Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/19

 this date the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Achaemenian, had reached from the frontiers of India to the shores of the Mediterranean, and had even held Egypt precariously as an integral province. Diverse nationalities marched under her standard, and immense hosts of Asiatics were habitually mustered for the achievement of foreign conquest. But this monarchy proved to be short-lived, and was destroyed in less than two centuries, after the invasion of Greece by Darius and Xerxes had disclosed the fact that a few thousands of patriotic Hellenes were of more martial worth than the vast and heterogeneous armies led by the Persian king. Less than ten years of actual warfare sufficed to bring the Achaemenian Empire and its dependencies under the rule of Alexander; and the indigenous races were kept in subjection by the Graeco-Macedonian invaders for a longer period than the kindred dynasty established by Cyrus had endured. The Persian Empire, in its widest extent, as it existed under the Achaemenidae, was never restored; nor did any subsequent conqueror issue from the west to repeat the exploits of Alexander. The Asiatic successors of that monarch, the Seleucidae, were gradually ousted from their dominions by a wild race which attacked them from the north, and became known historically as the Parthians. Under their native rulers, the Arsacidae, they might have restored the empire of Cyrus, but the simultaneous growth of the Latin power in Asia Minor and Syria for ever confined the Parthians to the eastern bank of the Euphrates. The policy of Rome, as defined by Augustus, forbade the extension of the empire beyond the limits assigned to it after the battle of Actium; but at least one emperor, the indomitable Trajan, was ambitious of emulating the prowess of Alexander