Exam 5: The Classical Style

Correct Answer:

Verified

The biggest change from Hellenic culture to Hellenistic culture was one of scale.Hellenistic life emerged after Alexander the Great's conquests and culture shifted from localized city-states to that of an empire.The defining features of the Hellenistic Age were cosmopolitanism,urbanism,and the blending of Greek,African,and Asian cultures.Trade routes linked Arabia,East Africa,and Central Asia,bringing great wealth to the cities of Alexandria,Antioch,Pergamon,and Rhodes.Alexandria,which replaced Athens as a cultural center,boasted a population of more than one million people and a library of half a million books.
The Hellenistic Age also made important advances in geography,astronomy,and mathematics.Euclid produced a textbook of existing geometric learning that systematized the theorems of plane and solid geometry.His contemporary,the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos,proposed that the earth and all the planets revolved around the sun,a theory abandoned by his followers and not confirmed until the seventeenth century.
The Hellenistic world was considerably different from the world of the Greek city-states.In the latter,citizens identified with their community,which was itself the state;but in Alexander's vast empire,communal loyalties were unsteady and-especially in sprawling urban centers-impersonal.The intellectuals of the Hellenistic Age did not formulate rational methods of investigation in the style of Plato and Aristotle;rather they espoused philosophic schools of thought that guided everyday existence:Skepticism,Cynicism,Epicureanism,and Stoicism.