In 336, at the age of twenty, Alexander the Great ascended his throne and began his conquests, so that for the next seven hundred years everyone from Sparta to India experienced Greek culture and most spoke the Koine, a Greek dialect common to all countries; but the distances in the new empire were so vast, and so few citizens could have direct contact with Greece, that a kind of substitute Greek culture developed, the Hellenism born of men who loved the Greek ideals of beauty but who interpreted them in Egyptian or Persian or Syrian terms.
