to belong to Alexander's legacy and their wish was all the stronger for being spontaneous.

It is not too remote to invoke Alexander's name in this. Apart from the ceaseless fighting, his years in the 'upper satrapies' beyond Hamadan had brought Greek into the lives of Iranians by deliberate and calculated stages, his persistent games, sacrifices and festivals in Greek style, his recruitment of 30,000 natives for Greek training, his mixed marriages and plans for their children, his Greek teachers for the Persian queen and her daughters, his Greek-speaking court, his use of Greek army commands in his integrated army and above all, the settling of more than 20,000 Greeks and veterans in rebuilt Alexandrias where they were mixed with a native citizenry and so spread their language through their wives, families and fellow-inhabitants. Each Alexandria was a full-blooded city where men had to vote on Greek decrees and agree to Greek law; citizenship was a privilege which did not extend to all the natives housed in these cities, nor was a city granted to every group of soldiers whom Alexander settled. A city was a distinct and special foundation. Just as the Persian kings had granted land to feudal tenants in return for military service, so Alexander manned military colonies in his own name, inheriting the Great King's colonists and adding settlers of his own. More than a dozen such settlements were left to guard against the nomads where the province of Media met their desert steppes; they were not full Alexandrias, but their farming soldiery grew to adopt the law and language of their western landlords, and it is from these 'second class citizens' that there come the most impressive tributes to the force of Greek culture among Iranians. None has yet been excavated in the upper satrapies, but at Dura on the Euphrates, an early colony of the Successors, every legal contract known for the next four hundred years conforms to Greek law, although the majority of colonists were Oriental natives and the colony had long passed to Parthian rule; in the Lydian plains on Asia's west coast, the Hyrcanian colonists whom Cyrus had settled came to be called Macedonian Hyrcanians and even under the Roman empire they retained their Macedonian military dress. In the wild Kurdish mountains near Hamadan, where Alexander had barely trodden, settlers with Iranian names were still drawing up the deeds of sale for their vineyards in passable Greek and clear Greek law a century after Greek rule in Asia had ended, the most compelling evidence so far for the spread of the language through inaccessible comers of Iran. They were surely descendants of cavalry-colonists, planted there by Alexander's early successors.

Through his court and his cities. Alexander had brought Greek speech and customs to some 100,000 Orientals from the upper satrapies alone; they would widen from one generation to the next, though the numbers of Alexander's first hellenizers are irrelevant, as Greek was the culture of the government and so it was bound to dominate. Within its limits, hellenization had to be complete. These limits were not demanding; an Oriental became a recognized Greek simply by speaking the language and sharing the games and customs of a Greek court or community. He did not have to change his religion and his colour was irrelevant; the one bar was nudity, for the Greeks exercised naked in gymnasiums, a habit which Orientals found repugnant and embarrassing; and not the least of the worries of hellenizing Jews in their new Jerusalem was that they should be seen by fellow athletes to be circumcised. The names 'Greek' and 'Macedonian' were freely applied to Jews, Syrians, Egyptians or Persians provided that they spoke Greek and adopted Greek customs, if not Greek gods; to the first Christians, the word Hellene applied to every pagan, regardless of race or religion.

Because it excluded nobody, Greek culture could spread universally; to do so, it also had to seem impressive. Nowadays, the meek surrender of the East to western culture is a surrender to technology and industrial growth, helped by the by-ways of tourism, pop-songs and the drip-dry world of the businessman. In Alexander's empire, land transport was painfully slow and only the patient and hardy could travel; economically, the Greeks promised no miracle and although Cleomenes and the Ptolemies primed the royal economy of Egypt for the coins with which to hire their troops and sailors, it was the government who gained by this skilful change, not the vast mass of Egyptians. The founding of Egyptian Alexandria and the reopening of the sea route from India to the west were proof that Alexander had his father's awareness of the merits of trade, but the trade he inspired did not work deeply into the agricultural world of most of Asia. Alexandria's trade only flourished through the Greek middlemen of nearby Rhodes and through customer cities with the harbour or river to receive it, while the trade from India was the hazardous life of a minority, bringing luxuries west to the courts of the rich, not the villages of tribes and peasants. By opening a string of new mints from Sardis to Babylon, Alexander had encouraged a wide coinage on the same Athenian standard which had already prevailed in the satraps' mints on the Asian coast; more coins then circulated on a standard and a royal design which was generally used in Greece, and for the trading minority and the hired soldiery this was no doubt a useful convenience. But in this agricultural world where most men lived by a natural economy, the scattered finds of small everyday coins cannot support the sweeping theories of coinage which collectors of valuable gold and silver pieces have written into the classical past; Alexander has even been blamed for promoting inflation in the Aegean by coining too rapidly from Darius's vast treasures, as if the farming society of Greece would ever have been troubled by the fluctuations of his silver tetradrachms or this alleged glut of precious coin, sound proof of which has still to be discovered. As for Asia's nomads and country villagers, they had no need for a coinage which tended to circulate, if at all, in towns. The most notable find of Alexander's small-change coins in Iran are the bronze obols in the mouths of nomads' skeletons beyond the Oxus, presumably placed for the customary Greek offering to Charon the ferryman, who shipped the dead across the river of the Greek underworld.

If the Greeks promised no wide prosperity, like their western heirs they impressed the East with their technical skill. In places it was as if they were working on an underdeveloped 'third world': 'When the Indians saw sponges in use among the Macedonians,' wrote Nearchus, 'they imitated them by sewing hairs and string into a sort of wool; then they pressed the wool to make it like felt, carded it and dyed it different colours. Many of them, too, were quick to learn to make the "rubbers" which we used for massage and the flasks in which we carried our oil'. Technically the Indians could train elephants and cure the bite of their poisonous snakes, but it was probably a Greek engineer who first devised the howdah for the elephant's back, and Greek doctors were always used for the surgery of serious flesh wounds. 'The Indians here have huge resources of salt, but they are very naive about what they own ...' Alexander's Greek prospector reported critically on the minerals of each Asian province and though mining was an ancient art in Asia, the Greeks may have introduced the skill of splitting rocks by fire to tribesmen who formerly picked precious stones from the beds of their fast-flowing rivers. Greek surveyors paced out the first accurate distances through lands which had otherwise been measured by the variable stages of an hour's journey; irrigation had long been the basic skill of Iranian farmers, but two new Alexandrias show signs of an improved water system, probably due to their Greek inhabitants. The tools and calendar of agriculture are likely to have changed little, for local lore is always authoritative and its fertile results had impressed Greek observers. However, the spreading of Asia's precious trees and plants though the open frontiers of Greek Asia can be traced in the vigorous efforts of the Ptolemies to import new crops and spices into Egypt; minor kings in Greek Asia continued their botanical example. In their buildings Greek architects could manage a wider unsupported roof-span than the builders of Persepolis, while the simple rectangle of their city-planning was adopted in oases along the Oxus and continued by the nomads who finally burst on their cities; their towered walls and ditches were a necessary defence to their own new principles of siege-craft, powered by the torsion-spring which had so surprised the Oxus nomads. In Syria, the Greeks even dug new harbours from bays which had been left 'natural' by their able Phoenician predecessors.