Seleucidce. Revolts of
Bactria and Parthia. Conflicting accounts of the establishment of the
Parthian Kingdom. First War with Syria._

The attempt of Alexander the Great to unite the whole civilized world in
a single vast empire might perhaps have been a success if the mind which
conceived the end, and which had to a considerable extent elaborated the
means, had been spared to watch over its own work, and conduct it
past the perilous period of infancy and adolescence. But the premature
decease of the great Macedonian in the thirty-third year of his age,
when his plans of fusion and amalgamation were only just beginning to
develop themselves, and the unfortunate fact that among his "Successors"
there was not one who inherited either his grandeur of conception or
his powers of execution, caused his scheme at once to collapse; and the
effort to unite and consolidate led only to division and disintegration.
In lieu of Europe being fused with Asia, Asia itself was split up. For
nearly a thousand years, from the formation of the great Assyrian empire
to the death of Darius Codomannus, Western Asia, from the Mediterranean
to Affghanistan, or even to India, had been united tinder one head, had
acknowledged one sovereign. Assyria, Media, Persia, had successively
held the position of dominant power; and the last of the three had
given union, and consequently peace, to a wider stretch of country and
a vaster diversity of peoples than either of her predecessors. Under
the mild yoke of the Achaemenian princes had been held together for two
centuries, not only all the nations of Western Asia, from the Indian and
Thibetan deserts to the AEgean and the Mediterranean, but a great part
of Africa also, that is to say, Egypt, north-eastern Libya, and the
Greek settlements of Cyrene and Barca. The practical effect of the
conquests of Alexander was to break up this unity, to introduce in
the place of a single consolidated empire a multitude of separate and
contending kingdoms. The result was thus the direct opposite of the
great conqueror's design, and forms a remarkable instance of the
contradiction which so often subsists between the propositions of man
and the dispositions of an overruling Providence.

The struggle for power which broke out almost immediately after his
death among the successors of Alexander may be regarded as having been
brought to a close by the battle of Ipsus. The period of fermentation
was then concluded, and some