Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/771

Rh checked likewise. Had the brilliant but erratic Greek genius been steadied by the empire, had the empire in turn been vivified and supported by the Greek, how different history might have been! But the gods willed otherwise, the Greeks were victorious, Persian expansion came to a sudden end. It was Rome and not Persia that Greece permeated, and by that time Greek culture had lost its pristine bloom.

Men commonly assume that the Persian empire was a failure because after a little more than two hundred years men of Persian race ceased to rule. Yet history shows no more striking case of a conquered state taking its conqueror captive, and in this case the conqueror was at least veneered with the highest culture the world had thus far seen. Alexander began as leader of a crusade against the Orient. He ended by being more Oriental than the Persians themselves. He took over, not only the royal robes, the harem and the harem exclusiveness, the satrapial system. To the royal obeisance he added a sonship of the god which the Persians had been willing to leave to Egypt and he spread it broadcast over the world. Intellectuals at Athens might still joke about Alexander being god if he wished, the masses of the Orient took it in dead earnest, and as the West came to be more and more penetrated by men of Oriental descent and by the Oriental ideas which followed their incoming, the Oriental conception of kingship followed.

Political conditions under the successors of Alexander have more in common with the days of Hammurapi or of Ramses than with those of Pericles. The theory behind the fact is also descended from the empires. From the earliest days to the present, the bulk of the land in the Near East has been in the possession of the king, of his court, or of his church establishment. These lands pay, not taxes but rent, and the king is not so much monarch as landlord. Divine right to the land, whether in the Hellenistic period or in the twentieth century after Christ, meant loss of individualism, dynastic wars, a total denial of nationalism.

None the less, nationalism of a sort persisted. Three quarters of a century after the death of Alexander, the eastern half of the empire had relapsed into Orientalism, and in another century the old culture-lands of Babylonia, Assyria, Media, and Persia had followed. Astonishingly little of Greek culture was left behind. As a single illustration, we have cuneiform business documents from Uruk, one of the Babylonian city-states of former days, which date from the very end of the Seleucid period. Aside from the dating by Macedonian kings, the presence of a half-dozen Greek names.