In addition to works of history there are 4th-century treatises that show how Greeks experienced the new military monarchies. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (“Education of Cyrus”) is a novel about Cyrus the Great, but it is also a tract on kingship and generalship addressed to the class of educated Greek commanders and would-be leaders. (In comparable fashion Isocrates offered advice on kingship to the semi-Hellenized rulers of Cyprus.) The surviving treatise on siege-craft by Aeneas of Stymphalus in Arcadia (known as Aeneas Tacticus) is valuable not only for the evidence it provides about dissensions (stasis) inside a polis—there is an entire section on “plots”—but also for the awareness both of the ruthless methods of men like Dionysius, who figures prominently, and of the new military technology of the age. (The treatise includes, for example, practical advice on how to defend walls against battering rams.) Aeneas Tacticus’s treatise, more than any other surviving prose work of the 4th century, makes the point that this was an age of professionalism.
Many technical monographs are known to have been written in that period but have not survived. For instance, Pythius, who worked on the Mausoleum, also wrote a book about another of his projects, the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene. (There were 5th-century precedents for some of this: Polyclitus of Argos had written a famous treatise on proportion in sculpture and Sophocles a monograph about the chorus.) Architecture and sculpture
In the sphere of architecture, the 4th century produced no Parthenon, but it was the great age of military structures. Most of what survives of the elegant fortifications of the northwestern frontier demes of Attica stems from the 4th century; inscriptions attest refurbishing work on Phyle in particular at about the time of the Battle of Cheronea. Outside Athens there were big projects, such as the temple at Epidaurus and theMausoleum at Halicarnassus" class="md-crosslink"> Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
Buildings such as the Mausoleum were commissioned by powerful individuals, further proof that the emergence of commanding personalities is a noticeable feature of the 4th century. In some respects it represents a return to Archaic values: a tyrant like Dionysius has much in common with Peisistratus of Athens or Polycrates of Samos, and Philip II of Macedon can be seen as comparable to Pheidon of Argos, a hereditary monarch who transformed his power base into a military autocracy. Revised attitudes toward such individuals are already detectable near the end of the 5th century. It seems that, when Athens founded Amphipolis in 437, its founder Hagnon, father of the oligarch Theramenes, was given some kind of cult in his lifetime. That is the usually neglected implication of a passage of Thucydides, which definitely records the award of cult honours at Amphipolis to the dead Spartan general Brasidas after 422. In the early 4th century another Spartan, Lysander, received cult at Samos, and later in the century Euphron, a tyrant at Sicyon, was buried in the agora “like a founder.”
At Athens itself, before the request by Alexander for his own deification, there could be no question of divine cult for a living man (although it is possible that Alexander had already arranged some kind of hero cult at Athens for Hephaestion). Nonetheless, even at Athens there was a marked trend toward more-assertive monuments. That is particularly evident in the commemorative choragic monuments built to celebrate victories in the great Athenian festivals. The most famous of these, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, which used to be called the “Lantern of Demosthenes,” represents a transitional phase; its inscribed dedication falls between the anonymity (actually more pretended than real) of the corporatist benefactions of Classical Athens and the assertiveness of Hellenistic Greece with its emphasis on individual generosity. On the one hand, the inscription makes clear that what is celebrated is victory by the tribe as a whole; on the other, the great prominence of the man’s name stresses individuality, as does the idiosyncratic form of the monument. Clearly, this is an emphatic statement in the first person singular.
Consistent with these developments is the marked tendency toward portraiture in art. Persian satraps such as Tissaphernes issued coinage with what were obviously meant to be realistic depictions of the satrap’s head. Individual rulers were represented by statues in the round, like that of Mausolus from the Mausoleum (which may or may not be an attempt to represent Mausolus himself but which incontrovertibly is a portrait of some powerful individual), or by figures on friezes, as those on the Alexander Sarcophagus in the Archaeological Museums of Istanbul. Although the workmanship is evidently Greek, the ethos is uncompromisingly royal. Alexander created a new visual image for himself: unlike the bearded Philip, Alexander is portrayed as clean-shaven, young, and idealized. Lysippus, in particular, is said to have caught Alexander’s physical qualities in his royal sculpture portraits.
Alexander the GreatAlexander the Great in battle, detail from the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus, marble, c. 310 bce, from Sidon; in the Archaeological Museums of Istanbul.Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
The Athenian empire had given employment to many artists, architects, and sculptors, both from Athens itself and from the subject states of the empire. When the empire collapsed in 404, many of them had to seek employment elsewhere. Some went to the courts of satraps like Mausolus or of military rulers like Dionysius: both of those had money to spend on art, building, and fortifications. Another wealthy court was that of Macedon. One remaining recourse in Athens, however, was funerary art; the most-famous funerary stelae and sculptured monuments found at Kerameikós, the city’s prestigious cemetery, date from this period, before such lavish commissions were outlawed by the Athenian ruler Demetrius of Phaleron after Alexander’s death. Some of those buried were foreigners; for instance, there was a precinct for the Messenians, one for some immigrants from Heraclea on the Black Sea, and one for those from Sinope, also in the Black Sea region. (In the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus there is a monument comparable to another one of a Black Sea immigrant, a reminder of Athens’s commercial connections with this crucial grain-growing area.) In the Kerameikós there is even a grave of a Persian with a larger-than-life torso of a seated man in Persian dress. Social and commercial exchanges
Whatever the political effects of the King’s Peace of 386, it was evidently not a barrier to social and commercial exchanges. Inscriptions in the corpus of Demosthenes’ speeches frequently mention trade with ports in Phoenicia and Anatolia and occasionally allude casually to piracy, a classic by-product of such trading activity. There is epigraphic evidence for piracy as welclass="underline" in the 340s Athens honoured Cleomis, tyrant of Methymna on Lesbos, for ransoming a number of Athenians captured by pirates. Lesbos had always enjoyed trading links with the Black Sea region, and in the 4th century more than ever. One should imagine Athenians and metic Athenian traders (i.e., foreigners resident at Athens) going in numbers via Lesbos and the Sea of Marmara to the rich granaries of southern Russia. Some no doubt settled in these regions, though the inscriptional evidence for Athenians abroad in the 4th century (as opposed to evidence for foreigners settling in Athens or Piraeus) is in need of systematic collation.
Immigration and free movement of individuals between one polis and another are typical features of the 4th century. They are best documented for Athens but hardly confined to it, given the attractiveness of the royal and satrapal courts. At Athens itself, the great magnet for immigrants was naturally Piraeus, the city’s densely populated, multilingual, multiracial port. Bilingual inscriptions in the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, in Greek and Aramaic, testify to the presence of Phoenician traders, who also left more strictly epigraphic traces. (Conversely, Greco-Aramaic stelae in the Archaeological Museums in Istanbul may attest Greek or partially Greek settlements in the Persian empire.) An inscription of the period of Alexander, from the Piraeus, records the response of the Athenian Assembly to the request of some merchants from Cyprus for permission to build a sanctuary to Aphrodite (the goddess, born in the sea, allegedly stepped ashore on Cyprus). The inscription mentions, as a precedent for the request, the Temple of Isis founded by the Egyptian community.