In this study of comparative history one finds after awhile that there are very few dates that count, and they are very easy to keep in mind. The same decades are important everywhere; and this because humanity is one, and however diversified on the outside, inwardly all history is the history of the one Host of Souls. Take 320 B.C. Alexander is dead three years, but the world is still vibrating with him. Chandragupta Maurya has just started his dynasty and great age in India, which is to last its thirteen decades until the neighborhood of 190. Seleucus Nicataor, the only one of the Macedonian diadochi who has not divorced his Persian bride, is about to set up for himself a sovereignty in Babylon,—which Scipio Africanus, thirteen decades afterwards, struck from the list of the Great Powers when he defeated Seleucus' descendant Antiochus at Magnesia,—in 190 again; at which time the Romans first broke into Asia. And it was in the one-nineties, too, that the second Han Emperor came to the Dragon Thone, and the glorious age of the Western Hans began.
Though the Seleucidae possessed for some time a great part of Darius Hystaspes' empire,—and, except Egypt, all the old imperial seats of the foregone manvantara,—they do not belong to West Asia at all; their history is not West-Asian, but European; they are a part of that manvantara whose forces were drifting West from Greece to Italy. The history of all the Macedonian kingdoms is profoundly uninteresting. There was enough of Greek in them to keep them polished; enough of Macedonian to keep them essentially barbarous; they sopped up some of the effeteness of the civilizations they had displaced, Egyptian and Asiatic; but the souls of those old civilizations remained aloof. There was mighty little Egypt in the Egypt of the Ptolemies: what memories and atmosphere of a grand antiquity survived, hid in the crypts and pyramids; all one saw was a sullen fanatic people scorning their conquerors. So too in Seleucus' Babylon there was little evidence of the old Childacan wisdom, or the Assyrian power, or the pride and chivalry of the Persian. It was Europe occupying West Asia; and not good Europe at that; and only able to do so (as is always the case) because the Soul of West Asia was temporarily absent. The Seleucidae maintained a mimic greatness in tinsels until 190 and Scipio and Magnesia; then a mere rising-tide-lapped sand-castle of a kingdom until, in 64 B.C., Pompey made what remained of it a Roman province,—just twice thirteen decades after the marriage-feast at Babylon; just when the great age of the Western Hans was ending, and when Augustus was thinking of being born, and (probably or possibly) Vikramaditya of starting up a splendor at Ujjain. What Pompey took,—what remained for him to take,—consisted only of Syria; all the eastern part of the Seleucid empire had gone long since.
In 255 Diodotus, the Seleucid satrap of Bactria, rebelled and made himself a kingdom; and that the kingdom might become an empire, went further on the war-path. On the eastern shores of the Caspian he defeated one of the myriad nomad tribes of Turanian stock that haunt those parts,—first cousins, a few times removed perhaps, to our friends the Huns; a few more times removed, to that branch of their race that had, so to say, married above them and become thus a sort of poor relations to the aristocracy,—the Ts'inners who were at that time finishing up their conquest of China. Thus while the far eastern branch of the family was prospering mightily, the far western was getting into trouble: I may mention that they were known, these far westerners, as the Parni; and that their chief had tickled his pride with assumption of the Persian name of Arsaces;—just as I dare say you should find various George Washingtons and Pompey the Greats now swaying empire in the less explored parts of Africa. South of this Parnian country lies what is now the province of Khorasan, mountainous; then a Seleucan satrapy known as Parthia;—also inhabited by Turanians, but of a little more settled sort; the satrap was Andragoras, who, like Diodotus in Bactria (only not quite so much so), had made himself independent of the reigning Antiochus (II). With him Arsaces found refuge after his defeat by Diodotus, and there spent the next seven years:—whether enjoying Andragoras' hospitality, or making trouble for him, this deponent knoweth not. In 248, however, he proceeeded to slay him and to reign in his stead. Two years later, Arsaces died, and his brother Tiridates succeeded him and carried on the good work; he was driven out by Seleucus II in 238, but returned to it when the latter was called westward by rebellions soon after. Thenceforward the Parthian kingdom was, as you might say, a fact in nature; though until a half-cycle had passed, a small and unimportant one, engaged mostly in reinvogorating the native Turanianism of the Parthians with fresh Parnian importations from the northern steppes. Then, in 170, Mithradates I came to the throne, and seriously founded an empire. He fought Eucratidas of Bactria, and won some territory from him. He fought eastward as far as to the Indus; then conquered Meida and Babylonia in the west. In 129 Demetrius II Nicator, the reigning Seleucid, attacked Mithradates' son, Phraates II, and was defeated; and the lands east of the Euphrates definitely passed from Seleucid to Parthian control.
Why not, then, count as manvantaric doings in West Asia this rise of the Parthians to power? Why relegate them and their activities to the dimness of pralaya? Says the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"The Parthian Empire as founded by the conquests of Mithradates I and restored, once by Mithradates II (the Great, c. 124 to 88 B.C.), and again by Phraates II (B.C. 76 to 70), was, to all exterior appearances, a continuation of the Achaemenid dominion. Thus the Arsacids now began to assume the old title 'King of kings' (the shahanshah of modern Persia), though previously their coins as a rule had borne only the legend 'great king.' The official version preserved by Arrian in his Parthica, derives the line of These Parnian nomads from [the Achaemenian] Artaxerxes II. In reality however the Parthian empire was totally different from its predecessor, both externally and internally. It was anything rather than a world empire. The countries west of the Euphrates never owned its dominion, and even of Iran itself not one half was subject to the Arsacids. There were indeed vassal states on every hand, but the actual possessions of the kings—the provinces governed by their satraps—consisted of a rather narrow strip of land stretching from the Euphrates and north Babylonia through southern Media and Parthia as far as north-western Afghanistan… Round these provinces lay a ring of minor states which as a rule were dependent on the Arsacids. They might, however, partially transfer their allegiance on the rise of a new power (e.g. Tigranes in Armenia) or a Roman invasion. Thus it is not without justice that the Arsacid period is described, in the later Persian and Arabian tadition, as the period of the 'kings of the part-kingdoms'—among which the Ashkanians (i.e. the Arsacids) had won the first place….
"It may appear surprising that the Aracids made no attempt to incorporate the minor states in the empire and create a great and united dominion, such as existed under the Achaemenids and was afterwards restored by the Sassanians. This fact is the clearest symptom of the weakness of their empire and of the small power wielded by their King of kings. In contrast alike with its predecessors and successors the Arsacid dominion was peculiarly a chance formation—a state which had come into existence through fortuitous external circumstances, and had no firm foundation within itself, or any intrinsic raison d'etre."
A Turanian domination over Iran, it had leave to exist only because the time was pralaya. When a man dies, life does not depart from his body; but only that which sways and organizes life; then life, ungoverned and disorganized, takes hold and riots. So with the seats of civilization. One generally finds that at such times some foreign power receives, as we are getting to say, a mandate (but from the Law) to run these dead or sleeping or disorganized regions,—until such time as they come to life again, and proceed to evict the mandataries.—As well to remember this, now that we are proposing, upon a brain-mind scheme, to arrange for ourselves what formerly the Law saw to:— the nations that are now to be great and proud manditaries, shall sometime themselves be mandataried; and those that are mandataried now, shall then arrange their fate for them; there is no help for it: you cannot catch Spring in a trap, or cage up Summer lest he go.—It seems now we must believe in a new doctrine: that certain 'Nordics' are the Superior Race, and you must be blue-eyed and large and blond, or you shall never pass Peter's wicket. One of these days we shall have some learned ingenious Hottentot arising, to convince us poor others of the innate superiority of Hottentottendom, and that we had better bow down! . . . But to return:
The Parthians remained little more than Central-Asian nomads: something between the Huns who destroved civilization, and the Turks who cultivated it for all they were worth (in a Central Asian-nomad sort of way). All their magnates were Turanian; they retained a taste for tent-life; their army and fighting tactics where of the desert-horseman type: mounted bowmen, charging and shooting, wheeling and scattering in flight,—which put not your trust in, or 'ware the "Parthian shot." They were not armed for close combat; and were quite defenseless in winter, when the weather slackened their bow-string. True, Aryan Iran put its impress on them: so that presently their kings wore long beards in the Achaemenian fashion, made for themselves an Achaemenian descent, called themselves by Achaemenian names. They took on, too, the Achaemenian religion of Zoroaster:—so, but much more earnestly and adventurously and opera-bouffe grimly. Ts'in Shi Hwangti took on the quest of Tao. There was also a stratum of Hellenistic culture in their domains, and they took on something of that. When they conquered Babylonia, it was inevitable that they should move their headquarters down into that richest and most thickly-populated part of their realm—to Seleucia, the natural capital, one might suppos?—a huge Hellenistic city well organized for world-commerce.—But let these nomad kings come into it with their horde, and what would become of the ordered civic life? Nomads do not take well to life in great cities; they love the openness of their everlasting plains, and the narrrow streets and high buildings irk their sensibilities. For this reason, and perhaps because they recognised their deficienceies, they shunned Seleucia; and built themselves lumbering straggling gawky Ctesiphon across the Tigris to be their chief capital;—for they had many; not abiding to be long in one place, but gadding about as of old. Still, Greek culture was not to be denied. They coined money, copying the inscriptions on the coins of the Seleucids, and copyting them ever worse and worse. Not until after 77 A.D., and then only occasionally, do Parthian coins bear inscriptions in Aramaic. Yet sometimes we hear of their being touched more deeply with Greekness. Orodes I,—he who defeated Crassus,— spoke good Greek, and Greek tragedies were played at his court.— As with nomads generally, it was always easy for a Parthian king to shark up a great army and achieve a striking victory; but as a rule impossible to keep the horde so sharked up thogether for solid conquests; and above all, it was impossible to organize anything.
But they played their part in history: striking down to cut off the flow of Greek culture eastward. It had gone, upon Alexander's impulse, up into Afghanistan and down into India; may even have touched Han China,—probably did. I do not suppose that the touch could have done anything but good in India and China; where culture was well-established, older, and in all essentials higher, than in Greece. But in Persia itself the case was different. Persia was under pralaya, in retreat among its original mountains; and submergence under Hellenisticism might have meant for its oblivion of its own native Persianism. Consder: of the two great centers of West-Asian culture, Egypt fell under Greek, and then under Roman, dominion; and the old Egyptian civilization became, so far as we can tell, utterly a thing of the past. When Egypt rose again, under the Esotericist Sultans of the tenth century A.D., I dare not quite say that her new glory was linked by nothing whaterver to the ancient glory of the Pharaohs; but that would be the general—as it is the obvious—view. Fallen into pralaya, she had no positive strength of her own to oppose to the active manvantaric influence of Greekism under the Ptolemies; and in Roman days it was her imported Greekism that she opposed to the Romans, not her own old and submerged Khemism. Her soul was buried very deep indeed, if it remained with her at all. In Persia, on the other hand, West Asia retained much more clearly its cultural identity. Persianism was submerged for about thirteen decades under the Seleucids; then the Parthians cut in, and the drowning waters were drained away. The Parthians had no superior culture to impose on the Persians; whereas the Greeks had,—because theirs was active and in manvantara, while that of the Persians themselves was negative, because in pralaya. One might say roughly that a nation under the dominance of a people more highly or actively cultured than itself, tends to lose the integrity of its own culture,—as has happened in Ireland and Wales under English rule:—they take on, not advantageously, an imitation of the culture of their rulers. But under the dominance of a stronger, but less advanced, people, they tend to seek refuge the more keenly in their own cultural sources: as the Finns and Poles have done under the Russians. This explains in part the difference between Egypt and Persia it the dawn of the new West-Asian manvantara. We have seen that in the former the seeds were ready to sprout, and did,—in Ammonius Saccas and his movement. They were Egyptian seeds; but the soil and fertilizers were so Greek that the blossom when it appeared seemed not Egyptian, not West-Asian, but Neo-Greek; and turned not to the rising, but to the setting sun. The new growth affiliated itself to the European manvantara that was passing, not to the West-Asian one that was to begin. Persia was in a different position.
Certain events went to quicken the Persian seed within the Parthian empire. One was the rise of the Yueh Chi. During the period between the end of the brilliance of the Western, and the beginning of that of the Eastern Hans, these people were consolidating an empire in Northern India, and figuring there as the Kushan Dynasty: their power culminated, probably, in the reign of Kanishka. They had wrested from the Parthians some of their eastern provinces;—really, the overlordship of these rather than the sovereignty, for the Parthians held all things lightly except the ground they happened to be camping on; and this made a change in the center of Parthian gravity which was of enormous help to the Persians.