The history of all the Macedonian
kingdoms is profoundly uninteresting. There was enough of Greek
in them to keep them polished; enough of Macedonian to keep them
essentially barbarous; they sopped up some of the effeteness of
the civilizations they had displaced, Egyptian and Asiatic; but
the souls of those old civilizations remained aloof. There was
mighty little Egypt in the Egypt of the Ptolemies: what memories
and atmosphere of a grand antiquity survived, hid in the crypts
and pyramids; all one saw was a sullen fanatic people scorning
their conquerors. So too in Seleucus' Babylon there was little
evidence of the old Childacan wisdom, or the Assyrian power, or
the pride and chivalry of the Persian. It was Europe occupying
West Asia; and not good Europe at that; and only able to do so
(as is always the case) because the Soul of West Asia was
temporarily absent. The Seleucidae maintained a mimic greatness
in tinsels until 190 and Scipio and Magnesia; then a mere
rising-tide-lapped sand-castle of a kingdom until, in 64 B.C.,
Pompey made what remained of it a Roman province,--just twice
thirteen decades after the marriage-feast at Babylon; just when
the great age of the Western Hans was ending, and when Augustus
was thinking of being born, and (probably or possibly) Vikramaditya
of starting up a splendor at Ujjain. What Pompey took,--what
remained for him to take,--consisted only of Syria; all the
eastern part of the Seleucid empire had gone long since.

In 255 Diodotus, the Seleucid satrap of Bactria, rebelled and
made himself a kingdom; and that the kingdom might become an
empire, went further on the war-path. On the eastern shores of
the Caspian he defeated one of the myriad nomad tribes of
Turanian stock that haunt those parts,--first cousins, a few
times removed perhaps, to our friends the Huns; a few more times
removed, to that branch of their race that had, so to say,
married above them and become thus a sort of poor relations to
the aristocracy,--the Ts'inners who were at that time finishing
up their conquest of China. Thus while the far eastern branch of
the family was prospering mightily, the far western was getting
into trouble: I may mention that they were known, these far
westerners, as the _Parni;_ and that their chief had tickled his
pride with assumption of the Persian name of Arsaces;--just as I
dare say you should find various George Washingtons and Pompey
the Greats now swaying empire