Built and developed in the wake of Alexander's conquests (334-323 BC), the Hellenistic world has regularly been analyzed in the mirror of modern and contemporary European colonization, through the postulated assimilation with the Greek settlements founded by the conqueror and his successors between the Mediterranean and Central Asia. The question of relations between local populations and Greek settlers has frequently been introduced into debates on the "indigenous question". Did European migration lead to a Europeanization of the conquered populations, or, on the contrary, did Eastern influences result in an "orientalization" of the European settlers, or even of Greece itself, by way of "contamination" or even "indigenous submersion"? This is the question that, since Roman times, generations of politicians and historians have posed to the Hellenistic world, hoping to find answers for the successive presents of colonial Europe.
