for Seleucus and his successors, though the latter, from Antiochus Soter
onward, had a strain of Iranian blood, they held and proved themselves
essentially Hellenic. Their portraits from first to last show European
features, often fine. Ptolemy Lagus and all the Lagidae remained
Macedonian Greeks to a man and a woman and to the bitter end, with the
greatest Hellenic city in the world for their seat. As for the remaining
tenth part of the East, almost the whole of it was ruled by princes who
claimed the title "philhellene," and justified it not only by political
friendliness to the Seleucidae and the Western Greeks, but also by
encouraging Greek settlers and Greek manners. So far as patronage and
promotion by the highest powers could further it, Hellenism had a fair
chance in West Asia from the conquest of Alexander down to the
appearance of Rome in the East. What did it make of this chance? How far
in the event did those Greek and Macedonian rulers, philhellenic Iranian
princes and others, hellenize West Asia? If they did succeed in a
measure, but not so completely that the East ceased to be distinct from
the West, what measure was set to their several influences, and why?

[Plate 6: HELLENISM IN ASIA. ABOUT 150 B.C.]

Let us see, first, what precisely Hellenism implied as it was brought to
Asia by Alexander and practised by his successors. Politically it
implied recognition by the individual that the society of which he was a
member had an indefeasible and virtually exclusive claim on his good
will and his good offices. The society so recognized was not a family or
a tribe, but a city and its proper district, distinguished from all
other cities and their districts. The geographical configuration and the
history of Greece, a country made up in part of small plains ringed in
by hills and sea, in part of islands, had brought about this limitation
of political communities, and had made patriotism mean to the Greek