Hellensitic+World+Essay+-+Decline

 

Essay


Written by Vicky Luu

In 323 BC, Alexander the Great died in Babylon, marking the start of the Hellenistic Era. During this period in history, there have been a great number of academic and technological achievements. Some of the things we can learn from the fall of Hellenistic culture are through Hellenistic military developments, their different social classes and their battle tactics. With this information, we can learn from the mistakes made by the Hellenistic culture and avoid them.

First, the formation and training of the soldiers were not as good as those under the reign of Alexander and his father, Philip II. The Macedonian phalanx, made up of heavily armed soldiers packed tightly together, is great on flat, even terrain, but it is horrible on uneven grounds. When the phalanx is on a battlefield that is not flat and unobstructed, there will be breaks, holes and gaps in the formation, therefore giving their enemy an opening. Eventually, the Hellenistic kings did try to improve their army's style of fighting to match the Romans, but not soon enough. With this flaw, the Roman legion flattened the phalanx (Bugh, 288-289) in the Battle of Pydna marking the beginning of the end for the Hellenistic era. This teaches us today that to be successful, we need to be flexible and adaptable, as well as not to change plans late in the game unless we know that we have enough time, otherwise, we will fail because of unpreparedness.

The second thing we can learn from the Hellenistic Era is their separation of social classes and the decline of real democracy (Boardman, 327). Their social classes ranking from the highest (1) to the lowest (5): (1) the royal family, (2) wealthy Greeks and Macedonians in the cities, (3) the wealthy indigenous in the city, (3) leaders of the minority population in the city, (3) traditional lords and princes of indigenous groups in the rural area. Below that, there are the (4) small merchants, (4) craft producers and (4) labourers. And outside the bounds of society are, as always, (5) the slaves. Even though the wealthy indigenous are near the top of the list, in the Seleucid Kingdom, non-Greeks were excluded from authority (Shipley, 323). The poor did the bulk of the labour and many of them worked on huge agricultural estates owned by the royal family. As democracy declined, the rich were favoured by the magistrates and gained a lot of power over the city. In my opinion, this caused many of the rebellions and uprisings in the Hellenistic world because of resentment to the rich and powerful and to unfair treatment. The lesson learned from this is to keep democracy, have people from every walk of life be involved with something, or there is a high chance that there will be revolts and upheavals.

Finally, what ultimately lead to their downfall was that they overused tactic that their opponent already knew how to defeat. The Hellenistic armies used elephants; in Egypt they used the African elephant because those were the only ones available, while the Seleucids used the larger Indian elephant. The Romans have experience fighting elephants in their African wars. All they have to do, is step aside and throw their spears at the side of the elephant, or hamstring them with swords. When the element of surprise is gone the battle is really just who has more guts. Same thing goes for the elephants; once the use of elephants becomes normal, the enemy will not be surprise, they are going to instead be prepared and think of different ways to defeat the elephants. The lesson is, to occasionally change tactics otherwise we will be predictable.

In 30 BC, when Cleopatra VII committed suicide in Alexandria, this marked the end of the Hellenistic era (Green, 2007, 129). We have seen that the military developments did not match that of the Romans, because the Hellenistic kings did not change their battle formations early enough resulting in the fall of Macedonia in 169 BC. Also, their social classes were very distinct and the poor were always working on royal or wealthy landowners therefore causing public unrest in the different kingdoms. And when the Hellenistic armies used the same tactics therefore, their enemy knows how to overcome the elephants used in Hellenistic warfare. In the end, it did not matter how good the Greek phalanx was, or how united the civilization was or how incredible their battle tactics were, the Romans still took over all of the Hellenistic kingdoms.

The Decline of the Hellenistic World     