Reading about Hellenistic dynasties in Egypt and Greek rulers in Judea doesn’t make sense to me given the size of Greece and that they afaik were divided into multiple small city states.
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Greece had a big population at the time. 10-13 million in late Antiquity compared to 5 million in Egypt, 3-4 million for the Carthagian Empire. I couldn’t find any number for Italy at the time, but a couple of hundred year later in the 1st century we estime at 6 million the population on the whole peninsula. This leave use with Persia, who had 50 million at their peak, but this include Persia, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Levant, Egypt, etc.
So as you can see Greek was pretty powerful in term of demography. Yes they were fractured into city states, but most of the world was fractured too. It’s not because you have an empire that everybody follow you. Most of the time local power kept their own power and only a fraction of the local ressources made it to the leader to project power. A bunch of Greek nation banding together was a force to be reckon with.
The reason why Greece had such a population at the time was mostly because of Geography. A bit reason why a population wouldn’t grow was because of war. Invasion, migration, pillaging, etc. Population had to rebuild their region from time to time. Greece was mostly protected by their mountains, more mountain in the North in the Balkan, Sea all around in the south. Allowing the polation to prosper for longer period of time. Something similar happened in the heartland of Persia with the mountain protecting them.
Greece was also a naval power. Persia was far inland so their naval tradition was a lot more recent, Egypt had no wood making it hard for them to make ships, in Anatolia most of the biggest valley where people lived where more into the interior of the land, leaving Greece and the Levant as the main two naval region of the time. Greece was protected by mountain and keep their supremacy, the Levant were conquered by the land, leaving their colony of Carthage as their sucessor in naval power. Eventually Persia having access to the Levant would become a Naval power too, but then Alexander happened.
Greece also had limited Arable land so by that point in history they just had too many people for the land. This is one of the reason why some cities declined in the late Antiquity like Sparta but also why the Greek started to colonize the hell out of the Mediterranean Coast. So if most ships on the sea is Greek and they create Greek colonies along the coast, you can see where their influence come from.
Finally, Macedon and then Rome did a lot of conquering and kept the Greek influence, keeping it alive and kicking.
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