under the Persians they had come to be called Armenians and their country Armenia.  The personal names of individuals in the country, both men and women, had acquired a decidedly Arian cast.  Everything seems to indicate that a strange people had immigrated into the land, bringing with them a new language, new manners and customs, and a new religious system.  From what quarter they had come, whether from Phrygia as Herodotus and Stephen believed, or, as we should gather from their language and religion, from Media, is perhaps doubtful; but it seems certain that from one quarter or another Armenia had been Arianized; the old Turanian character had passed away from it; immigrants had nocked in, and a new people had been formed—­the real Armenian of later times, and indeed of the present day—­by the admixture of ruling Arian tribes with a primitive Turanian population, the descendants of the old inhabitants.

The new race, thus formed, though perhaps not less brave and warlike than the old, was less bent on maintaining its independence.  Moses of Chorene, the Armenian historian, admits that from the time of the Median preponderance in Western Asia the Armenians held under them a subject position.  That such was their position under the Persians is abundantly evident;25 and, so far as appears, there was only one occasion during the entire Achaemenian period (B.C. 559 to B.C. 331) when they exhibited any impatience of the Persian yoke, or made any attempt to free themselves from it.  In the early portion of the reign of Darius Hystaspis they took part in a revolt raised by a Mede called Phraortes, and were not reduced to obedience without some difficulty.  But from henceforth their fidelity to the Achaemenian Kings was unbroken; they paid their tribute (apparently) without reluctance, and furnished contingents of troops to the Persian armies when called upon.  After Arbela they submitted without a struggle to Alexander; and when in the division of his dominions, which followed upon the battle of Ipsus, they fell naturally to Seleucus, they acquiesced in the arrangement.  It was not until Antiochus the Great suffered his great defeat at the hands of the Romans (B.C. 190) that Armenia bestirred itself, and, after probably four and a half centuries of subjection, became once more an independent power.  Even then the movement seems to have originated rather in the ambition of a chief than in a desire for liberty on the part of the people.  Artaxias had been governor of the Greater Armenia under Antiochus, and seized the opportunity afforded by the battle of Magnesia to change his title of satrap into that of sovereign.  No war followed.  Antiochus was too much weakened by his reverses to make any attempt to reduce Artaxias or recover Armenia; and the nation obtained autonomy without having to undergo the usual ordeal of a bloody struggle.  When at the expiration of five-and-twenty years Epiphanes, the son of Antiochus the Great, determined on an effort to reconquer the lost province, no very stubborn resistance was offered to him.  Artaxias was defeated and made prisoner in the very first year of the war (B.C. 165), and Armenia seems to have passed again under the sway of the Seleucidae.