This, then, the Seleucids did--they so brought West and East together that each learned from the other. But more than that cannot be claimed for them. They did not abolish the individuality of either; they did not Hellenize even so much of West Asia as they succeeded in holding to the end. In this they failed not only for the reasons just considered--lack of vital religion in their Macedonians and their Greeks, and deterioration of the Hellenism of Hellenes when they ceased to be citizens of free city-states--but also through individual faults of their own, which appear again and again as the dynasty runs its course; and perhaps even more for some deeper reason, not understood by us yet, but lying behind the empirical law that East is East and West is West.
As for the Seleucid kings themselves they leave on us, ill-known as their characters and actions are, a clear impression of approximation to the traditional type of the Greek of the Roman age and since. As a dynasty they seem to have been quickly spoilt by power, to have been ambitious but easily contented with the show and surface of success, to have been incapable and contemptuous of thorough organization, and to have had little in the way of policy, and less perseverance in the pursuit of it. It is true that our piecemeal information comes largely from writers who somewhat despised them; but the known history of the Seleucid Empire, closed by an extraordinarily facile and ignominious collapse before Rome, supports the judgment that, taken one with another, its kings were shallow men and haphazard rulers who owed it more to chance than to prudence that their dynasty endured so long.
Their strongest hold was on Syria, and in the end their only hold. We associate them in our minds particularly with the great city of Antioch, which the first Seleucus founded on the Lower Orontes to gather up trade from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor in the North Syrian country. But, as a matter of fact, that city owes its fame mainly to subsequent Roman masters. For it did not become the capital of Seleucid preference till the second century B.C.--till, by the year 180, the dynasty, which had lost both the Western and the Eastern provinces, had to content itself with Syria and Mesopotamia alone. Not only had the Parthians then come down from Turkestan to the south of the Caspian (their kings assumed Iranian names but were they not, like the present rulers of Persia, really Turks?), but Media too had asserted independence and Persia was fallen away to the rule of native princes in Fars. Seleucia on Tigris had become virtually a frontier city facing an Iranian and Parthian peril which the imperial incapacity of the Seleucids allowed to develop, and even Rome would never dispel. On the other flank of the empire a century of Seleucid efforts to plant headquarters in Western Asia Minor, whether at Ephesus or Sardes, and thence to prosecute ulterior designs on Macedonia and Greece, had been settled in favour of Pergamum by the arms and mandate of the coming arbiter of the East, the Republic of Rome. Bidden retire south of Taurus after the battle of Magnesia in 190, summarily ordered out of Egypt twenty years later, when Antiochus Epiphanes was hoping to compensate the loss of west and east with gain of the south, the Seleucids had no choice of a capital. It must thenceforth be Antioch or nothing.
That, however, a Macedonian dynasty was forced to concentrate in north Syria whatever Hellenism it had (though after Antiochus Epiphanes its Hellenism steadily grew less) during the last two centuries before the Christian era was to have a momentous effect on the history of the world. For it was one of the two determining causes of an increase in the influence of Hellenism upon the Western Semites, which issued ultimately in the Christian religion. From Cilicia on the north to Phoenicia and Palestine in the south, such higher culture, such philosophical study as there were came more and more under the influence of Greek ideas, particularly those of the Stoic School, whose founder and chief teacher (it should never be forgotten) had been a Semite, born some three hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth. The Hellenized University of Tarsus, which educated Saul, and the Hellenistic party in Palestine, whose desire to make Jerusalem a southern Antioch brought on the Maccabaean struggle, both owed in a measure their being and their continued vitality to the existence and larger growth of Antioch on the Orontes.
But Phoenicia and Palestine owed as much of their Hellenism (perhaps more) to another Hellenized city and another Macedonian dynasty--to Alexandria and to the Ptolemies. Because the short Maccabaean period of Palestinian history, during which a Seleucid did happen to be holding all Syria, is very well and widely known, it is apt to be forgotten that, throughout almost all other periods of the Hellenistic Age, southern Syria, that is Palestine and Phoenicia as well as Cyprus and the Levant coast right round to Pamphylia, was under the political domination of Egypt. The first Ptolemy added to his province some of these Asiatic districts and cities, and in particular Palestine and Coele-Syria, very soon after he had assumed command of Egypt, and making no secret of his intention to retain them, built a fleet to secure his end. He knew very well that if Egypt is to hold in permanency any territory outside Africa, she must be mistress of the sea. After a brief set-back at the hands of Antigonus' son, Ptolemy made good his hold when the father was dead; and Cyprus also became definitely his in 294. His successor, in whose favour he abdicated nine years later, completed the conquest of the mainland coasts right round the Levant at the expense of Seleucus' heir. In the event, the Ptolemies kept almost all that the first two kings of the dynasty had thus won until they were supplanted by Rome, except for an interval of a little more than fifty years from 199 to about 145; and even during the latter part of this period south Syria was under Egyptian influence once more, though nominally part of the tottering Seleucid realm.
The object pursued by the Macedonian kings of Egypt in conquering and holding a thin coastal fringe of mainland outside Africa and certain island posts from Cyprus to the Cyclades was plainly commercial, to get control of the general Levant trade and of certain particular supplies (notably ship-timber) for their royal port of Alexandria. The first Ptolemy had well understood why his master had founded this city after ruining Tyre, and why he had taken so great pains both earlier and later to secure his Mediterranean coasts. Their object the Ptolemies obtained sufficiently, although they never eliminated the competition of the Rhodian republic and had to resign to it the command of the Aegean after the battle of Cos in 246. But Alexandria had already become a great Semitic as well as Grecian city, and continued to be so for centuries to come. The first Ptolemy is said to have transplanted to Egypt many thousands of Jews who quickly reconciled themselves to their exile, if indeed it had ever been involuntary; and how large its Jewish population was by the reign of the second Ptolemy and how open to Hellenic influence, may be illustrated sufficiently by the fact that at Alexandria, during that reign, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek by the body of Semitic scholars which has been known since as the Septuagint. Although it was consistent Ptolemaic policy not to countenance Hellenic proselytism, the inevitable influence of Alexandria on south Syria was stronger than that consciously exerted by Antiochus Epiphanes or any other Seleucid; and if Phoenician cities had become homes of Hellenic science and philosophy by the middle of the third century, and if Yeshua or Jason, High Priest of Jehovah, when he applied to his suzerain a hundred years later for leave to make Jerusalem a Greek city, had at his back a strong party anxious to wear hats in the street and nothing at all in the gymnasium, Alexandria rather than Antioch should have the chief credit--or chief blame!
Before, however, all this blending of Semitic religiosity with Hellenic philosophical ideas, and with something of the old Hellenic mansuetude, which had survived even under Macedonian masters to modify Asiatic minds, could issue in Christianity, half the East, with its dispersed heirs of Alexander, had passed under the common and stronger yoke of Rome. Ptolemaic Alexandria and Seleucid Antioch had prepared Semitic ground for seed of a new religion, but it was the wide and sure peace of the Roman Empire that brought it to birth and gave it room to grow. It was to grow, as all the world knows, westward not eastward, making patent by its first successes and by its first failures how much Hellenism had gone to the making of it. The Asian map of Christianity at the end, say, of the fourth century of the latter's existence, will show it very exactly bounded by the limits to which the Seleucid Empire had carried Greeks in any considerable body, and the further limits to which the Romans, who ruled effectively a good deal left aside by their Macedonian predecessors--much of central and eastern Asia Minor for example, and all Armenia--had advanced their Graeco-Roman subjects.
Beyond these bounds neither Hellenism nor Christianity was fated in that age to strike deep roots or bear lasting fruit. The Farther East--the East, that is to say, beyond Euphrates--remained unreceptive and intolerant of both influences. We have seen how almost all of it had fallen away from the Seleucids many generations before the birth of Christ, when a ring of principalities, Median, Parthian, Persian, Nabathsean, had emancipated the heart of the Orient from its short servitude to the West; and though Rome, and Byzantium after her, would push the frontier of effective European influence somewhat eastward again, their Hellenism could never capture again that heart which the Seleucids had failed to hold. This is not to say that nothing of Hellenism passed eastward of Mesopotamia and made an abiding mark. Parthian and Sassanian art, the earlier Buddhist art of north-western India and Chinese Turkestan, some features even of early Mohammedan art, and some, too, of early Mohammedan doctrine and imperial policy, disprove any sweeping assertion that nothing Greek took root beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire. But it was very little of Hellenism and not at all its essence. We must not be deceived by mere borrowings of exotic things or momentary appreciations of foreign luxuries. That the Parthians were witnessing a performance of the Bacchae of Euripides, when the head of hapless Crassus was brought to Ctesiphon, no more argues that they had the Western spirit than our taste for Chinese curios or Japanese plays proves us informed with the spirit of the East.
The East, in fine, remained the East. It was so little affected after all by the West that in due time its religiosity would be pregnant with yet another religion, antithetical to Hellenism, and it was so little weakened that it would win back again all it had lost and more, and keep Hither Asia in political and cultural independence of the West until our own day. If modern Europe has taken some parts of the gorgeous East in fee which were never held by Macedonian or Roman, let us remember in our pride of race that almost all that the Macedonians and the Romans did hold in Asia has been lost to the West ever since. Europe may and probably will prevail there again; but since it must be by virtue of a civilization in whose making a religion born of Asia has been the paramount indispensable factor, will the West even then be more creditor than debtor of the East?