The uniformity of Greek culture all over the new world is remarkable. On the face of it, one might imagine that literature and art in Afghanistan would have developed in different directions from those they took in Egypt. But this was not so. As art historian Martin Robertson says: “Absorption of or modification by oriental influence . . . is a trivial and marginal element in Hellenistic art.” ¹⁰Greeks had a long history of considering their culture superior to that of any other people in the world, and the new cities were regarded by their inhabitants as oases of Hellenism in deserts considered otherwise to be more or less devoid of cultural interest. The separation between rulers and subjects in this respect is particularly striking in Egypt, where the two artistic traditions continued side by side—the Greek in Alexandria and other Greek enclaves, and the Egyptian elsewhere. There was little cultural interchange or hybridity.

In addition to security, the new settlements also facilitated trade, another major form of mobility. Even if primarily for military reasons, they commanded roads and rivers and coastlines, and hence came to play important commercial roles. Ancient trade was limited by a number of factors—chief among them being lack of technological development (due to the cheapness of available labor), too many frontiers, poor roads, and piracy—but the opening of the east enabled it to expand to the extent that it could. Traders traveled farther, established new markets, and dealt in new products (especially luxuries). Alexander undoubtedly saw the potential for this, since he standardized coinage and bullion values throughout the empire. But it took time. In the first years after his death there were only a few regions that were untroubled enough for trade to pick up. In fact, one of the goals of the contending Successors was to control regions that could provide them with the most vital commodities, such as timber, minerals, and grain—to try to corner the markets and deny them to their opponents.

For commercial as well as military reasons, then, frontiers were being pushed back. Both kinds of reason have always encouraged exploration. In the early Hellenistic period, Pytheas of Massalia sailed from southern Spain, circumnavigated the British Isles, and explored the amber coasts of the Baltic; meanwhile, military expeditions pushed farther into unknown parts of Asia than ever before, beyond the official boundaries of the empire. ¹¹As always, the expansion of the known world created a hunger for information about distant regions. Megasthenes wrote about India, Nearchus of his voyage back from India to Arabia, and utopian writers such as Euhemerus of Messene also set their fantasies in exotic locations. On the coattails of navigation (and of an increasing interest in astrology and calendrical systems), astronomers such as Autolycus of Pitane developed more precise models to account for the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies. Around 300, a former student of Aristotle’s called Dicaearchus of Messana drew up the first map of the known world showing a few orientation lines, the precursors of longitude and latitude.

Literal mobility across geographical borders found metaphorical echoes in society. Certain conventions did not survive the transposition to the east, and social mobility increased. Fortunes were made by men from outside the highest social classes, and even by slaves, while the pinnacle of the social ladder was reached by a very few, invariably aristocrats, who became official Friends of a king. The emancipation of slaves became more common, and there was a huge increase in the number of cases in which divine honors were awarded to human beings, as though even the barrier between humanity and divinity had become permeable.

Mobility led to the erosion of old family-based structures, not just in the sense that families themselves were physically broken up as one or more members emigrated in search of opportunities abroad, but also because these emigrants were uprooted from their ancestors and their kinship groups, with all that this implied in terms of family pride and cult. Hence, in part, the importance of gymnasia and social clubs in these far-flung foundations: they were substitutes for extended families. In the era of the Successors, emigrants were usually single men, but there were also a few widows looking for better opportunities for their children, as well as unmarried women. Having left their menfolk behind, they had to be allowed to manage their own assets, which was traditionally the job of the nearest male relative, and so women gradually won greater freedom and responsibility for their own affairs. But they never gained a significant political role.

As well as enhancing security and promoting trade and other forms of mobility, the new foundations also had an accidental result. Since Greeks were the ruling elite, a certain proportion of the native population came to assume at least some of the trappings of Greek culture as a way of gaining a share of the power. The Greeks themselves, however, made little effort to educate the natives, beyond having those who were employed in the administration learn Greek; the official language was everywhere the same, a version of Athenian Greek called koin ē, introduced by Philip II into his court and then spread around the world by Alexander’s army. ¹²

The new immigrants were not there to educate but to enrich themselves. They did not see themselves as bearing any ancient equivalent of the White Man’s Burden to civilize barbarian races, nor did they pretend they were bringing freedom and free trade (another pretext put forward by more recent European imperialists). Enrichment was the motive for uprooting the family and moving hundreds or thousands of miles from home. The ideal of cosmopolitanism—of a world in which different cultures mingled and met as equals—was a philosophers’ fancy, and had little bearing on Greek and Macedonian attitudes or policies. The new immigrants arrived with the assumption that their culture was superior to that of any non-Greek people, and simply wanted to enjoy its benefits themselves, however far they were from home. Immigrants invariably yearn for the homeland and surround themselves with familiar cultural trappings. All the same, it became a sign of prestige for a native to be a member of the local gymnasium or one of the other Greek clubs, or to worship at a Greek temple. Over time, then, Greek culture began to filter out of the compounds of the ruling elite and trickle farther down the social scale. From the start there were a few educated natives who knew Greek—the Egyptian historian Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek around 285 BCE, for instance, and a decade or two later Berossus of Babylon did the same for Babylonian history—but the pace picked up somewhat as the years passed. ¹³

Naturally, this trickle-down was limited, in the sense that it was largely restricted to the cities, and to elites within the cities. The 80 or 90 percent of the population who were peasant farmers found their daily lives more or less untouched by regime changes and international markets. They were still selling their products locally, mostly by barter; their ignorance of the Greek language was an uncrossable barrier. If their lives changed at all, it was as a result of different taxes, increased monetization, and the introduction of Greek agricultural stock and methods.

Nevertheless, there was a certain diffusion of Greek culture, even if limited, so that in due course of time, the term “Greek” came to designate not blood but education and mental outlook. And so an unintended result of the foundation of new cities such as Ai Khanum, whose first purpose was to secure the land, was the diffusion of Greek culture all over the world. The enterprise to which all the energy of the forty years following Alexander’s death was devoted was, as it turned out, the enterprise of creating the Hellenistic world out of Alexander’s inchoate ambitions.