Where does the word come from?
The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, and the verb hellenizein meant to speak Greek or to become Greek in language. Thucydides, writing in the fifth century BCE, uses it when he says that the people of Amphilochian Argos learned their Greek speech from their neighbours of Ambracia.
The period name is much younger. In 1836 the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen published his Geschichte des Hellenismus, a history of the time from Alexander to the coming of Christianity, and gave the age a name of its own. For Droysen, Hellenismus meant a fusion of Greek and Eastern cultures. The German word cannot be translated as “Hellenism”, which in English means something else, so English uses the adjective: the Hellenistic period, Hellenistic art.
Hellenic or Hellenistic?
Hellenic simply means Greek, at any time; the Hellenic Republic is the official name of modern Greece. Hellenistic is narrower in time and wider in space: it refers to the period after Alexander, when Greek language and culture were carried far outside the old world of the city-states, to places that had never been Greek.
When was the Hellenistic period?
Between 334 and 323 BCE Alexander the Great and his armies conquered an empire stretching from Greece and Asia Minor through Egypt and the Persian empire to India. His death in 323 BCE traditionally marks the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The conventional end is 31 BCE, the battle of Actium, when Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, defeated Mark Antony and brought Ptolemaic rule to an end; the Ptolemies of Egypt were the last Hellenistic dynasty to fall to Rome. Some historians close the period in 30 BCE, when Egypt became Roman.
The map: kings, leagues and cities
Alexander’s empire did not survive him. His generals, the Diadochoi or “successors”, divided it into kingdoms: the Seleucids in the Near East, the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Antigonids in Macedonia. In the third century BCE smaller kingdoms broke away from the Seleucids in Asia Minor, among them Bithynia, Pontus and Cappadocia, and the Attalid family of Pergamon came to rule much of western Asia Minor. Far to the east, a dynasty of Greek and Macedonian descent ruled a kingdom from Bactria.
The Greek cities did not disappear. Some kept their independence through alliances, the most important being the Aetolian League in central Greece and the Achaean League in the Peloponnese. But for nearly three centuries the dominant political form in the Greek East was kingship.
Why the word matters
The term tells you that you are no longer in the Athens of Pericles. Royal courts, new and enlarged cities, the first museums and great libraries at Alexandria and Pergamon, collectors and trade routes changed what art was for and who paid for it. In art history “Hellenistic” therefore names both a period and a recognisable change of style: more movement, stronger emotion, a wider range of subjects. Hellenistic art took that change furthest in sculpture and architecture.
The Romans, who conquered the Hellenistic kingdoms, were also the keenest collectors of Greek art, and by the first century BCE Rome itself had become a centre of Hellenistic art.
Where to see it
Hellenistic works are spread across the world’s great museums: the Louvre in Paris, the Pergamon Altar in Berlin, the Capitoline and Vatican Museums in Rome, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the museums of Greece, Egypt and Turkey near the old royal cities. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- G. R. Bugh, “Introduction”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007).
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.68.5 (Perseus Digital Library).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Alexandria”; “Ancient Egypt: Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt (332-30 BCE)”; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 2002.66 and 52.127.4.
