old. The dates were of unusual size and superior flavor;
and the palm, which abounded throughout the region, furnished an
inexhaustible supply both of fruit and timber.

The great increase of power which Mithridates had obtained by his
conquests could not be a matter of indifference to the Syrian monarchs.
Their domestic troubles--the contentions between Philip and Lysias,
between Lysias and Demetrius Soter, Soter and Alexander Balas, Balas and
Demetrius II., Demetrius II. and Tryphon, had so engrossed them for the
space of twenty years (from B.C. 162 to B.C. 142) that they had felt it
impossible, or hopeless, to attempt any expedition towards the East,
for the protection or recovery of their provinces. Mithridates had
been allowed to pursue his career of conquest unopposed, so far as the
Syrians were concerned, and to establish his sway from the Hindoo Koosh
to the Euphrates. But a time at last came when home dangers were less
pressing, and a prospect of engaging the terrible Parthians with success
seemed to present itself. The second Demetrius had not, indeed, wholly
overcome his domestic enemy, Tryphon; but he had so far brought him into
difficulties as to believe that he might safely be left to be dealt
with by his wife, Cleopatra, and by his captains. At the same time the
condition of affairs in the East seemed to invite his interference,
Mithridates ruled his new conquests with some strictness, suspecting,
probably, their fidelity, and determined that he would not by any
remissness allow them to escape from his grasp. The native inhabitants
could scarcely be much attached to the Syro-Macedonians, who had
certainly not treated them very tenderly; but a possession of 170 years'
duration confers prestige in the East, and a strange yoke may have
galled more than one to whose pressure they had become accustomed.
Moreover, all the provinces which Parthia took from Syria contained
Greek towns, and their inhabitants might at all times be depended on
to side with their countrymen against the Asiatics. At the present
conjuncture, too, the number of the malcontents was swelled by the
addition of the recently subdued Bactrians, who hated the Parthian yoke,
and longed earnestly for a chance of recovering their freedom. Thus when
Demetrius II., anxious to escape the reproach of inertness, determined
to make an expedition against the great Parthian monarch, he found
himself welcomed as a deliverer by a considerable number of his