMOPOLITANISM
Thus, in the period after Alexander the long struggle
between East and West reached a peaceful conclusion. The distinction between
Greek and Barbarian gradually faded away, and the ancient world became ever
more unified in sympathies and aspirations. It was this mingled civilization of
Orient and Occident with which the Romans were now to come in contact, as they
pushed their conquering arms beyond Italy into the eastern Mediterranean.
