Though the Seleucidae possessed for some time a great part of Darius Hystaspes’ empire,—­and, except Egypt, all the old imperial seats of the foregone manvantara,—­they do not belong to West Asia at all; their history is not West-Asian, but European; they are a part of that manvantara whose forces were drifting West from Greece to Italy.  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 in the less explored parts of Africa.  South of this Parnian country lies what is now the province of Khorasan, mountainous; then a Seleucan satrapy known as Parthia;—­also