In Syria also during the interval there had not been much change, and still less any improvement.  During the twenty years’ war of succession between the two half-brothers Antiochus Grypus (658) and Antiochus of Cyzicus(659), which after their death was inherited by their sons, the kingdom which was the object of contention became almost an empty name, inasmuch as the Cilician sea-kings, the Arab sheiks of the Syrian desert, the princes of the Jews, and the magistrates of the larger towns had ordinarily more to say than the wearers of the diadem.  Meanwhile the Romans established themselves in western Cilicia, and the important Mesopotamia passed over definitively to the Parthians.

The Parthian State
Armenia

The monarchy of the Arsacids had to pass through a dangerous crisis about the time of the Gracchi, chiefly in consequence of the inroads of Turanian tribes.  The ninth Arsacid, Mithradates ii or the Great (630?-667?), had recovered for the state its position of ascendency in the interior of Asia, repulsed the Scythians, and advanced the frontier of the kingdom towards Syria and Armenia; but towards the end of his life new troubles disturbed his reign; and, while the grandees of the kingdom including his own brother Orodes rebelled against the king and at length that brother overthrew him and had put him to death, the hitherto unimportant Armenia rose into power.  This country, which since its declaration of independence(2) had been divided into the north-eastern portion or Armenia proper, the kingdom of the Artaxiads, and the south-western or Sophene, the kingdom of the Zariadrids, was for the first time united into one kingdom by the Artaxiad Tigranes (who had reigned since 660); and this doubling of his power on the one hand, and the weakness of the Parthian rule on the other, enabled the new king of all Armenia not only to free himself from dependence on the Parthians and to recover the provinces formerly ceded to them, but even to bring to Armenia the titular supremacy of Asia, as it had passed from the Achaemenids to the Seleucids and from the Seleucids to the Arsacids.

Asia Minor

Lastly in Asia Minor the territorial arrangements, which had been made under Roman influence after the dissolution of the kingdom of Attalus,(3) still subsisted in the main unchanged.  In the condition of the dependent states—­the kingdoms of Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pontus, the principalities of Paphlagonia and Galatia, the numerous city-leagues and free towns—­no outward change was at first discernible.  But, intrinsically, the character of the Roman rule had certainly undergone everywhere a material alteration.  Partly through the constant growth of oppression naturally incident to every tyrannic government, partly through the indirect operation of the Roman revolution—­in the seizure, for instance, of the property of the soil in the province of Asia by Gaius Gracchus, in the Roman tenths and customs, and in the human hunts