“Iran indeed had gone, with all his rose,
     And Jamshyd’s seven-ringed cup, where no one knows:” 

—­And the angel that recorded their deeds and misdeed had written Tamam on the last page, sprinkled sand over the ink,—­shut the volume, and put it away on the shelf;—­and with a Thank God that’s done with! settled down to snooze for six hundred years and ten.

For what had he to do with what followed?  With Alexander’s wedding-feast in 324,—­when upwards of ten thousand couples, the grooms all Macedonian, the brides all Persian, were united:  what had he to do with the new race young Achilles Redivivus thus proposed to bring into being?  These were mere Macedonian doings, to be recorded by his brother angel of Europe; as also were the death of Alexander, and his grand schemes that came to nothing.  There 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.