religion of the court was pre-eminently the old national worship; the Hellenism there was little different from the Hellenism of the Armenian Tigranids and the Arsacids of the Parthian empire.  The Greeks of Asia Minor might imagine for a brief moment that they had found in this king a support for their political dreams; his battles were really fought for matters very different from those which were decided on the fields of Magnesia and Pydna.  They formed—­after a long truce—­a new passage in the huge duel between the west and the east, which has been transmitted from the conflicts at Marathon to the present generation and will perhaps reckon its future by thousands of years as it has reckoned its past.

The Nationalities of Asia Minor

Manifest however as is the foreign and un-Hellenic character of the whole life and action of the Cappadocian king, it is difficult definitely to specify the national element preponderating in it, nor will research perhaps ever succeed in getting beyondbgeneralities or in attaining clear views on this point.  In the whole circle of ancient civilization there is no region where the stocks subsisting side by side or crossing each other were so numerous, so heterogeneous, so variously from the remotest times intermingled, and where in consequence the relations of the nationalities were less clear than in Asia Minor.  The Semitic population continued in an unbroken chain from Syria to Cyprus and Cilicia, and to it the original stock of the population along the west coast in the regions of Caria and Lydia seems also to have belonged, while the north-western point was occupied by the Bithynians, who were akin to the Thracians in Europe.  The interior and the north coast, on the other hand, were filled chiefly by Indo-Germanic peoples most nearly cognate to the Iranian.  In the case of the Armenian and Phrygian languages(4) it is ascertained, in that of the Cappadocian it is highly probable, that they had immediate affinity with the Zend; and the statement made as to the Mysians, that among them the Lydian and Phrygian languages met, just denotes a mixed Semitic-Iranian population that may be compared perhaps with that of Assyria.  As to the regions stretching between Cilicia and Caria, more especially Lydia, there is still, notwithstanding the full remains of the native language and writing that are in this particular instance extant, a want of assured results, and it is merely probable that these tribes ought to be reckoned among the Indo-Germans rather than the Semites.  How all this confused mass of peoples was overlaid first with a net of Greek mercantile cities, and then with the Hellenism called into life by the military as well as intellectual ascendency of the Greek nation, has been set forth in outline already.

Pontus