It was through the conquests of Alexander that the ways were made clear and wide for this later form of the Greek language, this Hellenistic Greek, to find an opening in all directions, and to be employed as a common means of communication in ever-increasing measure. Close upon the soldiers followed the merchants, nor did it take long before colonists came and settled down in the newly conquered territories; and when once colonies of Greek-speaking people were established, teachers soon came and took up their abode in the new settlements. New Greek cities thus arose in which practically only Greek was spoken; with the employment of this language it followed in a natural course that the influence of the Greek spirit, and with it Greek forms of thought and Greek ideals, made itself felt. In this way Alexander’s ambition was attained; for his ideal was not only to conquer lands; he desired also that the hearts and minds of men should be brought under the domination of that Greek culture which was destined to affect the religion, the philosophy, the literature and the art of mankind for all time. Alexander was a worthy pupil of his great teacher, Aristotle. It is, perhaps, not always sufficiently realized that the Hellenistic Movement coincided to a large extent with an epoch which was in some notable respects one of dissolution. In the domain of learning, for example, the older Greek idea of the possibility of a single mind assimilating the whole content of knowledge had been discarded; for it had come to be seen that the sum of knowledge in its manifold ramifications was far too great to be acquired by any one man, however learned, and that specialists must devote themselves to different departments of learning. Hence arose the grammarian as well as the rhetorician, the historian as well as the mathematician, while the philosopher occupied his special position.[7] The scholar, therefore, who desired to gain some insight into more than one of the various branches of knowledge no longer went, as in earlier days, to one teacher who was supposed to possess encyclopædic learning, but he studied under a grammarian in order to learn grammar, under a rhetorician in order to learn rhetoric, under a philosopher in order to learn philosophy, and so on. This newer system had already forced itself to the front some time before the actual period with which we are dealing; there are clear indications in the methods and teaching of Plato, to say nothing of Aristotle and his pupils, of an increasing tendency of making wider differentiation between the various sciences, and of dividing them up into their various groups. Philosophy stands alone; the exact sciences go each along the line of their own development. What was thus prepared by these great philosophers and their followers was acted upon and greatly developed during the Hellenistic period proper. Nowhere was this more the case than in Alexandria, the city of Alexander’s founding.