Alexanders Foundation of Cities

he Hellenistic Kings adopted the practice of constructing cities from Alexander. He was credited with the foundation of over seventy cities, but as Simon Price1 says the real number may only be half that. Fraser lists 57 Alexandrias and argues that with the exception of Bucephala, it was Alexanders practise to establish cities where there had been existing Achaemenid fortresses2. The Seleucids created over sixty new settlements in the area from western Turkey to Iran. Some of these were old settlements that were given a new Greek constitution. Others were founded from scratch. These cities played a major role in the Hellenization of the areas that they dominated. Sometimes new cities were founded were perfectly good civilisations had already existed. For example the old city of Babylon was superseded by the new capital Seleucia, only fifty kilometres away. The cities varied in size and function. Some settlements were military institutions. These sometimes only had a few hundred citizens and possessed few independent institutions. They were merely military outposts designed to prevent uprisings from the local inhabitants. The king directly controlled them. Others were large independent cities with many thousands of inhabitants ranging in size up to Alexandria, which is estimated to have been the largest city in the Mediterranean basin in the first century BC. The culture of the cities was Greek. A new dialect of the Greek language developed called Koine. It became a trade language that facilitated communication all over the Hellenistic world. It is the dialect that the New Testament of the Bible was written in its original manuscripts. The constitutions of many of the Greek cities would have been familiar to citizens of Classical Greece. The council would nominate candidates for public office that would then be elected by the full body of the citizens. Over 300 years after its foundation Seleucia on the Eulaeus still had such a constitution. At the centre of the city was the gymnasion that was not merely a place for athletes to train but also a centre of education and learning. All full citizens of the city were expected to be members of the gymnasion. Those native people who managed to prove their eligibility to join the gymnasion had to exercise naked, an abomination to many native people (especially the Jews). To them stripping naked marked their transition from their old culture and the adoption of Hellenic culture. We see some indications that in some of the cities there was virtually no Hellenization of the native population. For example in Seleucia on the Eulaeus in 300 years there was no recorded citizen with a Greek name whose father did not have a Greek name. Even in Egypt there are few points of contact between Greek art and Egyptian art (except for the Ptolemies themselves who often portrayed themselves as Pharaohs.

1 2

Oxford History of the Classical World, p. 321. P.M. Fraser, Cities of Alexander the Great (Oxford, 1996), pp. 172f.