Angelos Chaniotis. Age of Conquests

Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian, by Angelos Chaniotis, offers a comprehensive overview of the Mediterranean world, with outlets to the north and the east, over the course of five centuries—from the conquests of Alexander the Great to the marked end of the aggressive growth of the Roman Empire during the reign of Hadrian. Chaniotis expands on his War in the Hellenistic World: A Social and Cultural History (2005), both geographically and chronologically, with important differences. His new book covers the entire inhabited world, or ecumene, and pushes the Hellenistic age, traditionally dated from the late fourth to the late first century b.c.e., well into the Roman imperial period. Immersed in the captivating narrative and intriguing details, general readers, who are this book’s main target audience, will likely skip through most of the theoretical considerations. Specialists, however, will find a lot of good food for thought here, beginning with how we should approach and establish historical periods and, closely interrelated, choose and use definitions for them. Chronologically, extending the Hellenistic age into the second century might not seem as radical as Simon Swain’s Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (1996), Glen Bowersock’s Hellenism in Late Antiquity (1990), or Anthony Kaldellis’s Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (2007)—which saw Hellenism as, first and foremost, a cultural phenomenon. What requires an explanation is why Age of Conquests ends with the reign of Hadrian. Carefully avoiding the use of the term “Hellenism,” Chaniotis speaks of a “long Hellenistic age,” which, he believes, actually continued into the later second century, when conditions in the Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire started to change. However, Hadrian’s foundation of the Panhellenic council symbolically closed a circle that had been opened with the establishment of a Panhellenic alliance by Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great; this is why, the author explains, he ends his book at this moment. Chaniotis, therefore, uses different premises to establish the beginning of the Hellenistic age, which he puts at before the death of Philip II, and its end in the second century c.e.

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