232 Ojitlines of Enropean History states of Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt devoured one another. Mere playthings of these great powers, the unhappy Greek cities steadily declined, and commercial leadership passed east- ward to Antioch and Alexandria (Fig. 102). At length, as the strength of Eg}^pt declined, the other two plotted to divide her possessions between them, at the very time when they all should have combined to crush the growing power of Rome in the west, then in the throes of a deadly struggle with Carthage (pp. 258ff.). The result of the failure of Macedon, Syria, and Egypt to com- bine against Rome was their submission to the rising city of the Supremacy West Rome gradually extended her power through the eastern the^E^t after Mediterranean, till, with the seizure of Egypt about a generation 200 B.C. before Christ and about three hundred years after the death of Alexander, she was supreme from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules (p. 263). The Hellen- istic Age — supremacy of the Greek language Section 39. The Civilization of the Hellenistic Age The three centuries follovving the death of Alexander we call the Hellenistic Age, meaning the period in which Greek civili- zation spread throughout the ancient world, and was itself much modified by the culture of the Orient. While Greek cul- ture had greatly influenced the world outside Greece long before Alexander, his conquests placed Asia and Egypt in the hands of Macedonian rulers who were in civilization essentially Greek. Their language was the Greek spoken in Attica. The business of government was carried on in this language, and, together with Greek commerce and Greek literature, it made Greek the international language of the civilized world, the tongue of which every man of education must be master. Thus the strong Jewish community now living in Alexandria found it necessary to trans- late the books of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, in order that their educated men might read them. While the native peasants in the thickly populated portions of the East
