The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World

This latest addition to the established Cambridge companion titles focuses attention on the too frequently neglected contribution of the Hellenistic or post‐Classical world. Even today scholarly works on Greece continue to be published which suggest that Greek history ended with the death of Alexander in 323BCE and that over 1,000 attested poleis or Greek city states spread throughout the Mediterranean had vanished mysteriously overnight.

As editor Glenn Bugh points out in an interesting introductory essay to the present volume, the ancients themselves must shoulder a proportion of the blame for classifying writers of this period as decadent and inferior. The...