Hellenistic culture was not merely a debased version of the culture of classical Athens. Its substrate was Greek, its language of expression was Greek, its social elites were Greek (Macedonian), but it absorbed ideas and practices from all the cultures with which it came into contact, thereby assuming many and diverse forms. The natives adopted the ways of the Greeks, and the Greeks adopted the ways of the natives, and the results of these two processes may be called “Hellenism.”
