Homonoia

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This article is about the philosophical movement. For the plant genus, see Homonoia (plant). For other uses, see Homonoia (disambiguation).
The Hellenistic world where Alexander tried to rule his new Empire through the concept of Homonoia

Homonoia (

vast Empire
.

Interpretation

Classical Greeks

The concept of Homonoia was an ancient Greek concept which traditionally was not applied beyond their own culture. The Greeks viewed Homonoia as an absence of factional fighting in their city states.[1] The Greeks viewed outside cultures as "barbarians". The famed scholar Aristotle once told his student, a young Alexander the Great, "treat Greeks as friends, but [non-Greeks] as animals."[1]

It was the scholar

assassinated
, his son Alexander the Great became King of Macedonia and himself became a proponent of Homonoia.

Alexander the Great

Alexander's tutor, Aristotle, viewed non-Greeks as barbarian animals.[1] Alexander however, ignored his teacher's indication and expanded on the concept of Homonoia. With an Empire covering most of the known world, Alexander sought to rule his subjects, whether they were Greek, Persian or Egyptian, under the concept of Homonoia.[1] In his short time as ruler of his vast Empire he tried to adopt customs of the cultures he conquered such as Persian dress and customs at his court, notably the custom of proskynesis, either a symbolic kissing of the hand, or prostration on the ground, that Persians paid to their social superiors.[5] He also married the officers of his army to Persian wives in an effort to further create a sense of oneness in his new Empire.[6] Through his policies he wanted to create a new Greco-Oriental empire as distinct from the more traditional system of a small ruling class of conquerors ruling over the recently vanquished. It was his practice to place the old style Persian satrap as governors but in the newly created offices of taxation and finance he placed Macedonians.[7] After his death most of his reforms lived on even as the Empire fragmented into successor states.

In the Romanized East

Homonoia was extended under Roman rule in the highly urbanized East as a symbolic mechanism for dealing with intra-city tensions and for linking the sometimes intensely individual eastern city-states.

rhetor Dio Chrysostom sought in one of his Discourses to establish homonoia between two cities that each claimed the sobriquet "first city", Nicaea and Nicopolis.[10]

See also

  • Homonoia (Greek: Ὁμόνοια) Greek goddess of order and unity

Bibliography

Notes
  1. ^ a b c d e Mauriac 1949, p. 106
  2. ^ Tarn 2002, p. 400
  3. Sunrise Magazine
    . theosociety.org. Retrieved October 13, 2009.
  4. ^ Low 2007, p. 62
  5. ^ Arrian 1983, VII, 11
  6. ^ Tetlow 2005, p. 171
  7. ^ Mauriac 1949, p. 108
  8. ^ Price 1985, pp. 126–32
  9. ^ Edwards 1994, p. 709 and bibliography
    Edwards notes several examples of homonoia coinage.
  10. ^ Dio Chrysostom 1983, 28.22
References
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