The relative disempowerment of Athens in the Hellenistic period shows, above all, in the fact that it never again built monumental buildings out of its own resources, without the help of kings and wealthy individuals. It also shows in its literature and art, and most clearly in the comedy that was popular at the time. In the days when Athens had been a major power in the Aegean, comedy had blended farcical fantasy with satire, or even direct criticism, of contemporary figures, especially political figures and their policies. Aristophanes, the main comic playwright at the end of the fifth century, assumed that his job was to instruct his audiences as well as entertain them. ⁵By contrast, it is clear that Menander of Athens, the chief surviving representative of the kind of comic plays that were being shown at the end of the fourth century (conventionally called “New Comedy”), was concerned more or less entirely with entertainment. The rural setting of most of his comedies contrasts with the way Aristophanes set his plays in the heart of the city, where the political action was.

Menander’s plays are delightful, but they are light, soap-operatic situation comedies. The protagonists are recognizable types, but not political types; they are, for instance, clever slaves, young women with illegitimate children, grumpy old men, braggart soldiers, and worthless young men-about-town, all depicted with great skill and psychological insight. The plots invariably center on a thwarted love affair, which comes out well for the young lovers in the end. Where Aristophanes was engaged in contemporary events, Menander (who was a friend of Demetrius of Phalerum) and his peers do no more than refer to them as a kind of backdrop. Women might be abducted by pirates, or sold into slavery, or captured in war, or have children by foreign soldiers. Men contemplate enlisting as mercenaries, or are assumed to have died abroad on service, or return with a “spear-won” concubine. Menander was writing at a time when thousands of lives were being lost on the battlefields of Asia and Europe, but, not surprisingly, he felt it was his job to distract his audience’s attention from such harsh realities, not to comment directly on them. He was writing escapist literature. He drew attention not to large-scale events but to the personal problems of individuals and their families. And so he kept step with the emphasis on the individual that we have already found to be a dominant feature of early Hellenistic culture.

Escapism is apparent too in the new craze among rich town-dwellers for commissioning pastoral paintings to adorn their domestic quarters—the first manifestation of the long European tradition of landscape painting. None of these paintings has survived from the Hellenistic period, but they are known through later imitations, especially those preserved in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in southern Italy (though of course Roman artists were never merely imitative). Vitruvius, writing in Rome in the first century BCE, described typical scenes as “harbors, headlands, woods, hills, and the wanderings of Odysseus.” ⁶Such scenes were considered relaxing—which is to say that they took one’s mind off current affairs. The men who commissioned these paintings were increasingly cut off from the countryside, and so they idealized it. It is telling that the Greek word boukolikos, meaning “bucolic” or “pastoral,” also came to mean “soothing,” “ distracting.”

Of course, it is somewhat facile to describe any works of art or literature just as “escapist.” They are works of art in their own right, and many of the productions of the Hellenistic era have stood the test of time well. The degree of skill and the quality of the attention paid to works of art make it clear that both the artists themselves and their patrons shared the concept of art for art’s sake. The fact that they may have served escapist purposes is important from a social-historical point of view, but it falls far short of any kind of assessment of their worth as artistic productions.

These pastoral paintings quite often occupied panels that were displayed in a room in such a way that they could be read as a continuous narrative. Around the middle of the third century, poets such as Theocritus began to echo the trend by writing pastoral or bucolic vignettes. Not all of Theocritus’s Idyllsare on pastoral themes, but all of them display the typical Hellenistic focus on everyday men and women rather than heroes. In IdyllI, the most famous of the pastoral idylls, a shepherd and a goatherd pipe and sing for each other, for entertainment and competition, and their exchanges are filled with details of country life: the music of the breeze in the pines, the playful sound of a waterfall, the flora and fauna, tasks such as milking, and lore such as that the meat of an unweaned kid tastes better. All the pastoral Idyllsare imbued with escapism in the form of “the nostalgia, or hope, for simple virtues, uncomplicated living, plain home-grown food, basic country values.” ⁷Of course, country life never has been as ideal as this fantasy, produced for an urban elite by the court poet of Ptolemy II’s Alexandria. Theocritus instigated the pastoral dream that led, via Virgil, to Poussin’s Arcadia.

The evidence for the kind of tragedies that were being written in Athens and elsewhere at the time is exiguous, but bears out these generalizations about escapism. As far as we can tell, they tended to emphasize technical and musical virtuosity over the depiction and problematization of ideal civic values, as their fifth-century predecessors had. The fifth-century masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were commonly revived, but only as great works of literature; we watch a Shakespeare production in much the same way nowadays, missing the copious references to contemporary events.

The new emphasis on the individual also informed sculpture and painting. While kings and commanders were still portrayed in propagandist ways that distinguished them as players of critical roles, a considerable gap opened up between this kind of public idealism and the increasingly large numbers of privately commissioned works of art, which aimed at the perfect execution of less weighty subjects, depicted as realistically as the writer or artist could manage. Coin portraits bridged the gap, with their subtle combinations of ideal and real.

Earlier in the fourth century, sculptors and painters had already begun to strive for a closer imitation of nature than the classical ideal allowed. Lysippus of Sicyon had introduced a new proto-Mannerist canon for the human figure, with longer legs and smaller heads, and positioned so that more than just the front of the body was visible. On this basis, sculptors began to experiment with more sensuous poses of the human form. The full range of emotions could now be expressed on face and body together—a satyr turning to look at his tail, a dancer dancing free. Realism—or at least the appearance of realism, as Lysippus is said to have quipped ⁸—was the name of the game. Just as Lysippus was Alexander’s court sculptor, so Apelles of Colophon (died ca. 295) was the only painter he allowed to do his portrait, and Apelles too was at the forefront of developing a new realism in painting—so much so that, as the story goes, Alexander’s horse Bucephalas whinnied at its own image in one of his paintings. ⁹

A new aesthetic was emerging. Poetry and the visual arts focused on technique and subtle displays of learning, and reflected each other. What was assonance in poetry and repeated motif in music became the periodic placing of color and form in painting; poetry in particular was full of such devices, designed to enhance its musicality, playfulness, and suggestiveness. Techniques such as filigree, chiaroscuro, and gilding were the visual counterparts of the wit and refinement of Hellenistic poetry. Poets returned the favor by valuing vividness, the ability to bring a matter directly before the mind’s eye. The subjects of all media were similar: pets, plants, children, ordinary people, domestic scenes, comic characters, tragic characters—all portrayed with vigor, a love of detail, and psychological insight. In some cases, artists chose to make their emotional point by grotesquery and caricature (here we find hunchbacks, dwarfs, and cripples, for instance); in others, by pathos or a gentle eroticism. Realism or caricature were the goals. It was all a far cry from war.