After Alexander's death in 323 B.C., the vast Macedonian empire, which stretched from Greece to India, crumbled into a patchwork of small kingdoms, principalities and competing factions, ushering in the age of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Despite an incipit marked by violence and anarchy, the Hellenistic age was a time of great vitality and cultural ferment. Greek domination over Asia had generated for the first time in human history a cosmopolitan web of cultures, languages and peoples who coexisted with each other using Greek as the vehicular language for communication and trade, just as we in the western world use English today.

The Diadochi, Alexander's generals, vied for power in the vast and dying empire in a series of fratricidal wars that gave rise to great and centuries-old eastern dynasties such as those of the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Antigonids of Macedonia and the Seleucids of Antioch. In Alexandria, capital of the new kingdom of Egypt, the new pharaohs, who from then on spoke only Greek, ruled as living gods, merging Egyptian practices with the new political institutions and the language of the Greeks. Alexandria became the main economic, academic and political centre of the ancient world, symbolising the vast cosmopolitan legacy left by Alexander.

In the Seleucid kingdom, which stretched from Anatolia to Persia, cosmopolitanism reached incredible heights and cities such as Antioch became vibrant centres of encounter between East and West, cities in which Greek architecture mingled with Indian and Persian influences. Alexandrian Greek culture even spread to Bactria, today's Afghanistan, then under the rule of the Macedonian Empire. In the Greek kingdom of Bactria, Persian, Indian, Greek and Chinese influences merged into a cultural syncretism unprecedented in history.

The Hellenistic age, far from being an era of war and decadence alone, was a historical laboratory of cosmopolitanism, demonstrating for the first time in human history that the coming together of different peoples and cultures could generate wealth and artistic and economic prosperity.