ey,
copying the inscriptions on the coins of the Seleucids, and
copyting them ever worse and worse. Not until after 77 A.D., and
then only occasionally, do Parthian coins bear inscriptions in
Aramaic. Yet sometimes we hear of their being touched more
deeply with Greekness. Orodes I,--he who defeated Crassus,--
spoke good Greek, and Greek tragedies were played at his court.--
As with nomads generally, it was always easy for a Parthian king
to shark up a great army and achieve a striking victory; but
as a rule impossible to keep the horde so sharked up thogether
for solid conquests; and above all, it was impossible to
organize anything.

But they played their part in history: striking down to cut
off the flow of Greek culture eastward. It had gone, upon
Alexander's impulse, up into Afghanistan and down into India;
may even have touched Han China,--probably did. I do not suppose
that the touch could have done anything but good in India and
China; where culture was well-established, older, and in all
essentials higher, than in Greece. But in Persia itself the case
was different. Persia was under pralaya, in retreat among its
original mountains; and submergence under Hellenisticism might
have meant for its oblivion of its own native Persianism.
Consder: of the two great centers of West-Asian culture, Egypt
fell under Greek, and then under Roman, dominion; and the old
Egyptian civilization became, so far as we can tell, utterly a
thing of the past. When Egypt rose again, under the Esotericist
Sultans of the tenth century A.D., I dare not quite say that her
new glory was linked by nothing whaterver to the ancient glory of
the Pharaohs; but that would be the general--as it is the
obvious--view. Fallen into pralaya, she had no positive strength
of her own to oppose to the active manvantaric influence of
Greekism under the Ptolemies; and in Roman days it was her
imported Greekism that she opposed to the Romans, not her own old
and submerged Khemism. Her soul was buried very deep indeed, if
it remained with her at all. In Persia, on the other hand,
West Asia retained much more clearly its cultural identity.
Persianism was submerged for about thirteen decades under the
Seleucids; then the Parthians cut in, and the drowning waters
were drained away. The Parthians had no superior culture to
impose on the Persians; whereas the Greeks had,--because theirs
was active and in manvantara, while that of the Persians
thems