far more civilized than themselves, and had oppressed them and their
religion."

Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History, vol. iii. p. 270.


When the great Empire of the Persians, founded by Cyrus, collapsed under
the attack of Alexander the Great, the dominant race of Western Asia did
not feel itself at the first reduced to an intolerable condition. It
was the benevolent design of Alexander to fuse into one the two leading
peoples of Europe and Asia, and to establish himself at the head of a
Perso-Hellenic State, the capital of which was to have been Babylon. Had
this idea been carried out, the Persians would, it is evident, have lost
but little by their subjugation. Placed on a par with the Greeks, united
with them in marriage bonds, and equally favored by their common ruler,
they could scarcely have uttered a murmur, or have been seriously
discontented with their position. But when the successors of the great
Macedonian, unable to rise to the height of his grand conception, took
lower ground, and, giving up the idea of a fusion, fell back upon
the ordinary status, and proceeded to enact the ordinary role, of
conquerors, the feelings of the late lords of Asia, the countrymen of
Cyrus and Darius, must have undergone a complete change. It had been the
intention of Alexander to conciliate and elevate the leading Asiatics
by uniting them with the Macedonians and the Greeks, by promoting social
intercourse between the two classes of his subjects and encouraging them
to intermarry, by opening his court to Asiatics, by educating then in
Greek ideas and in Greek schools, by promoting them to high employments,
and making them feel that they were as much valued and as well cared for
as the people of the conquering race: it was the plan of the Seleucidae
to govern wholly by means of European officials, Greek or Macedonian,