Again, neat post Demetrios about the paradigm shift - especially your last comment, This sense of despair pushed the importance of individual action and individual action eventually expects individual reward.

One of the things I'm inhaling from current reading about the post-Alexander world is it was a NERVOUS world. There appeared to be little law and order - a lot of the literature is about how you have to be able to take it if you're stabbed to death in a riot, kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery, the big contractor in your city decides to destroy you, can, and does . . . and a withdrawal from an outer-facing energy to something far more inward. You can't change the culture or fix things, so you concentrate internally. A lot of the more "mystery" religions apparently have this focus on the internal life, as opposed to the external life. It reminded me of nothing so much as the kind of depression that settled over the west in the final century of Rome, where the City of God looked so attractive, partly because the cities of man were falling apart and there was nothing one could do about it.

Another thing I'm brooding on is - my taped lectures went to some length to talk about Egypt under the first Ptolemys, and the picture ain't pretty at all. The taxation was outrageous, the Greek upperclasses took everything they could take, the people lost their land and any sensation that a benign governor ruled them, as opposed to wolves who'd take 'em for every penny that could be wrung from their souls and bodies. If this was, by and large, the attitude that the Hellenistic kings brought to their various realms, that would certainly have increased insecurity, depression, despair . . . and when people feel enough despair, they begin to get mad at the gods who do nothing about it.