COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE

E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures) (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1951) ("Despite its lack of political freedom, the society of the third century B.C. was in many ways the nearest approach to an 'open' society that the world had yet seen, and nearer than any that would be seen again until very modern times. The traditions and institutions of the old 'closed' society were of course still there and still influential: the incorporation of a city-state in one or other of the Hellenistic kingdoms did not cause it to lose its moral importance overnight. But though the city was there, its walls, as someone has put it, were down: its institutions stood exposed to rational criticism; its traditional ways of life were increasingly penetrated and modified by a cosmopolitan culture. For the first time in Greek history, it mattered little where a man had been born or what his ancestry was: of the men who dominated Athenian intellectual life in this age, Aristotle and Theophrastus, Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus were all of them foreigners; only Epicurus was of Athenian stock, though by birth a colonial." Id at 236.).