Diadochi and the Hellenistic Period | World History | Khan Academy

Where we left off in the last video, Alexander dies in 323 BCE at the young age of 32. Even though he conquered all of this territory, it was a very short-lived Empire. What happens next is a period known as the wars of the Diodi.

Let me write down this word, Diodi. So, Diodi translates into "successors," and these are the various leaders, mainly generals of Alexander, who then fought for control of the Empire. It's a very bloody period, a lot of different Diodi going after each other or after each other's families.

What eventually happens over the next few decades is Alexander's Empire—the Empire that he establishes—gets split up into a few major Empires. Now, what you see on this map here is most of Persia and the Anatolian Peninsula right over here—really the bulk of the old Achaemenid Persian Empire. It gets under the control of Seleucus, and he establishes the Seleucid Dynasty.

So, let me write this down right here: this is the Seleucid Empire. Egypt, right over here, gets taken control of by another general of Alexander, Ptolemy, and he establishes the Ptolemaic Empire and the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Then, Macedon ends up under control once again of another Diodi.

Remember, the Diodi are the successors; all of these characters right over here are three of the various Diodi—three of the more successful Diodi, right over here. But what the Macedonian components of Alexander's Empire, for the most part, end up under the control of the Antigonid Dynasty, which ends up being called the Antigonid Dynasty.

As you can see, it's not all of the Empire Alexander established. What we have in red here are independent states that did not get subsumed into the Seleucid, the Ptolemaic, or the Antigonid Empires. You can imagine over the next several hundred years they’re going back and forth; there's an ebb and flow of control of these various Empires.

But these are the three most significant, especially the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid. Now, what this establishes is what a lot of historians refer to as a new period of, especially this part of the world. When we go from shortly before the Persian invasions of Greece all the way to Alexander the Great, we refer to that as Classical Greece.

But now we’re going from Classical Greece, with the death of Alexander and the beginning of the wars of the Diodi for control. This sets up a new period, often referred to by historians as the Hellenistic period. The Hellenistic period is referring to the fact that all of this territory that was conquered by Alexander the Great and later got split after the wars of the Diodi between these successors establishing these various Empires had a huge influence of Greek culture.

You had ruling dynasties that were essentially Greek, whether you’re in Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Persia, or Antigonid Macedonia. Obviously, the Macedonians were already a very strong Greek culture. It's a time where you have this spread of culture; you have kind of a bit of fulfillment of Alexander the Great's goal of creating this very mashup, so to speak, of the various cultures of the region: the Greco, the Persian, and the Egyptian cultures.

Now, the Hellenistic period starts to end as each of these various Empires gets overthrown. The Seleucid Empire in the 3rd century BCE gets more and more overtaken by the Parthian Empire. Parthia starts as a satrapy, a region of the Seleucid Empire, but it eventually takes control over much of Persia.

So this is the Parthian Empire right over here. The last vestiges of the Seleucid Empire are eventually defeated by the Roman Legions. You'll see this is a common trend here because at the time of Alexander, on the Italian Peninsula, you start having a city-state that's becoming more and more powerful and more and more of an Empire.

As we will see, it starts to subsume a lot of the regions we talked about. Ptolemaic Egypt gets overthrown by the Roman Empire in 30 BCE, and the Antigonid dynasty gets overthrown by the Roman Empire—they're actually the first to get overthrown by the Roman Empire in 168 BCE.

So this period, this Hellenistic period, the takeaway is that it’s a period—you know, I'm talking about hundreds of years in a matter of five or six minutes—but this is a period where you had significant Greek influence over a very large area of land. Eventually, it ends with a lot of the western portions falling under Roman control and the eastern portions, especially Persia, falling under Parthian control.