By the Hellenistic Movement is meant the process whereby the supremacy of the Greek language and of Greek culture generally became established during the period, roughly speaking, from B.C. 300 to the beginning of the Christian era, that is to say, from the time when Alexander the Great had completed his victorious career[1] to the time when the Roman Empire was rising to pre-eminence and establishing its power, more especially in the east. It was during this period that Hellenism was what may be called an invading force; having once established itself its influence was in evidence long after the period indicated. Dill, in writing on the age of Hadrian and the Antonines, says, for example: “The glory of classic art had almost vanished; and yet, without being able to produce any works of creative genius, the inexhaustible vitality of the Hellenic spirit once more asserted itself. After a long eclipse, the rhetorical culture of Greece vigorously addressed itself in the reign of Hadrian to the conquest of the west. Her teachers and spiritual directors, indeed, had long been in every family of note. Her sophists were now seen haranguing crowds in every town from the Don to the Atlantic.... From the early years of the second century can be traced that great combined movement of the Neo-Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies and the renovated paganism which made a last stand against the conquering Church in the reigns of Julian and Theodosius....”[2] But the influence of Hellenism did not stop here; various writers have shown that that influence persists even up to modern times,[3] and Bevan states nothing but the literal truth when he says that “what we call the Western spirit in our own day is really Hellenism reincarnate.”[4] It is well to realize, on the other hand, however, that the roots of the Hellenistic Movement reached back somewhat further than the time of Alexander. We must look to Athens for the real beginnings of the Movement, the further development of which Alexander’s conquests did so much to forward. It was the Attic sea-power which first brought about the conditions under which the idea of a pan-Hellenic culture could take form and ultimately become realized. Though Athens declined with the rise of the Macedonian power, and ceased outwardly to play any conspicuous part in the great drama of the world’s history, yet Attic ideals and conceptions lived on and continued to be the inner motive-power in the propagation of the newer culture. So that the Hellenistic Movement grew and developed from Attic antecedents.