Nineteenth-century scholars started calling this world created in the wake of Alexander’s conflicts ‘Hellenistic’, to show how Greek it was, but also in order to differentiate it from the Greece which had gone before it.27 Classical Greece, however briefly, had fostered democracy, while here were states which were undisguised dictatorships. Their rulers took on divine trappings which Greeks had long ago rejected, but which Philip II had revived for himself; Alexander had turned this strategy into a major programme of identification with a variety of Greek and oriental divinities.28
