if you examine the results of Alexander's instruction, you will see that he educated the Hyrcanians to respect the marriage bond, and taught the Arachosians to till the soil, and persuaded the Sogdians to support their parents, not to kill them, and the Persians to revere their mothers and not to take them in wedlock. O wondrous power of Philosophic Instruction, that brought the Indians to worship Greek gods, and the Scythians to bury their dead, not to devour them! (Plutarch, Moralia 328C, ca. AD 65?)
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Once upon a time, texts such as these defined our understanding, and study, of the Hellenistic world. Plutarch here emphasizes the 'civilizing' force of Alexander's conquests, admiring how 'Philosophic Instruction' served to bring the barbarians of the east, with their peculiar customs, into conformity with the Hellenic way of life. Later scholars -- both historians and archaeologists -- followed, if with somewhat more sophistication, in Plutarch's footsteps: tracing the impact of Hellenic culture, assuming that Alexander's conquests wrought profound and beneficial changes to the Hellenistic world.
In our present post-colonial age, attitudes such as these -- which aggrandize the conqueror as they patronize the conquered -- are more than suspect and have in recent years been frequently challenged. These challenges have brought into question another deep-seated belief about the Hellenistic oikoumene (a Greek term meaning 'inhabited world'). Because previous scholars had consulted only Greek sources for the period, and because they were concerned almost exclusively with tracing the export of Greek artifacts, the Hellenistic world emerged (not surprisingly) as a connected and integrated unit. The same 'civilizing' processes were assumed to have taken place everywhere, with the conquests of Alexander marking a sharp break between what had gone before and the new world order.
That notion -- of a unified and 'similar' Hellenistic oikoumene -- has now been shattered by greater sensitivity to other, non-Greek documentary traditions, and more broadly-based archaeological research, notably the recent results of archaeological field survey. Local traditions, local trajectories, local accommodation, local resistance: all must now be sought, and expected, within the Hellenistic oikoumene. Large-scale overviews of that complex world, so akin to our own in various unnerving ways as Edouard Will has pointed out, will always be essential. Equally necessary, however, are more small-scale, local studies: how did discrete regions, interlocking groups of communities, even individual families live and adapt to the changing conditions of life in the Hellenistic age?