Greeks, and to found them along main lines of communication, where they
might promote trade and serve as guardians of the roads; while at the
same time, owing to their continual intercourse with each other, their
exposure to native sojourners and immigrants and their necessary
dependence on the centre of government, they could hardly repeat in Asia
the self-centred exclusiveness characteristic of cities in either
European Greece or the strait and sharply divided valleys of the west
Anatolian coast. In fact, by design or not, most Seleucid foundations
were planted in comparatively open country. Seleucus alone is said to
have been responsible for seventy-five cities, of which the majority
clustered in that great meeting-place of through routes, North Syria,
and along the main highway through northern Asia Minor to Ephesus. In
this city, Seleucus himself spent most of his last years. We know of few
Greek colonies, or none, founded by him or his dynasty beyond the
earlier limits of the Ancient East, where, in Afghanistan, Turkestan and
India, Alexander had planted nearly all his new cities. Possibly his
successor held these to be sufficient; probably he saw neither prospect
of advantage nor hope of success in creating Greek cities in a region so
vast and so alien; certainly neither he nor his dynasty was ever in such
a position to support or maintain them, if founded east of Media, as
Alexander was and proposed to be, had longer life been his. But in
western Asia from Seleucia on Tigris, an immense city of over half a
million souls, to Laodicea on Lycus and the confines of the old Ionian
littoral, Seleucus and his successors created urban life, casting it in
a Hellenic mould whose form, destined to persist for many centuries to
come, would exercise momentous influence on the early history of the
Christian religion.

By founding so many urban communities of Greek type the Macedonian kings
of West Asia undeniably introduced Hellenism as an agent of political