A Show About the Hellenistic One Per Cent

When Alexander the Great conquered the Achaemenid Persian Empire and hauled off the treasures of its royal capitals, he unleashed perhaps the greatest economic stimulus package of all time. The city of Persepolis alone, taken by the Macedonian Army in 331 B.C., yielded enough gold and silver to fill the saddlebags of twenty thousand mules and five thousand camels, according to an account by Plutarch. This tidal wave of wealth sloshed all around the eastern Mediterranean during the three centuries that followed, the era known today as the Hellenistic Age. It soaked the shores of the half-dozen new kingdoms carved out of Alexander’s conquests. Those who styled themselves Alexander’s Successors, the generals who served under him and founded the monarchies that carried his legacy forward, or those rulers who sought to proclaim, as Alexander had done, that their power was tempered by justice and reason, used the riches to finance extravagant building projects or amass glittering collections of statues, many copied from famous originals in Athens, the epicenter of Hellenic enlightenment.