Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/301

 THE DIADOCHI IIELLENIZED ASIA. 2G9 liausting duty.^ But it is certain that no volunteer emigrants •would g) forth to settle at distances such as their imaginations could hardly conceive. The absorbing appetite of Alexander was conquest, to the East, West, South, and North ; the cities which he planted were established, for the most part, as garrisons to maintain his most distant and most precarious acquisitions. The purpose of colonization was altogether subordinate ; and that of hellenizing Asia, so tar as we can see, was not even contem- plated, much less realized. This process of hellenizing Asia — in so far as Asia was ever hellenized — which has often been ascribed to Alexander, was in reality the work of the Diadochi who came after him ; though his conquests doubtless opened the door and established the mili- tary ascendency which rendered such a work practicable. The position, the aspirations, and the interests of these Diadochi — Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleukus, Lysimachus, etc. — were mate- rially different from those of Alexander. They had neither ap- petite nor means for new and remote conquest ; their great ri- valry was with each other ; each sought to strengthen himself near home against the rest. It became a matter of fashion and pride with them, not less than of interest, to found new cities im- mortalizing their family names. These foundations were chiefly made in the regions of Asia near and known to Greeks, where Alexander had planted none. Thus the great and numerous foundations of Seleukus Nikator and his successors covered Syria, Mesopotamia, and parts of Asia Minor. All these regions were known to Greeks, and more or less tempting to new Grecian im- migrants — not out of reach or hearing of the Olympic and othei festivals, as the Jaxartes and the Indus were. In this way a consid- erable influx of new hellenic blood was poured into Asia during the century succeeding Alexander, — probably in great measure from Italy and Sicily, where the condition of the Greek cities became still more calamitous — besides the numerous Greeks who took service as individuals under these Asiatic kings. Greeks, and Mace- donians speaking Greek, became predominant, if not in numbers, 1 See the plain-spoken outburst of the Thurian Antileon, one of the soldiers in Xenophon's Ten Thousand Greeks, when the army reached Trapezus (Xenoph. Anabas. v. 1, 2). 23*