at all, framing his actions with a view solely to happiness in the
flesh. A possible fate in the hereafter seemed to him to have no bearing
on his conduct here. That disembodied he might spend eternity with the
divine, or, absorbed into the divine essence, become himself
divine--such ideas, though not unknown or without attraction to rarer
spirits, were wholly impotent to combat the vivid interest in life and
the lust of strenuous endeavour which were bred in the small worlds of
the city-states.

The Greeks, then, who passed to Asia in Alexander's wake had no
religious message for the East, and still less had the Macedonian
captains who succeeded him. Born and bred to semibarbaric superstitions,
they had long discarded these, some for the freethinking attitude of the
Greek, and all for the cult of the sword. The only thing which, in their
Emperor's lifetime, stood to them for religion was a feudal devotion to
himself and his house. For a while this feeling survived in the ranks of
the army, as Eumenes, wily Greek that he was, proved by the manner and
success of his appeals to dynastic loyalty in the first years of the
struggle for the succession; and perhaps, we may trace it longer still
in the leaders, as an element, blended with something of homesickness
and something of national tradition, in that fatality which impelled
each Macedonian lord of Asia, first Antigonus, then Seleucus, finally
Antiochus the Great, to hanker after the possession of Macedonia and be
prepared to risk the East to win back the West. Indeed, it is a
contributory cause of the comparative failure of the Seleucids to keep
their hold on their Asiatic Empire that their hearts were never wholly
in it.

For the rest, they and all the Macedonian captains alike were
conspicuously irreligious men, whose gods were themselves. They were