This defiant network stands directly to Alexander's credit; it depended on him, and his death nearly undid it, for the Greek settlers in the upper satrapies rebelled at the news 'longing for their own Greek upbringing and way of life which they had only forfeited through fear of Alexander in his lifetime'. It took an army sent by Perdiccas at Babylon to rum them back and so save Greek Iran for history: several thousand were killed, but certainly not the majority. Some cities, those in the Merv oasis and Alexandria-the-furthest, were rapidly attacked by nomads and had to be rebuilt; those in India passed to Chandragupta; those in upper Iran were cut off after eighty years, and within two centuries every Greek city beyond the Euphrates had been overrun by Parthians and central Asian nomads. But politics are only one part of history and Greeks and Greek culture did not vanish with a change of masters; because years seem like minutes when they are so far distant, it is hard to remember that the Greek cities in Iran had lasted as long as the British empire in India. Just as British cooking still disgraces the kitchens of the Caribbean and Shakespeare is still taught in Indian schools, so the prints of the Greeks can be traced for another seven hundred years, whether in the city-planning of their first nomad masters or in the shapes of small clay figures which were traded from Samarkand to China, in alphabets and central Asian scripts or in the astonishing funerary art of nomads beyond the Oxus. The one detailed book on the towns and routes of central Asia to be written by a westerner in the Roman Empire derived its facts from a Macedonian entrepreneur, whose father had left his colonial home in Syria and moved to Bactria, where he mastered the silk trade which ran from the Oxus to China.

Politically, this spreading of Greek culture had suited Alexander; in the process he forcibly rolled back the boundaries of the Mediterranean until the Greeks' own 'frog-pond' had threatened to reach to the outer ocean. This new horizon was extremely significant. Three centuries later, the frontier of his Roman successors came to rest on the river Euphrates, and even then the frontier was never absolute. A traveller from Roman Syria to the Parthians' Fertile Crescent had not passed into a different world of barbarity, for the Semitic peoples were a vigorous unity which forts and frontiers could not divide. Likewise, in the upper satrapies beyond them, Alexander's Mediterranean legacy had not altogether died. The common blood of Hellenism still survived in skills and senders, while it also flowed from Egyptian Alexandria round Arabia and so to India by the great sea route which its founder had meant to realize. Beyond the Roman frontier men were not barbarians; to a historian in senatorial Italy they 'had the deplorable quality of not being barbarian enough*. Greek culture had not been confined to Greek colonists; it was dominant and it had invited its subjects to surrender to it.

To an age which has seen the collapse of Iran to the ideals of western industry and the aping of America by a Japan which has lost its own nerve, this effect of Alexander's conquest is as fascinating as it is elusive. Every area responded differently, the broad divisions of Egypt, Asia Minor, the Semitic peoples and Iran, and within them every desert and valley, mountain and farmers' plainland; the thin veins of a road or the nearness of a royal estate and a westernized court could lift a tribe out of its past and link it with the skills and language of the Greeks, while neighbours inland continued their herding and grazing in the manner of their ancestors. The Syrians' Aramaic, the Iranian dialects and the country speech of Asia Minor's hinterland did not die before the new common Greek, but they certainly went underground. In Iran there was no native alphabet; in the west local dialects survived, but they seldom obtrude in the surviving evidence, apart from the names of native gods and the fact that a Phoenician under Greek rule wrote his people's prehistory in Aramaic prose.

As these dialects retreated before their rulers' Greek, the results of their westernization were varied and seldom edifying. The flowering of science and scholarship in the Ptolemies' third-century Egypt was mostly the work of Greek immigrants from the old Aegean world; it stood as a tailpiece to the history of classical Greece, owing very little to westernized Egyptians. The special case of Egypt's Alexandria was mirrored in the fate of Babylon. The Successors favoured its temple communities in the manner of free Greek cities, and this tolerance limited foreign hellenism to a few-native governors and priests; Greek immigrants were scarcer and less of a distortion. Thus the Fertile Crescent did not lose its vigour; when the Parthians seized it two centuries after Alexander, it gave them a new and spiritual style of art and a flourishing architecture of vaults and arches. But these styles owed more to Semitic culture than to the upper layer of Greek taste which had never smothered the natives' unity.

The shining exception was Syria, always contested by the Successors' armies. Circumstances forced Seleucus to found four cities on undeveloped sites, diverting the caravan trade from the Persian Gulf through a backward patch of country. Hellenism surged through these cities and their nearby military colonies: the one exception is athletic culture, for so far, athletic games are unattested here in early Hellenistic evidence. Syrian philosophers and a school of Syrian poets sprang up, who wrote witty Greek epigrams and referred to their homes as 'Assyria's Athens'. They left them soon enough, but it mattered more that Syria had joined the Greeks' common culture than that she could not contain her brightest children. This culture lasted and became the chain for the spread of Christianity. Without this common language of Greek, Christianity could never have spread beyond Judaea.

East of the Euphrates and among Iranians Hellenism has received less attention, partly because it has long been less known: few hcllenized Persians are mentioned by name in surviving Greek literature, and the sense of an open frontier, where a man could speak Greek from Syria to the Oxus, can only be deduced from the horizons of Greek geographers and chance remarks in westerners' histories. Archaeology has recently added new evidence, a process which still has far to go: at a time of new beginnings the grandiose experiment of Alexander's eastern frontier deserves another thought.

First, the generalities. After Alexander, Greek became the culture of every Asian native who wished to succeed, and so it swept through the circles of Asia's governing classes; 'Let us make a covenant with the Gentiles', wrote the Jewish author of the only historical work which describes the conflicts of hellenizing the East, 'for since we have been different from them we have found many bad things. ..." The urge to belong to the Greek world was the urge of successful men everywhere; it made no difference that much of Alexander's empire broke into local kingdoms within a hundred years. Just as the romanization of western Europe only took root through the efforts of local patron landowners four hundred years after Caesar's conquests, so the hellenization of the East was best served by these local kings, because they needed to work Greek culture down through their subjects and ensure secretaries, treasurers, generals and orators to plead their cause in the wide Greek world. Alexander had never controlled Cappadocia, mountainous refuge of many of Darius's followers, and under his Successors it became an independent kingdom with an Iranian aristocracy and line of kings. But two hundred years after Alexander, those kings patronized Greek actors and issued coins of pure Greek design; a Cappadocian man of letters was connected with Delphi, and an old Assyrian military colony in the Cappadocian plains had already turned itself into a Greek city which observed the law of Alexander's kingdom and passed decrees in perfectly balanced Greek. The neighbouring king of Armenia enjoyed Greek literature and wrote a play himself, though his kingdom had never acknowledged the Successors; the hellenizing families in Jerusalem were willing to buy from the Seleucid king the privilege of setting up a gymnasium to turn Jerusalem into a Greek city called Antioch, for they wished