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THE SELEUCID EMPIRE. 358-251 BC. HOUSE OF SELEUCUS

CHAPTER 13.

IRAN

The plains of the Euphrates and Tigris are bounded on the east by the long mountain walls which, one behind the other, fence the tableland of Iran. This name, of course, belongs to an ethnological, rather than a physical, demarcation of the earth —the country possessed by Iranian man. And in this sense Iran embraces more than the tableland; it includes the mountainous country which forms a bridge between the tableland and the Pamir; it includes also the regions to the north of the bridge as far as the Jaxartes (Syr-daria); to use modern political divisions, it includes, besides the kingdom of Persia, which coincides with the tableland, the principalities of Afghanistan and Bokhara. Within this region, in the dim centuries which precede recorded time, a peculiar national type had shaped itself as distinctive as that of the kindred Indians farther east, or as that of the Semitic kingdoms on the west. Into this old Iran, when the tribal organization of society had not yet been overlaid by an imperial system after the Assyrian model, we can get barely a glimpse. The Greek historians and Old Testament writers, to whom well-nigh everything we know of the Median and Persian Empires is due, show us almost exclusively the Iranian monarch in his relation to the foreign peoples dwelling west of Iran, his subjects, his enemies, or his allies; they show us the Achaemenian court established for the most part outside Iran on the ground of those older monarchies which it imitated, in Babylon, or in Susa; beyond the court, into Iran itself, into the land and the life, in which the Achaemenian house had its roots, they give us little insight.

The Iranian people, before Deioces the Mede built an Empire, were split into a number of small princedoms and clan chieftainships. Their necks had not been bent under the yoke of a Great King. They stood in very much the same stage of social development as Macedonia up to the days of Philip, or as the mediaeval princedoms of Europe. We see in all of these an aristocracy of great houses, of chiefs ruling by virtue of blood and inherited authority in the tribe, the clan, or the family. The typical Persian nobleman was known for his magnificent airs. His manner of life was very like that of his Macedonian counterpart. He had the same passion for dogs and horses, for hunting and the profession of arms. He had the same love of wine and night-long wassails, although he combined this with a great capacity for abstinence, where need was, in forced marches through the starved regions of Iran. Lying was the cardinal sin, and the chaffering of the market­place he held a thing with which only lower breeds of men would have to do. But to till the ground in ancestral fashion and tend flocks and herds was labor honorable and well-pleasing to God.

None of these qualities are, however, very distinctive. Most warlike aristocracies are proud in bearing, devoted to sport and good company, and contemptuous of trade. To find the distinctive expression of the old Iranian spirit we must turn to the Zoroastrian religion. It is certainly impossible to determine how far the actual religion of Achaemenian days conformed to the true Zoroastrian type. The royal houses of Media and Persia, as we can gather from some of the proper names in use, from the fact that the Achaemenian kings worship Ahuramazda as the One Creator, were professed Zoroastrians. But certain salient differences appear between their practice and what was, later on at any rate, held orthodox —their custom of burial, for instance. In the worship of the clan deities we may see a survival of old pre-Zoroastrian heathenism, in the cult of Anabita the adulteration of the Faith through foreign influences. But even if we cannot infer that this or that prescript of Zoroastrianism was observed in the Persia of Darius Codomannus, the Avesta sheds a flood of light on the fundamental religious conceptions, on the peculiar religious temperament of old Iran. And we are led, I think, to place it high in the scale. The earliest form of Zoroastrianism to which we can get back is practically monotheistic. And not only is God one God—the Egyptians and Indians spoke sometimes of the One in a pantheistic sense—Ahuramazda is a Person, a strongly moral Person. He differs altogether from the old non-moral nature gods whom even the ordinary Greek still worshipped, and equally so from the non-moral abstractions into which the old nature-gods became resolved by the speculative thought of Greek and Indian philosophers. And with such a God, the attitude of the Iranian to the world and its ways formed a strange contrast to that which we loosely talk of as “Oriental,” to the attitude of his Indian kinsman, for instance. The material world was not a vain process, a burden from which the wise man would, as far as possible, withdraw himself; it was that which Ahuramazda created good, though the wicked spirits were now doing their best to spoil it. We speak of the “brooding East”; the religion of Zarathushtra was above all things a religion of honest work. Its supreme object was that “the Cow” (i.e. agriculture generally) should no longer, through the craft of lying spirits, suffer neglect. It is true that the piety required by Ahuramazda was to some extent narrow and formal, that no voice in old Iran proclaimed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.” But it is also true that in the Zoroastrian conception of God and His service we, who have derived our thoughts of God from Jerusalem, find something strangely responsive.

Two centuries of empire made indeed a great difference in the aristocracy of Iran. The Persian nobles who fought against Alexander were very unlike the rude highland chiefs who had gathered round the standard of Cyrus. The good things of the world, the riches and refinements of great industrial cities, the precious wares of India and Ionia, had not been laid open to their fathers in vain. Even in the time of Cyrus the Persians had discarded their primitive kilts for flowing robes, such as the Medes had already borrowed from Assyria,  for the purples of Tyre, and the rainbow embroideries of Babylon. Their inbred passion for carousing and hunting was gratified in artificial modes on a magnificent scale. A Persian banquet became to the Greeks the type of extravagant luxury. All Asia was ransacked to furnish the table of the Great King. Armies of cooks, confectioners, and butlers waited on a Persian nobleman. His banqueting hall must be richly hung, and blaze with gold and silver plate. The couches must be over­laid with gold and spread with costly fabrics. In fact, the art of spreading couches was brought to such nice perfection that to satisfy the Persian sense required a special training, and when the King made a present of valuable carpets to Greek visitors, the couch-spreader was an indispensable adjunct. So too with the Persian love of hunting. Huge parks were now enclosed, stocked with all manner of game, for his diver­sion—a declension, it seemed to the fine instinct of the sportsman Xenophon, from the true spirit of the field,  “like slaying beasts chained up.”  Horse-breeding was passionately studied, and horses, in the estimation of a Persian, among the most honorable presents he could give or receive. The Indian hounds kept, in the time of Herodotus, by the satrap of Babylon were so numerous that their maintenance was the sole charge laid upon four substantial villages.

And yet, sumptuous as the Iranian nobility had grown in its style of living, much of the old spirit survived. There was still a social code which prompted the Persian baron to adventure himself hardily in battle and to close with great beasts. The fresher spirits of the Greek world, men like Xenophon and Alexander, found much in the better type of Persians to admire. There was indeed such a fundamental resemblance between the tastes and ideals of the Macedonian and Iranian aristocracy as to naturally create a kind of fellow-feeling. And the struggle which brought Macedonian and Persian into close contact led, as we know, in the case of Alexander himself, and those of his entourage who were in sympathy with him, to a generous eagerness to make friends. It is no part of Alexander’s policy in the latter years of his life to depose the Iranian race from its position as the ruling race of Asia. He aspired to make of Iranian and Macedonian and Hellene one people. Device after device is put forth in order to promote their fusion—intermarriage, association in the army, transportation in the mass. When his schemes are cut short by his death, the situation in Iran is one of counter­poise. Some of the satraps are natives, some are Macedonian. A Hellenic element has been introduced by the planting of new cities; in the villages, no doubt, and along the country­side the authority of the old families is still cherished.

The great geographical divisions into which Iran, according to the usage prevalent at the time of the Macedonian conquest, fell were twelve: two on the west and south-west of the central desert—(1) Media (Mada) and (2) Persis (Parsa, mod. Fars); two to the north and north-east of it, (3) Hyrcania (Varkana) and (4) Parthia (Parthava); on the east of the desert, adjoining the mountain country which connects Iran with Central Asia, came (5) Aria (Haraiva) and (6) Drangiana (Zaranka); the mountain-country itself fell into the two divisions of (7) Paropanisidai on the north, including the Cophen (Kabul) valley, and (8) Arachosia on the south; the region which sloped down, north of the Paropanisidai, to the Oxus formed (9) Bactria (Bakhtrish, mod. Balkh); the country between the Oxus and Jaxartes (10) Sogdiana (Suguda, mod. Sughd); and, lastly, along the south of the Iranian plateau lay (11) Gedrosia and (12) Carmania (mod. Kirman). The number of administrative provinces or satrapies which these twelve regions constituted varied naturally according to the convenience of the hour. At Alexander's death we can probably make out eight: Parthia and Hyrcania were under one satrap, so were Aria and Drangiana, Arachosia and Gedrosia, Bactria and Sogdiana.

Of the rule of Alexander’s successors in this part of the world we know even less than of their rule in Syria. The native tradition, as it was gathered in later centuries under Mohammedan rule, had forgotten even the names of the kings who ruled Iran between Iskander and the Sassanians. We can discern the work of the Seleucid house only in the Greek cities which here also are shown us by the geographers. But we can gather further from the history that this Greek element was an extremely important political factor in Iran.

Media, as has been said, was the most important of the Iranian provinces. Alexander had put in a native nobleman as satrap, controlling him by the presence of Macedonian commanders. At his death this arrangement was changed by the chiefs in Babylon. Media was now divided into two satrapies. The principal part of it, from Persis northward as far as the river Amardus (mod. Kizil Uzen), containing Ecbatana and Rhagae, its two most illustrious cities, was made over, as we saw, to Pithon the son of Crateuas. The northernmost part, the country at the corner of the Iranian plateau, about Lake Urumiya, was divided off as “Lesser Media” and left in the hands of Atropates, the satrap appointed by Alexander.

Lesser Media is a lovely “Alpine” land, belonging by its character to Armenia almost as much as to the Iranian plateau. By the action of the chiefs it was abandoned more or less to native government. Atropates was the father of a dynasty, and the country came to be called Atropatene after him, a name which still cleaves to it in the form Adharbaijan, although Atropates and his house have long been forgotten there. It is a holy land in Zoroastrian tradition. When Kai-Khosru, the legend ran, destroyed an idol-temple in the land, the divine fire, Adar-Gushasp, played about his person—an occasion commemorated by the great temple of Adar-Gushasp upon Mount Asnavanta (mod. Savelan). There were other religious centres in the land, Vesaspe (mod. Ardebil), called after the heavenly Being worshipped there, and the great fire-temple, Adarakhsh, at Gazaca (mod. Takht-i-Sulaiman), the capital of Atropatene, and, according to one tradition, the birthplace of Zoroaster. Whether this prestige of Atropatene is due to the dynasty of Atropates, or whether it is of earlier date, has not, as far as I know, been determined.

In the other part of Media, “Greater Media, the work of Hellenization was prosecuted vigorously. The hills, indeed, were left to the warlike Kurdish tribes who inhabited them. It was, in fact, their neighborhood which led Alexander and his successors to protect civilization in these parts by multi­plying new foundations, although the hill-tribes, it must be remembered, did not only appear to the kings as a menace, but as a valuable element to be incorporated in their own armies. The case of the Greek cities of Media shows with peculiar force how unsafe it is in this department to be guided by the fullness with which our fragmentary authorities inform us of any matter in estimating the real proportions of things. It is not possible to gather more than the names of one or two cities. And yet Polybius expressly tells us that “Media was covered with Greek cities after the plan prescribed by Alexander, to form a defense against the neighboring barbarians.” Whether Ecbatana received a Greek colony is doubtful. Polybius makes it an exception, but he may mean no more than that it was not a new foundation of the Macedonians. Pliny says that “King Seleucus built it.” The magnificent cedar palace of the Achaemenians, covering over twenty-five acres with its colonnades, was left standing, and was an occasional residence of the Seleucid kings. Rhagae (mod. Ehei), the older capital of Media, is distinctly said by Strabo to have been refounded by Seleucus Nicator as a Greek city, and given the name of Europus—his own birthplace. Apparently near Rhagae was the Heraclea founded by Alexander, and restored by Antiochus (the First, presumably) with the new name or surname of Achais. We hear further of a Laodicea and an Apamea Rhagiana.

The course of things in the province which adjoined Media on the south-east, Persis, where lay the seats of that part of the Iranian race which had so long held the supremacy, and the royal burg in which the Achaemenian kings had been at home, is involved in complete darkness during the rule of the Seleucid house. That the national or tribal feeling was strong in these valleys we may see by the case of Peucestas, who found it good policy to adopt the guise of a Persian when satrap, and the bold declaration of the native nobleman in the council of Antigonus, that if Peucestas were deposed no other Macedonian governor would be accepted. And that this feeling continued under Seleucid dominion we may see by the fact that as soon as the authority of that house weakens, the country is found under the govern­ment of native princes. The work of the Seleucids can be discerned only in the frontier city of Laodicea, founded by Antiochus, the Antioch-in-Persis of which we know by a decree which its citizens once passed in their ekklesia, the Stasis, “on a huge rock,” which again is connected with the name of Antiochus I and, if we can argue from its Greek name, Methone. At some time or other a revolt seems to have broken out among these soldier-colonists in Persis, like the revolt among the Bactrian Greeks after Alexander’s death. The stratagem is described by which Oborzus, apparently a Persian employed by the Seleucid government, had 3000 of them put to the sword.

On the north the Iranian plateau is fenced by the high line of the Elburz range from the Caspian. Along the southern, that is, the interior, face of this range runs a narrow belt of habitable country which forms the connection between Western and Eastern Iran. Here the province of Media adjoined Parthia, the country which included the easternmost part of the belt just named as well as the mountains which bend southwards in a sort of crescent from the Elburz to meet the mountains of Aria. It corresponded with the modern Khorassan, or the northern part of it. It is a country of which the greater part is barren—sterile ranges bordering the great desert, but with tracts here and there in the valleys of extreme fertility. Such was the region of Nisa—one of the places cited as especially blessed in the Zoroastrian scriptures, in which an Alexandropolis is mentioned by Pliny as having been founded by Alexander. Hecatompylus, the capital of the province, owed its name, according to Polybius, to the roads from all quarters which here converged; in a land where the lines of communication are so restricted the centre of a road-system is all the more important. That such a point, therefore, should have been secured by the Macedonian kings is a matter of course. And indeed we find Hecatompylus reckoned among the foundations of Seleucus Nicator. The only other Greek city in Parthia whose name has come down to us is Calliope, likewise founded, according to Appian, by the first Seleucus. It must have been on the extreme west of the province, since it is said by Pliny to have been at one time a frontier fortress against the Medes.

Closely connected in the administrative system with Parthia was the country on the northern side of the Elburz range along the southern shore of the Caspian, Hyrcania (mod. Mazanderan). Physically, no contrast could be greater than that between the regions to the north and those to the south of the Elburz. Instead of the arid terraces of the Parthian side, the Hyrcanian slopes, receiving moisture from the Caspian, are clothed with rank forest. The sea-board at their feet has an almost Italian character. The exuberant fertility of the country is described by Strabo. Its inhabitants were perhaps of another stock than the Iranians, and the hills were tenanted here, as elsewhere, by unruly tribes, Mardi and Tapyri. Several “considerable cities” are mentioned by Strabo as being in Hyrcania, and as the names are native, we may perhaps infer that the fertility of the country had favored the growth of larger communities even before the Macedonian conquest. The chief place at the time of Alexander is Zadracarta (probably where the modern Asterabad stands). Polybius in the time of Antiochus III speaks of Sirynca as the seat of government and Strabo uses the same expression of Tape. Whether these are different names of the same place is impossible to say. Of Greek towns in this region, although such must needs have existed, in view of the country’s richness and the interest taken by Seleucus and his son in the navigation of the Caspian, we have no names given us except that of Eumenea. It is noticeable, however, that there was a community of resident Greeks at Sirynca in 209.

Hyrcania and Parthia, by the system which obtained at the death of Alexander, were under a single satrap, a native, who was replaced by the Macedonian Philip in 321. This was the man whom Pithon killed in 318 in order to put in his own brother Eudamus. Eudamus was almost immediately ejected by the confederate satraps, and after the triumph of Antigonus in 316 the province seems to have been annexed to Bactria, and to have formed part of the governorship of Stasanor. A few years later it passed with the rest of the East to Seleucus.

The eastern half of the Iranian upland consists, as we have said, not of a central desert surrounded by mountains, but of a mountain mass pushed out from Central Asia. The backbone of this mass is formed by the Paropanisus (Hindu-Kush), and round about it are the provinces fed by the rivers which it sends down. On the west of it, adjoining Parthia, was the province which drew its life and its name from the river Arius (mod. Hare-Rud), the province of Aria (old Pers. Haraiva). The name bears witness to the grateful contrast of its well-watered valleys with the neighboring desolation of mountain and desert. It was a land of vineyards, among the six blessed regions of the Vendidad. Here Alexander began the work of colonization by planting an Alexandria, and the old capital Articoana was rebuilt in more splendid fashion by Antiochus I. From Alexandria-of-the-Arians two important roads diverged. One ran round the north side of the mountain mass to Bactria, the other went south to Drangiana, and thence reached India by way of Alexandria Arachoton (Kandahar). Alexandria Arion was thus a station through which all traffic between Western Iran and the lands farther east must almost necessarily pass, a knot where the great lateral lines of the world’s communications were drawn together.

Two other Greek cities are found in Aria bearing witness to the activity of the Seleucid government, Achaia, whose founder Achaeus was no doubt the general and father-in-law of Seleucus II, or an elder Achaeus of the same family, and Sotira, called probably after Antiochus I Soter. The Charis mentioned by Appian must also have been either in Parthia or here.

Two regions geographically distinct from the valley of the Arius seem to have been included in the satrapy as it was marked out under Alexander and his successors. Somewhat east of the Arius, another river, the Margus (mod. Murghab), comes down from the mountains and flows out into the desert parallel with the Arius, where it meets with the like fate, perishing in the sand. But it does not disappear before it has created in mid-desert the oasis which the ancients called Margiana and the moderns call Merv. Under careful irrigation this spot was turned into a paradise. It also was among the blessed lands of the Vendidad. “Report affirms,” said Strabo, “that vines are often found whose stock it takes two men to compass, with clusters two cubits long”. To balance its advantages, the oasis was by its position more than ordinarily exposed to be ravaged by the nomads of the desert. The Alexandria placed here by Alexander was actually overwhelmed within a few years of its foundation. The city rose again under the hand of Antiochus I as an Antioch, “Antioch-in-the-waters,” standing among its network of canals. Its new founder took the precaution of surrounding the whole oasis with a wall, 1500 stadia long (about 173 miles). Thence­forward Merv, under various masters, Macedonian, Parthian, Mohammedan, maintained its contest with the children of the desert These in the long run got the better of every wall. Century after century the swarms broke upon it, till at the coming of the Russians the other day it was found little better than a heap of desolations.

The other region attached to Aria lay to the south of it. The rivers on the southern slopes of the Afghan country tend south-westerly, and find their ultimate meeting-place in the swampy basin of Seistan, where they form a lake of varying extent. This lake, which is now called Hamun, was known to the old Iranians as Daraya, the “Sea,” in the eastern dialect Zaraya, and the people who dwelt about it were called Daranka or Zaranka, the dialectical variation giving rise to the two Greek names of Drangai and Zarangai (in Herodotus Sapdyyees). The chief city of Drangiana became already under Alexander a Greek colony, with the name Prophthasia, which at once commemorated the discovery of the plot of Philotas and rendered something of the sound of the native name, written by Stephen of Byzantium as Phrada. It was the principal station on the road to India between Alexandria of the Arians (Herat), and Alexandria of the Arachosians (Kandahar).

Aria, together with Drangiana, and presumably Margiana, had at Alexander’s death Stasanor, a Cypriot of Soli, for governor. By the partition of Triparadisus, when Stasanor was transferred to Bactria, his place in Aria was taken by another Cypriot, Stasander. This man appears among the con­federate satraps who were beaten by Antigonus in 316, and in the case of Aria, Antigonus was able after his victory to make a change of satrap in his own interest. The province, being next to Parthia on the main road east and west, was perhaps more accessible than Carmania and Bactria. Nominees of Antigonus, first Euitus and then Euagoras, replaced Stasander. Whether Seleucus found Euagoras still installed in Alexandria-Arion when he brought the province under his authority we do not know.

On the east of Drangiana came Arachosia. The Erymanthus (Haitumant, mod. Hilmend) perhaps constituted the frontier for part of its course. Arachosia, corresponding to the southern part of modern Afghanistan, is a land of mountain ranges running south-west from the watershed, which divides the tributaries of the Kabul and the Hilmend. On its eastern sides the valleys run steep down to the Indus. Its inhabitants, like their descendants, the Afghans of today, formed a con­necting link between the pure Iranians and the races of India. They called themselves, as the Afghans do now, Pakhtun. The Greek name Arachosia, in use after Alexander, was taken from the main eastern tributary of the Hilmend, the river Harahmti, which the Greeks called Arachotus (mod. Argandab). Here, too, the hand of Alexander was busy. Kandahar was once undoubtedly an Alexandria. Through Alexandria of the Arachosians, the capital of the province, went the great road to India.

We know of only one satrap of Arachosia between the death of Alexander and the rise of Seleucus, Sibyrtius. He was among the confederate satraps, but having conspired to supplant Eumenes, he was accused before the army and barely escaped with his life. Antigonus naturally looked upon him as an ally, and restored him to his province in 316. Megasthenes, the historian of India, had resided at the court of Sibyrtius before he was employed as the ambassador of King Seleucus to the Indian king.

Not only Arachosia, but the country to the south as far as the sea, belonged to the province of Sibyrtius. This country consisted of Gedrosia (Beluchistan) and the coast, inhabited by races different from those of the interior. The Iranian plateau falls to the sea in wastes of shifting sand. Although Gedrosia has its habitable valleys and its caravan routes, “ in which one can always rely after a day s march, at least, on a well of brackish water and a little fodder for the camels,” in an area of 100,000 miles there are less than 500,000 inhabitants. The prevalence of desert all along the sea-board from the Indus to the Persian Gulf diverted commerce to other roads. Gedrosia seems, therefore, to have been an unknown land to the Greeks before Alexander. Herodotus calls the people of this part of the world Parikanioi, a Greek form of the Persian term, which described them as “worshippers of the Pairika,” the unclean spirits of the desert. After Alexander the Greeks called them Gedrosoi, a name of unknown origin and meaning. They were of another stock, probably, than the Iranians. The Beluchis, who now inhabit the land, do belong to the Iranian family, but they represent a drifting of the Iranian race eastwards in later centuries. There is, however, a people of darker skin, the Brahui, who live alongside of the Beluchis in the land, and these are supposed to be the remnant of the ancient Gedrosians. Their affinity is with the black Dravidian peoples of India. An extension of the Aryan civilization of India to this country in ancient times is indicated (if it is safe to build anything upon a proper name) by the name of the chief city of the Gedrosians, Pura, which seems to be good Sanskrit for “city.”

But whilst Gedrosia was of little consequence for land traffic, the coast formed part of the maritime high-road between India and the West. It was inhabited by different peoples again from the Gedrosians, Arbies and Oritae, belong­ing, like the Gedrosians, to the Indian group, and west of these, in what is now called the Mekran, people whom the Greeks described simply as Ichthyophagoi, Fish-eaters—a race of squalid beings living in huts by the shore and catching the fish in which that sea is peculiarly rich. The intense interest taken by Alexander in the sea-route to India could not fail to stir his activity in this region also as a city-builder. But here, too, the scattered notices of the ancients do not make clear how many cities were founded by Alexander and his captains, or even satisfy us to which of the landmarks of today the names they use refer. Rambacia, the principal village of the Oritae, was transformed into a city by Hephaestion on Alexander’s direction, a city for which Alexander divined a great future; an Alexandria rose on the coast near a place of good harborage; Nearchus founded a city at the mouth of the river Arbis; but whether all these passages as well as the statement of Curtius refer to one city, or to several, is debatable. Distinct, at any rate, must be the Alexandria in Macarene (Mekran), near the river Maxates (Mashkid).

The mountain-mass of Afghanistan north of Arachosia is cloven from its centre down to the Indus by the valley of the river Kabul. This valley must always be important as the main way of entrance from the west into India, its door being familiar to English ears as the Khaibar pass. By it Alexander entered, and the highway of traffic under the Macedonian kings struck north from Kandahar (Alexandria) across the hills to Kabul, instead of following the directer, but more difficult tracks by the valleys of the Bolan or the Gumal. From Kabul (the ancient name is written by the Greeks as Ortospana) a road ran down the valley to the Khaibar. Another great road entered the Kabul valley from the north, from Balkh, making by its junction with the Kandahar-Kabul-Khaibar road the “Three-ways from Bactra”. The importance of holding strongly this country north of the Kabul valley, the Paropanisus (old Persian, Paruparanisana; mod. Hindu-Kush), with its passes commanding the communication between the Kabul valley and Bactria, led to its being constituted a separate satrapy, described as that of the Paropanisidai. At the death of Alexander the satrap was Oxyartes, the father of Roxane; he continued to hold his place through the partitions both of Babylon and of Triparadisus, and was even unmolested by Antigonus in 316, although he had sent troops to the confederate army. It is after this that the cloud comes down upon the East, in which the conquests of Seleucus Nicator are involved.

Here, too, as in Beluchistan, the people of Iranian stock (Afghans), who are the ruling race today, are late-comers. At the time of Alexander the population of the Kabul valley was Indian, Gandara; the hills, of course, were then as now held by fierce fighting tribes, who gave Alexander considerable trouble on his way to India. It was their neighborhood, like that of the Kurds in Media, which led presumably to the multiplication of new foundations, which we seem to discern in the Paropanisus. The chief of these, Alexandria-on-the-Caucasus, seems to have stood in one of the side valleys leading up from the Kabul to the passes into Bactria. In the old Buddhist books Alasanda is spoken of as the chief city of the Yonas (Ionians, Greeks). The other cities mentioned are Cartana, afterwards called Tetragonis, Cadrusi, and Asterusia, a settlement of Cretans, called after the Cretan mountain.

North of the Hindu-Kush lay the last region towards the wildernesses of Central Asia, in which the Iranian man had, till the coming of the Greeks, borne rule. Beyond was the outer darkness of Turanian barbarism. So long as the great rivers, the Oxus (Amu-darya) and Jaxartes (Syr-darya), are accompanied by offshoots of the mountain mass whence they take their rise, the country about them can nourish a settled population. This land of hills between the sand-wastes on the west and the mountains on the east formed the two outlying provinces of Bactria and Sogdiana, Bactria being in fact the lower slopes of the Hindu-Kush towards the Oxus, and Sogdiana the country between the two rivers.

In both these provinces the ruling race at any rate was Iranian. They formed not only a genuine part of Iran, but a most illustrious part. According to one view here were the oldest seats of the Iranian civilization. The Zoroastrian religion had perhaps its cradle in this region; at any rate its strong­hold was here. Nowhere else did the Iranians offer so desperate a resistance to Alexander. Again and again cities like Cyrescheta on the Jaxartes rose in rebellion. Intersected, too, as the country was by spurs of the lofty ranges to the south and east, it furnished the great lords like Oxyartes with castles lodged high on precipitous crags where they could long defy the Macedonian. The two provinces were similar in their physical character and their population. In Sogdiana there seems, as one might expect to have been the case, some infusion of Turanian elements. Under the Achaemenian kings their governor was commonly a son of the Great King, or a prince of the blood-royal. Even so the great resources of the country and its outlying position had tempted the rulers of Bactria and Sogdiana to revolt from the central authority on almost every opportunity. The case was not altered when a Seleucid was substituted for an Achaemenian king.

Bactria (the northern part of the principality of Afghanistan), although it contains some barren tracts, and the lowlands by the river have a bad name for malaria, is on the whole singularly favored by nature. Strabo describes it as producing everything, except the olive, and quotes Apollodorus of Artemita, who called it the “pride of all Iran” . Its eastern end, the modern Badakshan, is rich in minerals, in rubies, and lapis lazuli. But its special fame, has in all times rested upon its breed of horses. In the old Indian epics we hear of the “Turanian” (i.e. the Bactrian) steeds, and today the horses of Andkhoi are a name in Asia. The ancient capital Zariaspa itself recalls by its name (açpa, a horse) the prominent place of the horse in Bactrian life. And it was not only from its own soil that Bactria drew its wealth. It was well placed for commerce, one of the countries binding India to the West. For besides the road we have seen, skirting the southern side of the mountains of Afghanistan and reaching the Kabul valley by way of Kandahar, there was an alternative road from Alexandria-Arion (Herat) by way of Bactria and the passes of the Hindu-Kush.

The country on the other side of the Oxus, included under the name Sogdiana, is divided into three strips by the double range of mountains sent through it lengthwise from the mass of Central Asia. The southern strip slopes down to the Oxus, and coincides with the modern Bokhara, the northern to the Jaxartes, and between these lie the parallel ranges, making a sort of trough down which the river Polytimetus (mod. Zarafshan) flows toward the desert, where it disappears. This middle district, the valley of the Polytimetus, is the most fertile of the province. Here was the capital Maracanda, destined, as Samarkand, to bear the finest flower of Mohammedan learning.

In these two provinces, so important from their resources and their character as frontier provinces against the Scythians, and yet so difficult to hold because of their remoteness and the proud spirit of their inhabitants, Alexander established masses of Greeks. Strabo gives the number of cities as eight, Justin as twelve. But the most striking figures are those of the army formed by these colonists, when after Alexander’s death they attempted to return—more than 20,000 infantry and 3000 horse. The names of most of the new cities are no longer recoverable. We know of an Alexandria Eschate on the Jaxartes (mod. Khojend) looking across the river into the illimitable wilderness—the last outlying station of Hellenism, in whose market-place, in the centuries after Alexander, the Greek trader from the West saw the Indian caravans which had come across the snowy ridges of the Tian-shan mountains, bringing the new substance of silk and stories of the great cities of the Silk-people, which lay in some distant world far away to the east. We hear also of an Alexandria Oxiana, of an Alexandria-by-Bactra? of perhaps another Alexandria Eschate on the upper Oxus towards the Pamir, and of an Antioch in Scythia. Lastly, the capital of the southern province, Zariaspa, or, as the Greeks called it, Bactra, was in all probability occupied by Greek colonists even before a separate Greek kingdom came to exist in this quarter, when indeed Bactra was a royal capital, fortified so strongly as to make its siege by Antiochus III one of the great sieges of the age.

At the death of Alexander a certain Philip is over both Bactria and Sogdiana. The experiment of leaving the farther province under a native satrap had not succeeded, and since the first revolt of the Greek colonists in 325 Philip had governed both provinces. By the partition of Triparadisus (321), Stasanor, the Cypriot of Soli, was transferred from Aria to Bactria and Sogdiana. It may well have been that a governor who was a Greek, not a Macedonian, was more likely to manage the restive Greek colonists. In fact we are told expressly that in 316 Antigonus did not dare to disturb Stasanor; “ it was not easy to depose him by a letter, as he had dealt adroitly with the natives, and he would have many friends to fight in his cause.” It has been noticed that the “one piece of information on record as to the way in which Seleucus Nicator came into possession of the Upper Satrapies is that he subdued the Bactrians by force of arms.”

We have still one province of Iran to speak of, that which lies on the south side of the plateau between Persis and Gedrosia, the province of Carmania, corresponding with the modern Kirman and Laristan. The description of Carmania closely coincides with that of Bactria. It is a land of hills and rivers. Here, too, everything prospered, according to Strabo, except the olive. It was famed for its noble trees, and a sort of vine with immense clusters. Here, too, was much mineral wealth, river-gold, and mines of silver, of copper, and vermilion. The division between Carmania and Persis was probably an artificial one; the physical character of the two regions is similar; the Carmanians did not differ sensibly from the Persians of Persis, except that they maintained less impaired the fighting qualities of their ancestors. The only Greek town which we know of for certain in Carmania is an Alexandria. Harmuza, the port, whose name was to become famous in the markets of the world, was perhaps a foundation of the Greeks; at any rate it would seem that Nearchus found no settlement here in 325. Carmania, as has been remarked, was not on the principal line of traffic between east and west, which went along the north of the Iranian plateau. It remained un­disturbed by the political convulsions which followed Alex­ander’s death. The satrap appointed by Alexander in 325, Tlepolemus, continued to hold his position till the cloud comes down upon the East after the departure of Antigonus in 316. Tlepolemus had taken part, indeed, with Eumenes and the confederate satraps, but he also, like Stasanor, had rooted his position too well in his province for Antigonus to overthrow him by a letter from Persepolis.

Such fragments can still be made out of that system of Greek cities with which Iran, like Syria and Babylonia, was overspread by Alexander and his first successors. Besides the name of Alexander himself, two others recur among the founders, those of Seleucus Nicator and his son, the first Antiochus. It may not be mere chance that while Alexander appears as founder over the whole tract, Seleucus and Antiochus (except in the case of Antioch in Scythia) do not leave traces east of Merv and Herat. That the further provinces were under their authority is of course unquestionable, but their main activity as founders was perhaps in Media, Parthia, and Aria. It is impossible to draw a line between the foundations of Seleucus and those of Antiochus. The activity of Antiochus in Iran belonged, no doubt, in great measure to the time when he reigned in the East as viceroy, and his acts might be indiffer­ently ascribed to himself or to the father whom he represented.

Of the elements of which the population of the new cities was composed we have some sparse indications. It is note­worthy that in some of the foundations of Alexander a body of natives is said to have been incorporated with those Greek or Macedonian soldiers who were to give the city its Hellenic character. In the case of Alexandria Eschate we are told that the population was composed (1) of a body of Greek mercenaries (settled, no doubt, by compulsion); (2) of all the natives who voluntarily associated themselves in the new city; (3) of the Macedonian veterans who were past service. The population of the city or cities near Alexandria-on-the-Caucasus consisted of (1) 7000 natives; (2) 3000 of the camp followers, and (3) all the Greek mercenaries who wished to join. So too we are told of the city founded among the Oritae that a body of Arachosians were settled there. That the Hellenic character, however, continued in the case of these cities to be dominant may be inferred from the way in which Alexandria- on-the-Caucasus is referred to, as we saw in the Buddhist books, as a city of the Ionians. The European colonists were, of course, either Macedonians or Greek mercenaries—the latter therefore, no doubt, of those Greek races in the main which sent out most soldiers of fortune, Cretans, Arcadians, Aetolians, and so on, or men of the Thessalian horse, or, thirdly, they belonged to some of those less civilized nations of the Balkan peninsula, Thracians and Illyrians, which furnished contingents to the Macedonian king. It was not for the first time in these cities that a Greek population and a barbarian coalesced.

An extremely interesting document in this connection is the decree passed by Antioch-in-Persis, which a stone found in Asia Minor has preserved for us. It is dated by the eponymous magistrate of the year, who in this city is the priest of the deceased Seleucid kings and the reigning kings, Antiochus III and his son Antiochus, and shows the normal forms of the Greek city-state, a boule and an ekklesia, who introduces the decree in the popular assembly, and who put it to the vote. The occasion is a request sent by Magnesia-on-the-Meander to the cities of the eastern provinces to recognize as a festival of Panhellenic standing that celebrated by Magnesia in honor of Artemis Leucophryene. To this Antioch gives a cordial answer, and praises Magnesia for its zeal in Hellenism and its loyalty to the Seleucid King. It also recalls the old ties of kinship between the Greeks of Antioch-in-Persis and the Greeks of Magnesia, and in so doing throws light upon the procedure of colonization. The city of Antioch was called after Antiochus I Soter; whether it was his own foundation or an earlier colony renamed we do not know; but Antiochus at any rate was concerned to increase it by a fresh body of colonists. To do this he makes an appeal to Magnesia-on-the-Meander (and others, presumably, of the Greek cities of the west) to send out some of their citizens. It is a matter which touches the glory of Hellenism, and the Magnesians respond by sending out men “adequate in number and distinguished for virtue” who go to reproduce the Hellenic life among the hills of Iran. And locked within those hills, we cannot doubt, are many similar decrees, awaiting the modern European excavator to reveal the European civilization which once flourished there.

Once, then, in its long past has Iran—including regions which today are a shut-up land to Europeans—been for a brief space under “western” rule. And it is striking to observe how the ancient world was as conscious of the essential difference between this rule and the spirit of Oriental govern­ment as we are in our own time. Then also it was the characteristic of the western rulers that they must be carrying things forward, curious to discover the nature and conditions of the country under their hands, restless to develop and improve. “Considerate management” was what the countries got from them, and could not get from Asiatic kings. In speaking of Hyrcania and the Caspian, Strabo describes their undeveloped resources. The considerate management has here been lacking. “And the reason is that the rulers have here always been barbarian (i.e. non-Hellenic), Medians, Persians, and, last and worst of all, Parthians.” In this long history the period of Macedonian rule was a momentary taste of better things, but too brief, and spoilt by the continual wars.

We may then probably think of the reigns of Seleucus Nicator and Antiochus Soter as a period when a new spirit of inquiry and enterprise was active in Iran. Obscured as those days are for us, we have seen some indications of that activity in the building of cities and such works as the great wall of Merv. We have further evidence of it in the work of explora­tion and research connected with the two names of Patrocles and Demodamas. Already under Alexander the best informa­tion as to the measurements and local conditions of the Empire had been collected by qualified agents and laid up in the royal archives. This valuable body of documents was in time handed over by Xenocles, Alexander’s treasurer, to Patrocles, the minister of Seleucus. Patrocles carried the work further. We have already seen this man taking a prominent part in the affairs of the kingdom. At one time he held a command in the eastern provinces, when he was commissioned to explore the coasts of the Caspian, and report on the possibility of a northern waterway to India. The development of trade-routes was a main concern of the Hellenic kings. Alexander had ordered the exploration of the Caspian shortly before his death with this end. An exploration, imperfect indeed and obviously provisional, was actually carried out by Patrocles. Patrocles seems to have made two voyages from some port at the south-west extremity of the sea, one in which he proceeded as far north as the mouth of the Cyrus (mod. Kur), another in which he sailed up the east side of the Caspian to some point impossible to determine with certainty. He embodied the result of these voyages in a book, a Periplus, which was thenceforward the standard authority for these regions. Strabo speaks of Patrocles with great respect, of his trustworthiness and knowledge of scientific geography, and contrasts his sober report with the fabulous stories of Megasthenes and Deimachus. The curious thing is that this authority, so conscientious and intelligent, should have fixed for generations the error that the Caspian did communicate with the ocean, and that it was possible to sail that way to India.

While Patrocles explored the Caspian, his contemporary, Demodamas of Miletus, was employed by Seleucus or Antiochus to investigate the course of the Jaxartes. As in the case of the Caspian, commercial interests were no doubt largely the motive of the enterprise. The Jaxartes might be a waterway, connected with a landway from India across Central Asia. That India, at any rate, fell within the purview of Demodamas is suggested by the fact that the one express quotation from his writings refers to a town in India. By the side of the Jaxartes, on the edge of the Scythian waste, Demodamas erected altars to the Didymaean Apollo, the god of his home.

Of a piece with this policy of discovering or opening trade-routes along the north of Iran is the intention which is ascribed to Seleucus Nicator at the end of his reign of making a canal between the Caspian and the Black Sea. It may well be that the first voyage of Patrocles to the mouth of the Cyrus had relation to this scheme, and that it was his discoveries which showed its impracticability. But in fact it was not one scheme only, it was the whole system of policy, which collapsed with the Bactrian and Parthian revolts. The exploration of the Caspian was only begun by Patrocles; had Seleucid rule lasted in these regions the work would surely have been completed, but the great Hellenic Empire was broken up before it could bring its vast designs to accomplishment.

The danger from the unsettled peoples beyond the pale— this constituted the main preoccupation of civilized rule in Iran, just as in the West a similar danger was forced upon the attention of the Greek kings in the irruption of the Gauls. The danger in the East confronted the heirs of Seleucus in an ominous form when an independent dynasty established itself, defying their authority, in Parthia. We have very divergent statements as to the rise of this Parthian dynasty; when it became great in the world, its origins gathered round them a halo of mist. Its rise also proceeded gradually, by successive advances, and it was possible, no doubt, for different traditions to take different moments in this process as its true beginning. But certain facts stand out. It was not a revolt of the native Parthians. That province, consisting, as we saw, of sterile mountains, with a few fruitful valleys and plains, could not nourish a large population. Its inhabitants were homogeneous with the other peoples of Iran; they are mentioned in the inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings as one of the peoples of the realm; in the revolt they play, as far as our existing records show us, a merely passive part. The blow is struck by a tribe issued out of the dim wilderness to the north, who seize the Parthian country and reduce the natives to the position of serfs. It was no doubt by continual reinforcement from the north that the power of the invading tribe grew. It consisted of Parni, a division of the people whom the Greeks called Daae, and who ranged the steppes to the east of the Caspian. The Daae are described as a “Scythian” people, but this tells us nothing of their affinities, since the name Scythian was applied by the Greeks to all the peoples of Russia and Turan indiscriminately. When they entered the Parthian province and wrested it from the body of the Seleucid Empire, a separate Parthian dynasty may be said to begin, in the sense of a dynasty with its basis in that province, but that moment had been led up to both by events in Parthia and by the earlier history of the family which now came to rule there. Parthia itself had showed a tendency before the Scythian irruption to break away from the Empire; at least something of the sort is to be inferred from the coins which Andragoras, the satrap, strikes in his own name. On the other hand the Scythian chief Arsaces seems, before his invasion of Parthia proper, to have established a petty sovereignty in the neighboring region of Astabene, with his seat at a place called Asaak. The conquest of Parthia did not, apparently, take place till the battle of Ancyra (soon after 240) had crippled the Seleucid power in the West. It was, however, an earlier moment in the history of the dynasty, perhaps that of the establishment of Arsaces at Asaak, or some victory won over the army of a satrap, that the later reckoning fixed upon as the birth-year of the Arsacid power. And this much is at any rate plain, that as the difficulties of the house of Seleucus in the West had not begun with the battle of Ancyra, but for the thirty years preceding it the wars with Egypt and the Gauls drained its strength, its hold upon the East had already begun to relax under Antiochus II, and that the earlier stages in the formation of the Arsacid power go back to his reign.

It is these earlier stages which the later tradition wrapped in an atmosphere of romance, through which it is difficult to detect the truth of things. Beyond the Arsaces who conquered Parthia looms the shadowy figure of another Arsaces, his brother, whose image, as that of the divine founder of the kingdom, all the Parthian drachmae bear; he sits, bow in hand, upon the omphalos, from which he has ousted the Seleucid Apollo. Only two years did this first Arsaces reign on the confines of the desert. He was succeeded by his brother, whose personal name was Teridates, but who assumed his brother’s name, Arsaces, on his accession, this becoming thenceforth the royal name of all the dynasty. It was this second Arsaces, Teridates, who conquered Parthia soon after 240.

It may, however, be questioned whether, in the case even of the first shadowy king, Arsaces was a personal name, and not rather adopted deliberately in order to affiliate the new dynasty to the old Achaemenian house. For Arsaces had been the name of Artaxerxes II (Mnemon) before his accession, and we are expressly told that the Arsacid dynasty drew their descent from “the Persian king Artaxerxes”. It was the same motive which made the court tradition give five com­panions to the brothers Arsaces and Teridates in their assault upon the Macedonian power, their enterprise being thus assimilated to the overthrow of the False Smerdis by the Seven.

The story of their rebellion, as we have it in a mutilated form, says that in the reign of Antiochus II they attacked Pherecles, the satrap appointed by the Seleucid government, because he had offered a gross insult to Teridates, the younger of the two brothers, and slew him. Of what province, however, Pherecles was satrap the abstract of Arrian given by Photius does not specify; we may presume he was really eparch or hyparch of the district in which Asaak was situated. That the establishment of the Scythian tribe in this region involved some collision with the Macedonian officers, especially if it maintained itself by marauding, is no doubt true.

About the same time that the house of Arsaces emerged from the wilderness, the provinces of Bactria and Sogdiana ceased to obey the Seleucid King. We have already seen that the new colonies in this region, being mainly composed of Greeks, had shown themselves impatient of Macedonian rule, and a leader who could play upon this national feeling could make himself very strong. Diodotus the satrap, probably a Greek like his predecessor Stasanor and his successor Euthydemus, abjured allegiance to his Seleucid master and declared himself an independent king.

We do not know whether the revolt of Diodotus preceded or followed the appearance of Ptolemy III in the eastern provinces, which must have loosened the whole fabric of Seleucid government in that part of the world. Nor do we know what order of things Ptolemy left here on his retirement, except for the statement that he confided the government of the East to his general Xanthippus. If his conquest consisted in little but his obtaining the recognition of his authority from the existing administrators of the country, the Seleucid authority, such as it was, would be quietly re-established so soon as the provincial magnates thought it advisable to regard Seleucus once more as their overlord. In this way the Egyptian conquest would be a mere transitory phase, which, except in weakening the power and prestige of the Seleucid court, would not permanently modify the situation.

This situation, then, as it appears in the early years of Seleucus II, presents three more or less independent powers in the Far East, that of Andragoras in Parthia, of Diodotus in Bactria, and of Arsaces in the region of Astabene. The relations of the three to each other cannot be distinctly made out. Arsaces seems to have been regarded by Diodotus as one would expect the Hellenic ruler of Bactria to regard the marauding chiefs of the wilderness. The fields and villages, no doubt, suffered. The district of Astabene was perhaps one which had been attached to the Bactrian province, and was considered by Diodotus part of his legitimate domain. One account, Strabo tells us, spoke of Arsaces as “a Bactrian”, and asserted his attack on Parthia to have been due to the pressure of the power of Diodotus. The relations of Arsaces to Andragoras are still more problematical. On the one hand, Andragoras is spoken of as holding Parthia against Arsaces and his Scythians till he is swept away by their onset; on the other hand, Justin says elsewhere that from Andragoras, the satrap put over Parthia by Alexander, the “kings of the Parthians” professed to descend.

The conquest of Parthia by Arsaces Teridates made the situation in the East far more grievous for the house of Seleucus. The province was of great importance as the link between western and eastern Iran. And if Andragoras had been semi-independent, the new ruler of the country was not only independent but aggressive, and already styled himself  king. He had soon conquered, not only Parthia proper, but Hyrcania, so that his power reached from the interior desert to the Caspian. Seleucus Kallinikos had not long rallied in Syria the broken forces left him by the battle of Ancyra before he set out to win back the East. About this time Diodotus of Bactria died and was succeeded by his son Diodotus II. The Greek ruler of the lands by the Oxus had now to choose whether he would range himself with Seleucus or Arsaces. On either side there was danger: Seleucus would hardly allow a rebel to retain his authority, and the re­establishment of Seleucid rule must probably mean the disappearance of Diodotus; on the other hand, by the Scythian occupation of Parthia, Bactrian Hellenism was cut off from connection with the Hellenic powers of the West, and left isolated among barbarians. Arsaces feared that Diodotus would make his peace with the Seleucid King, and that he would be attacked on both sides. The elder Diodotus had been his enemy, but the accession of the son seems to have brought a change of policy. Diodotus II granted the new Scythian power a treaty which left Arsaces at rest as to his eastern frontier.

Seleucus advanced. Before the disciplined armies of Macedonian Syria the barbarian chief thought it the better strategy to vanish into the desert out of which he came. He took refuge in the camping grounds of a tribe whose name is given as Apasiacae. It was the eternal trick by which the arm of Oriental governments is evaded. Whether Seleucus plunged into the waste in pursuit of him we do not know. Some fighting between his army and the Scythian hordes took place, but it can hardly have been the desire of Arsaces to come to close quarters, unless he had got his pursuer in a tight place. In after times the anniversary of some encounter was celebrated in the Parthian kingdom as of the victory which had been “the beginning of liberty.” Whether it was in reality a skirmish or a great battle we do not know. No decisive result had been obtained when troubles in the West compelled Seleucus to withdraw. This was equivalent to complete failure. Diodotus, as far as we know, he never reached.

Immediately, of course, that Seleucus was gone, Arsaces reoccupied Parthia, and there was none now to hinder the consolidation of his power. He worked hard at putting the country into a thorough state of defense, organizing his rude Scythians as a regular army and fortifying strongholds. Among the latter Dara in the region of the Apaorteni is especially mentioned. Any new attempt to establish Seleucid authority in the East was not likely to find the task any easier for the expedition of Seleucus Kallinikos. And with his retirement we leave Iran in obscurity till we follow Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, into the eastern provinces some twenty-five years later.

It remains to ask what traces we have of the relations of the native Iranians to the Hellenic kings. The indications do not point to altogether friendly ones. In Alexander, as in the British rulers of India, the “western” spirit had to deal with practices which are abhorrent to it, and with a great desire in both cases to show extreme tolerance, there are certain limits beyond which the superior civilization has to repress by force. The British have abolished Sati (Suttee); Alexander prohibited the custom, which the extravagant form of Zoroastrianism followed in Bactria prescribed, of exposing persons at the point of death, while still alive, to the sacred dogs. It is perhaps due to this and similar actions on the part of the Greek rulers that we find Alexander appearing in the Zoroastrian tradition in a light which is strangely at variance with his main policy. Alexander, who was concerned above all things to patronize the national cults and conciliate the native priesthoods, here figures as the great enemy of the religion, the destroyer of the sacred books.

Perhaps this conflict between Hellenic humanity and barbarian religion was confined to the east of Iran; but in the west the memories of their former position must have worked in the hearts of Medes and Persians. Of actual revolts we are not told much. Thespias, the native nobleman, threatened Antigonus with one in Persis, under any other satrap than Peucestas. The revolt which broke out in Media after Pithon’s removal, although led by the Macedonian and Greek adherents of Pithon and Eumenes, drew in a part of the natives and may have been supported by the national feeling. One, at any rate, of the leaders themselves was a native Mede.

We are told definitely of one revolt among the Persians under the house of Seleucus. Siles, the officer representing the Macedonian king (whether it was the first Seleucus or the second there is no indication, and does not much matter), enticed 3000 of them into a village called Rhanda among marshes, where he surrounded them with Macedonian and Thracian troops and made away with them all.

On the other hand, numbers of Persians served both as administrators and soldiers under Seleucus and his successors. The satrap of Cilicia at the beginning of the reign of Seleucus Kallinikos is proved by his name Aribazus to have been an Iranian. Another Aribazus is the governor of Sardis under Achaeus. Oborzus, who crushes the revolt of katoikoi in Persis, is by his name a Persian. The Smyrnaean inscription mentions “Omanes and the Persians under Omanes” among the troops stationed in the neighborhood. A force commanded by Antiochus I in Syria celebrates a Persian festival. There was a Zoroastrian temple on Mount Silpius at Antioch —a temple of the Eternal Fire. Considering that our whole knowledge of the organization of the Seleucid kingdom is derived from chance notices gathered here and there, such references as those above indicate a larger Iranian element than we can actually trace with our imperfect sources. These references are enough to prove that the policy of Alexander, which set Macedonian and Iranian side by side, was not altogether abandoned by those who inherited his throne.