I personally call it the time we have to kill before Rome shows up and makes things interesting again.

I'm kidding. ^Not ^really. Totally joking about that. ^I ^^hate ^^^that ^^^^period.

So this actually came up in my comps. Not the name of the period, but how the period is defined. The period following the Classical period is the Hellenistic period, and speaking generally it extends to 31 - the Battle of Actium, in the aftermath of which the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms - Ptolemaic Egypt - came under Roman control. The idea is it is a period of wide-spread Greek culture propagated among non-Greeks (but including Greek migrants) in the period following the Classical period.

The OCD entry on Hellenization, which treats "the Hellenistic period" has real trouble with that periodization. It notes that already in the 5th and 4th centuries Greek had become a significant and even constitutional language of many cities of Asia Minor, and indicates that adoption of the Greek language had little to do with political attitudes. Also, the Greek language, literature, and the institutions of the Greek polis survived Roman conquest, indeed into the Byzantine period. So 31 BCE is a convenient end date, but a very misleading one.

This very difficulty in defining the "Hellenistic Period" is what got me in trouble in my comps. I was asked to write a syllabus for a "Classical Greek history" class. Now I did my MA in a Classics department, and I learned the "Classical" period was sometime around the Persian Wars (say, 500 BCE) to the death of Alexander in 323 BCE. I wrote my syllabus to focus on the tension between the Greek states and Persia rather than a more traditional strictly Hellenocentric approach. 2.75 centuries is a lot for a 10 week class and I thought that East-West tension was a common theme. But I was taking my comps in a History department. Two of my committee members had issues with this. The Classical period, they argued, didn't end with the death of Alexander; it ended in 404 with the end of the Peloponnesian War. So Plato, Demosthenes, and Aristotle were in their minds Hellenistic authors, or at best some some sort of intermediate between the Classical and Hellenistic. They marked the confusion down to a difference between Classicists and Historians.

I passed, but I learned not to take periodization at face value.

You might find the FAQ on the Hellenistic period helpful.