There was also a stratum of Hellenistic culture in their domains, and they took on something of that.  When they conquered Babylonia, it was inevitable that they should move their headquarters down into that richest and most thickly-populated part of their realm—­to Seleucia, the natural capital, one might suppos?—­a huge Hellenistic city well organized for world-commerce.—­But let these nomad kings come into it with their horde, and what would become of the ordered civic life?  Nomads do not take well to life in great cities; they love the openness of their everlasting plains, and the narrrow streets and high buildings irk their sensibilities.  For this reason, and perhaps because they recognised their deficienceies, they shunned Seleucia; and built themselves lumbering straggling gawky Ctesiphon across the Tigris to be their chief capital;—­for they had many; not abiding to be long in one place, but gadding about as of old.  Still, Greek culture was not to be denied.  They coined money, 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.