Modern historians about Macedonia – Francis S. Marvin

With the conquests of Alexander the Great more than the dream of Isocrates became actual fact. A Hellene was now lord over a vast tract of Asia. What attitude would the Hellene in these new circumstances take up to the barbarian?

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It does not, of course, follow from Alexander’s desire to merge the Greeks in a racial amalgam that he wished their culture to be similarly merged in a nodescrpt syncretism. It is conevable that while he wanted the races mixed, he wished Hellenism as a culture to be predominant.  The indications rather point to this being in his mind. The cities of Greek type which he founded all over the empire were to be nurseries of Hellenic life. In a tract attributed after Alexander, he is lauded as the belligerent missionary of a higer culture in the backward East.

Thanks to this, the Indians worship Hellenic gods, the Scythians bury their dead and do not eat them. Whilst Alexander was civilizing Asia, Homer was his reading; the sons of Persis and Susiana and Gedrosia chanted the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles.

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The native peoples had in their midst cities largely Greek in Speech, Greek in their customs and mode of building. Large numbers of people of Asiatic race learnt to speak in Greek and write in Greek and think in Greek.

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Western Races and the World by Francis S. Marvin