was no West Asia now; only Europe: all was European and
Hellenized to the borders of India, with periodical overflowings
beyond;--just as, long afterwards, Spain was a province of West
Asia; and just as Egypt now is submerged under a European power.

Only the trouble is that the seed of something native always
remains in regions so overflowed with an alien culture; and
Alexander dreamed never of what might lie quiescent, resurrectable
in time, in the mountains of Persis, the Achaemenian land,
out of the path of the eastward march of his phalanxes;--or
indeed, in those wide deserts southward, parched Araby, that
none but a fool--and such was not Alexander--would trouble
to invade or think of conquering: something that should
in its time reassert West Asia over all Hellenedom, in Macedonia
itself, and West beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the limits of
the world. But let that be: it need trouble no one in this year
of 324 B.C.! Only remember that "that which hath been shall be
again, and there is nothing new under the sun."

In this study of comparative history one finds after awhile that
there are very few dates that count, and they are very easy to
keep in mind. The same decades are important everywhere; and
this because humanity is one, and however diversified on the
outside, inwardly all history is the history of the one Host of
Souls. Take 320 B.C. Alexander is dead three years, but the
world is still vibrating with him. Chandragupta Maurya has just
started his dynasty and great age in India, which is to last its
thirteen decades until the neighborhood of 190. Seleucus
Nicataor, the only one of the Macedonian _diadochi_ who has not
divorced his Persian bride, is about to set up for himself a
sovereignty in Babylon,--which Scipio Africanus, thirteen decades
afterwards, struck from the list of the Great Powers when he
defeated Seleucus' descendant Antiochus at Magnesia,--in 190
again; at which time the Romans first broke into Asia. And it
was in the one-nineties, too, that the second Han Emperor came to
the Dragon Thone, and the glorious age of the Western Hans began.

Though the Seleucidae possessed for some time a great part of
Darius Hystaspes' empire,--and, except Egypt, all the old
imperial seats of the foregone manvantara,--they do not belong to
West Asia at all; their history is not West-Asian, but European;
they are a part of that manvantara whose forces were drifting
West from Greece to Italy.