There was no imperial Athens to fill the theatres with a crowd of
citizens and strangers eager to listen to new tragic masterpieces.
There was no humorous democracy to laugh at all the world, and at
itself, with Aristophanes. The very religion of Sophocles and
Aeschylus was debased. A vulgar usurper had stripped the golden
ornaments from Athene of the Parthenon. The ancient faith in the
protecting gods of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes, had become a lax
readiness to bow down in the temple of any Oriental Rimmon, of
Serapis or Adonis. Greece had turned her face, with Alexander of
Macedon, to the East; Alexander had fallen, and Greece had become
little better than the western portion of a divided Oriental empire.
The centre of intellectual life had been removed from Athens to
Alexandria (founded 332 B.C.) The new Greek cities of Egypt and
Asia, and above all Alexandria, seemed no cities at all to Greeks who
retained the pure Hellenic traditions. Alexandria was thirty times
larger than the size assigned by Aristotle to a well-balanced state.
Austere spectators saw in Alexandria an Eastern capital and mart, a
place of harems and bazaars, a home of tyrants, slaves, dreamers, and
pleasure-seekers. Thus a Greek of the old school must have despaired
of Greek poetry. There was nothing (he would have said) to evoke it;
no dawn of liberty could flush this silent Memnon into song. The
collectors, critics, librarians of Alexandria could only produce
literary imitations of the epic and the hymn, or could at best write
epigrams or inscriptions for the statue of some alien and luxurious
god. Their critical activity in every field of literature was
immense, their original genius sterile. In them the intellect of the
Hellenes still faintly glowed, like embers on an altar that shed no
light on the way. Yet over these embers the god poured once again
the sacred oil, and from the dull mass leaped, like a many-coloured
frame, the genius of THEOCRITUS.