Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/304

 272 HISTORY OF GREECE. when he visited Alexandria, looked with surprise and aversion on the Greeks there resident, though they were superior to the non-hellenie population, whom he considered wortUess.i Greek social habits, festivals, and legends, passed with the hellenic set- tlers into Asia ; all becoming amalgamated and transformed so as to suit a new Asiatic abode. Important social and political consequences turned upon the diffusion of the language, and up- on the estabUshment of such a common medium of communica- tion throughout Western Asia. But after all, the hellenized Asi- atic Avas not so much a Greek as a foreigner with Grecian speech, exterior varnish, and superficial manifestations ; distinguished fundamentally from those Greek citizens with whom the present history has been concerned. So he would have been considered by Sophokles, by Thucydides, by Sokrates. Thus much is necessary in order to understand the bearing of Alexander's conquests, not only upon the hellenic population, but upon hellenic attributes and pecuhaxities. While crushing the Greeks as communities at home, these conquests ojjened a wider range to the Greeks as individuals abroad ; and produced ■ — perhaps the best of all their effects — a great increase of inter- communication, multiplication of roads, extension of commercial dealing, and enlarged facilities for the acquisition of geographical "knowledge. There ah-eady existed in the Persian empire an easy and convenient royal road (established by Darius son of Hy- staspes and described as well as admii'ed by Herodotus) for the three months' journey between Sardis and Susa ; and there musi ' Strabo, xvii. p. 797. o yovv Ho^^.vfiioQ yeyovCig kv n) Tro/.ei (Alexandria), BSeTiiiTTETai tt/v rav-ri KaTuaraaiv, etc. The Museum of Alexandria (with its library) must be carefully distin- guished from the city and the people. It was an artiticial institution, wliicii took its rise altogether from the personal taste and munificence of the earlier Ptolemies, especially the second. It was one of the noblest and most useful institutions recorded in history, and forms the most honorable monument of what Droysen calls the heUenislic period, between the death of Alexander and the extension of the Roman empire into Asia. But this ISIuseum, though situated at Alexandria, had no peculiar connection with the city or its population; it was a College of literary Fellows (if we may employ a modern word) congregated out of various Grecian towns. Era tosthenes, Kallimachus, Aristophanes, Aristarchus, were not natives cJ •Alexandria.