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THE SELEUCID EMPIRE. 358-251 BC. HOUSE OF SELEUCUS

CHAPTER 12

BABYLONIA

At a time beyond the vision of history some members of the human family found the country about the lower reaches of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris—then a swampy wilderness— good to live in. They began to cast seed into the black earth and to dry lumps of it in the sun for the building of houses. Presently they went on to improve Nature’s distribution of the water, digging new channels which carried it from the swamp, where there was too much of it, to the desert, where there was too little. The area of serviceable land gradually extended. Here and there the mud-brick houses clustered into villages. Then the villages became cities, with great temples and palaces and towers for star-gazing. Society became more complex; there were rich and poor; rich, who wanted a variety of things to make their life easeful and beautiful; and poor, whose myriad hands were busied in their manufacture. The communication of thought between man and man or between one generation and another, which the complexity of society now required, was made possible by the fixing of speech in written signs. All this process was already accomplished by the time history becomes cognizant of human things. The cities and their civilization were already there; not Babylon only—for Babylon was but one of many sisters and not the first-born, though in time she eclipsed them all—Ur, Eridu, Uruk, and many others stood once on an equal footing. Who the people were, who first lived in these cities, what their affinities were with other branches of the human race, history cannot say. The people who possessed the land later on were Semites, cousins of the Jew and the Arab, but these Semites, It is believed, were not the original inhabitants; they broke in from the desert upon the older people and overwhelmed them, but became themselves assimilated in manners and traditions to the conquered race, using its old-world tongue as a sacred language alongside of their own living Semitic Idiom.

This branch of the Semitic peoples did not occupy the alluvial country about the lower Euphrates only—the seat of that primeval civilization of which we have just spoken. Its settlements were pushed up the Tigris to the point where it issues from the Armenian highlands. At intervals on its banks cities arose whose language and culture did not differ essentially from those of Babylon. In process of time two great monarchical states shaped themselves: a northern one, whose center was first at Asshur and then at Nineveh— what we know as the Assyrian kingdom—and a more southern one, in the alluvial country about the lower Euphrates, whose center was in Babylon. In the day of their greatness the northern Semites, the Assyrians, were able to subjugate their cousins of the south; but the yoke was impatiently borne. At last it was finally broken. About 607 B.C. the Assyrian kingdom succumbed to a combined attack of Baby­lonians and Medes. Nineveh fell. Under Nabopolassar (625-605) and Nebuchadnezzar (605-562) Babylon had a new period (brief enough) of independence and glory.

During all these centuries the Semitic kingdoms on the Euphrates and Tigris had been the focus of civilization in the East. They were to the peoples of mountain and desert round about them what the Roman Empire was afterwards to the peoples of Central Europe. There was no other area of culti­vation in Western Asia so wide and productive as Babylonia; there were no other cities so large and populous as those on the banks of the two rivers; no centres of industry to compare with those great hives of labor; no wisdom like the wisdom of the Chaldaeans; no king so exalted as the “King of kings.” The influence of Babylon radiated as far as the Mediterranean on the west and India on the east. From all parts of the world there was a demand for its wares, especially for its embroideries and rich, tissues, “goodly Babylonish garments.” The river, which created its fertility, made at the same time a great highway through the desert, by which it communicated with the lands to the north and west, with Syria and Asia Minor and Egypt; on the east roads ran from it through Assyria or through Elam up to the Iranian plateau. And by these routes Babylon not only exported its own products; it was the central mart, through which the products of one end of the world found their way to the other. In its bazaars merchants perhaps chaffered for wares of India which were destined to be used by the peoples of the far-away Aegean.¹ Babylon was thus the commercial capital of the world, the heart in which all the arteries of traffic met. Its unit of weight, the manah, set the standard for all nations; the Greeks measured by the mna, the Indians of the Rigveda by the mana—a witness to the universal authority of Babylon.

It was not commerce only which brought Babylon into contact with foreigners, but in a lesser degree war as well. The Babylonians, being an industrial not a martial people, were obliged to have most of their fighting done for them, like the Carthaginians. Hard by on the east the lower slopes of the Iranian border range nourished a people who made excellent soldiers, and could be hired for money, predecessors of the modern Bakhtiaris. From how far afield they drew their mercenaries under the second Babylonian Empire is shown by the case already mentioned of the brother of the Lesbian poet Alcaeus.

Men from every quarter were thus drawn to Babylon and the other great cities of the Euphrates and Tigris, Phoenician merchantmen, nomads of the desert, and hardy fighting men from the hills of Asia Minor and Iran. Before their eyes were displayed the riches and glory, the handicraft and science of these settled kingdoms. It is no wonder that many nations learnt in their infancy from Babylon, that traces of Babylonian influence may be found in the primitive traditions of Canaan and India and Iran.

In the sixth century B.C. the long dominion of the Semites in Western Asia came to an end. Kurush, whom we call Cyrus, the chief of a Persian clan, led his countrymen forth from their mountains to seize, first the hegemony of the Iranian race, and then the empire of the world. On the 3rd of Marheshwan (about October 20) 539 Cyrus entered Babylon as a conqueror. But Babylon did not thereby lose its imperial dignity. Its greatness was too well based on its old renown, its geographical position, its immense population, its commercial and industrial supremacy. It could not but be still the capital of the world, the seat of the “King of kings,” even though that title now belonged to a foreigner. During the hot Babylonian summer indeed the Iranian monarch used to withdraw to his own high country, to Persepolis or Ecbatana; but for the seven cooler months of the year the Persian court resided at Babylon.

The Babylonians did not think without regret of the days of Nebuchadnezzar. They were troubled with memories of old empire. More than once they rose in revolt—in vain revolt. It was this disposition which moved the Persian kings to break their spirit by a series of rigorous measures. The Babylonians looked on ruined temples, the evidence of their master’s vengeance, or saw their golden images carried off to satisfy his greed. Xerxes, after one of their revolts, forbade altogether the carrying of arms; let the Babylonians keep themselves to their harps and flutes, the life of the brothel and the bazaar. But although under unsympathetic rule, Babylon continued to be the greatest of cities,  not so much a city in dimensions as a nation.”  The population of Babylonia was the densest known, with elements drawn from every nation under heaven. Agriculture, manufactures and trade, three unfailing springs of wealth, made Babylonia the richest province of the Empire. As to the first, it was a chief duty of the satrap to regulate that elaborate canal system upon which Babylonian agriculture depended, and immense bodies of men were employed upon the works. Herodotus tells us what Babylonia was like in the middle of the fifth century, after a hundred years or so of Persian rule. He saw its flat expanse, intersected by canals, stretching away in endless fields of wheat and millet and sesame, dotted with clumps of palm. For corn, “the fruit of Demeter,” he knew no land like it. Wheat crops yielded from two to three hundredfold, and the size which millet and sesame attained, “I could say, but I will not, because I know very well that even what I have already said about its corn has gone far beyond the bounds of belief of such persons as have not been to the land of Babylon”. The industries of Babylon were still busily plied. Its many-coloured embroidery was as much in demand under the Persians as centuries before in the time of Joshua, or centuries after under the Roman emperors.

With regard to trade, Babylon held its place as the great mart of Asia. Herodotus describes the boats which regularly brought merchandize down the river and unloaded in Babylon. In the hot summer nights merchants from cooler lands could be seen in its crowded Mums, trying to secure a little relief by lying on skins filled with water. The traffic with India naturally continued under an empire which extended over all the intervening country.

There are nevertheless indications that the conditions were not as favorable to trade under Persian rule as they might have been. The important water-way of the Tigris was blocked by “cataracts” which Alexander found it an easy matter to level, and which the local tradition asserted to have been made by the King’s order, on purpose to bar the way to hostile ships. The sea-route, again, between the Persian Gulf and India seems to have been forgotten; one would gather, from the accounts of Nearchus’ voyage, that it was of the nature of a re-discovery, and this is all the more remarkable since these waters had been explored for Darius Hystaspis by the Greek Scylax, and Herodotus expressly declares that the sea-route was thereafter in use. One might conclude that a weak commercial policy had marked the Persian government only in its declining days. We have an incidental sign of its slipshod administration at the end of the dynasty in the circumstance that a law which imposed a duty of 10 per cent on imports into Babylon, although it had never been repealed, had fallen into general neglect by the coming of Alexander.

Some estimate of the relative importance of the Euphrates and Tigris regions to the Persian king can be formed from the revenue table of Darius, as given by Herodotus. The Empire is divided for purposes of revenue into twenty districts, of which Babylonia and “the rest of Assyria” form one. When we deduct from the total annual revenue of the King the tribute in gold-dust, 360 talents, from the Indian district, we get a total of 7600 talents of silver (about 19,773,848 rupees) from the remaining nineteen districts. And of this the single district of Babylonia and Assyria yields 1000 (about 2,864,980 rupees). Egypt alone competes with it, yielding 700 talents. Besides this tribute in money, the various provinces were required to make contributions in kind to the support of the King and his army. The part taken in this by Babylonia exhibits its importance in a more striking way still. “There being twelve months to the year,” says Herodotus, “or four of them the land of Babylon supports him, and for the other eight all the rest of Asia. Thus the Assyrian country is according to its capacities a third part of Asia.” The governorship of this province, he goes on to say, was the most lucrative appointment in the Empire. One satrap, whom he mentions, drew from it a daily income of an artabe (a bushel and a half) of silver.

Closely associated with Babylonia in past history was a land to the east of it, the torrid river-country which intervenes between the ramparts of Iran and the Persian Gulf, watered by the Choaspes (Kerkha), the Copratas (Dizful), and the Eulaeus (Karfin). It is described today as “a malarious labyrinth of meandering rivers and reedy swamps”. Once it was the seat of a unique civilization, of a people as alien from the Semites of Babylonia as from the races of Aryan speech on the farther table-land. According to one theory, they had come across from Africa. For centuries their kings were the antagonists, sometimes the conquerors, of the neighboring Semitic powers. They were known by many names, to the Semites as Elam, to the Persians as Huzha, to the early Greeks (Herodotus, Aeschylus) as Kissioi. When the Mace­donians appeared in this part of the world, some of the Huzha maintained themselves as a robber people among the hills, but the Elamites of the lowland had probably forgotten the far-off days of their independence and glory. For hundreds of years they had borne the yoke of the stranger, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian. So completely had they been assimilated to their rulers that the Greeks could see no difference between their manners and customs and those of the Persians. Their country became in fact almost the central province of the Persian Empire. Its favorable position, near the cradle of the ruling race, and yet enough removed to free the monarch from the inconvenient aristocratic tradition of Iran and to overlook the western half of the Empire, led the Persian kings to make Susa (“Shushan the palace”) a chief residence of the court during the delicious Elamite spring and one of the principal treasuries of the realm.

In the autumn of 331, two hundred and eight years after the triumphal entry of Cyrus Into Babylon, the city witnessed another triumphal entry. This too registered a new epoch in human history: after the Persian the man of Javan, the Hellene, the progenitor of the modern world, had come to reign in the seats of the old civilization. Alexander had two courses open to him after the victory of Gaugamela, to pursue Darius into his native Iran, or, in the first place, to seize Babylon. The latter was the course which Darius had rightly conjectured he would take; to possess the capital of the Empire was the thing most immediately essential; the rich cities of the plain, Babylon and Susa, were the real “prize of the war.”  Therefore Alexander pressed on south. Mazaeus, the greatest of the western satraps, who united under his governorship Cilicia, Syria and Mesopotamia, and to whom the disastrous battle of Gaugamela (Arbela) had only brought fresh credit, had thrown himself into Babylon with the wreck of his forces. But on Alexander’s approach he at once sur­rendered; no assault had to be made upon the famous Babylonian wall. Mazaeus was rewarded by being made satrap of Babylonia under the new Great King.

Babylon thus passed under Greek rule, just ten years before Seleucus came to govern it. The change did not make much difference in the appearance of things there. A Persian grandee still held the place of satrap. It was rather as the restorer of the old order than as an innovator that Alexander presented himself to the Babylonians. He ordered the ruined temples to be rebuilt as in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, and in thirty days was gone again for fresh conquests. Only among the motley crowd of the bazaars one might now see here and there the mailed figure of a Macedonian soldier; and behind the caparisoned Persian satrap stood the real holders of power, Apollodorus of Amphipolis, the commander of the military forces of the province; Agathon of Pydna, the commandant of the citadel; Asclepiodorus, who was over the tribute.

Whether Alexander intended Babylon to be ultimately capital of his Empire, or Alexandria in Egypt, or Pella in Macedonia, we do not know—whether even he intended to make one capital for the whole. Babylon, at any rate, seems to have been regarded as the capital for Asia from its conquest to the time of his death. It was the headquarters of Harpalus, chief treasurer of the Empire; and Alexander returned there in 323 to plan a new scheme of enterprise, and to make a new organization of the imperial army. Then Babylon, which had seen the glories of the oldest conquerors remembered by man, saw the youngest conqueror die. In Babylon the army and its chiefs made a new settlement for the Empire.

We proceed to inquire how the conquering European race and this most ancient world acted upon each other. Alexander, as we saw, presented himself here, as in Egypt, as the restorer; the evidences of Persian tyranny, ruined and impoverished temples, were to be no more seen. The gods of Babylon were to share in the impartial liberality of the universal King. But his magnificent projects were slackly prosecuted in his absence; the Babylonian priests enjoyed the temple revenues, so long as the temples lay waste, and they felt a tenderer interest in their money-bags than in the honor of their gods. Here, too, Alexander had time only to adumbrate his policy.

The pupil of Aristotle and the educated men who accom­panied him looked with interest at the physical character of the lands into which they came. In Babylonia they were drawn to experiment in the acclimatizing of the plants of their native land. In this they had been anticipated to some extent by the old Eastern kings, who were zealous to collect the fauna and flora of remote countries in their gardens.

Now under the Macedonian supremacy the culture of the vine was attempted in Babylonia and the land of Elam on a new method adapted to the peculiarity of the soil. Harpalus vainly attempted to make ivy grow in the gardens of Babylon.

But in a much more vital respect the aspirations of the old national kings were fulfilled in the larger and more systematic designs of the man of the West. Nebuchadnezzar, according to an account which perhaps emanates from Berosus, had shown interest in the coast traffic of the Gulf. He had attempted to make solid harbors in the swamp, and had built the town of Teredon towards the land of the Arabs.

The Persian government, as we have seen, had cared little for such things. But now in the mind of Alexander the idea of a mighty sea-traffic between Babylon and India shaped itself. The expedition of Nearchus from the Indus to the Persian Gulf subserved this policy. The latter months of Alexander’s life were almost entirely taken up with examining the water-ways of lower Babylonia, regulating the canal system, and framing a scheme for the exploration of Arabia. Near Babylon itself he began to dig a gigantic basin capable of containing a thousand vessels of war with the corresponding docks. New cities of Greek speech even in this overpowering climate began to rise, one among the pools west of the Euphrates, in which a number of Greek mercenaries and broken veterans were planted, another to the east on the lagoons of the lower Eulaeus (Karun)—an Alexandria populated partly with natives from an old “royal town”, partly, like the other city, with broken soldiers.

Babylonia and the land of Elam, called by the Greeks Susiana, from Susa, its capital, formed two satrapies under Alexander.

In 321-320 Seleucus becomes satrap of Babylonia, and Antigenes, who commands the Silver Shields, satrap of Susiana. Till 316 Seleucus governs Babylonia. Of his administration during those four years we know next to nothing. One thing had become clear: in the dissensions of the Macedonian chiefs the native element was not a negligible quantity. It was largely owing to the support of natives that Docimus had overthrown Archon. To this fact Seleucus was no more blind than Antigonus or Ptolemy or Pithon in the case of their respective provinces. The one point told us as to his first period of rule is that “he bore himself honorably towards all men, evoking the good-will of the people, and preparing long beforehand partisans to help him, should he ever get an opportunity of striking for power.”

Can we form any idea of Babylon, as it appeared in the last days of its greatness, when Seleucus reigned as satrap in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar?

Babylon had many features in common with London—if we can think of London under an Oriental sun—its size, its industrial ferment, its great brick wharves with a label of foreign seamen. It lay on either side of a river, a flat city of brick (so much more prosaic than a city of stone), with straight streets and houses three or four stories tall. Unlike London, it was protected by a system of enormous walls from an invader. The whole province of Babylonia in the first place was shut off from Mesopotamia by the “Median Wall,” which ran across the neck of land between the Euphrates and Tigris, 20 feet broad and 100 high, according to Xenophon. Coming down the left bank of the Euphrates, one passed through it by the “Babylonian Gates,” out of the Mesopotamian desert into the rich fields of Babylonia. Dominant in this expanse, the mighty circumvallations and towers of Babylon soon showed themselves. In the days of Nebuchadnezzar the city had lain in a square tract enclosed by an outer and an inner wall, known respectively as Nimitti-Bel (‘‘Founda­tion of Bel”) and Imgur-Bel (“May Bel show mercy”). But under the Persians the outer wall had been breached and suffered to fall into decay; Imgur-Bel was still standing when Mazaeus delivered up the city to Alexander. Its compass is given by the Greeks as 360 stadia, or 38 miles; its height as 50 cubits, or about 75 feet, and its breadth as 32 feet, so that two chariots of four horses could pass each other upon it. All the space within this immense barricade of brick, over 90 square miles, was not taken up by building. It embraced royal hunting grounds and pleasances, and even tracts of corn-land, which might make the city independent, if need should be, of external supplies.

The flatness of the city had been redeemed under the Babylonian kings by artificial erections. The Babylonian plain-dwellers delighted above all things in gigantic towers. Their temples took this form; their citadels were not nature’s work, but piles of brick; in the famous “Hanging Gardens” art had striven to reproduce by a series of ascending terraces, supported on arches and covered above with mould, the aspect of a mountain with all its romantic caverns and waving trees—the work of one of the old kings, tradition asserted, whose queen had come from a land of hills. Another great pile was the palace on the right bank of the river—a city in itself, shut off from the common gaze by a wall of its own, and connected with the tower-temple called E-sagila. This inner “Royal City” was doubtless one of the two “citadels” which are spoken of in the days of Seleucus. Where the other citadel is to be placed is more questionable. But there is a strong presumption that, since we hear in the story of Alexander’s last days of two “palaces,” the other citadel is the same as the other palace. And this is borne out by the description of Diodorus, who says (following Ctesias) that the two palaces were built in order that from them the sovereign might “overlook the whole city, and hold the keys of its points of vantage”. Now the local relation of the two palaces is fixed beyond mistake. They lay over against each other on opposite banks of the Euphrates, joined, according to one account, by a tunnel which ran under the river. Each of these palaces was fenced off from the city of the people, one of them by as many as three walls. They rose, these walls, the second above the first, and the inmost above the second, their faces of brick variegated with hunting scenes in bright enamels, and above all the copper roofs under a Babylonian sun crowned the Royal City with a crown of fire. It was in one of these palaces that Alexander was stricken with his mortal sickness; in the other he died.

Below these palace-citadels the city of the common people spread on either side of the river. Although the days were long past when the Babylonians had borne rule in Asia, and history, concerned almost entirely with courts and wars, has little to say about them, the Babylonian people and the Babylonian civilization existed still. The cities which had been cities when Ecbatana and Persepolis, when Athens and Pella were not, were still hives of busy life. In Babylon itself, in Barsip (Greek Borsippa), Erech, Sippar, the old life went on and the old industries were plied. All over the Mediterranean lands, in the temples and houses of the new rulers of the world, might be seen splendid fabrics, covered with strange beasts and fantastic branchwork, upon which brown hands in the cities of the Euphrates had labored after an immemorial tradition. Borsippa hummed with a multitude of looms which turned the flax of the Babylonian plains into linen cloth for the merchantmen. The old formalities of law and business were observed; those stamped clay tablets which record transactions done under Macedonian kings are of the same type as those made under Nebuchadnezzar.

The old gods, although they could no more give their people the lordship of the nations, had not ceased to be served with sacrifice and prayer. The learned and priestly caste— Chaldaeans the Greeks called them—continued to hand down the ancient lore—theology, mythology, astrology, magic—and to write in the cuneiform character. Schools of them seem to have been connected with some of the great temples; we hear of such in Borsippa, Erech and Sippar. How far the Babylonian (Semitic) language remained in popular use cannot be exactly known. It had, to a large extent at any rate, been supplanted by Aramaic, the lingua franca of Western Asia. For legal and priestly documents the old language and character were employed as late as the last century before Christ.

Babylon had a bad name for its moral atmosphere. There was all the vice inseparable from a great city, made more rank by the absence of national or civic enthusiasms, by an enervating climate, by an abundance of the means of luxury. There in the warm nights, while eye and ear were allured by flame-lit colours and artful music, sensuality put on its most seductive glamour. The lascivious city threatened to engulf the northern soldiery of Alexander like an evil morass.

Seleucus reaped the fruit in 312 which he had sown during his first administration. Babylon received him back with open arms. As we saw, he had soon brought the neighboring Susiana also under his authority, and after conquering the East was satrap of Babylonia no longer, but King. From 312 for 175 years Babylonia and Susiana were under the house of Seleucus. We still have only fragmentary information of the Hellenic rule in this quarter.

Babylonia and Susiana continued to be two satrapies.

The extent of Babylonia is, so far as I know, quite uncertain. In the district between the rivers it was, of course, divided from Mesopotamia by the desert, and the actual frontier was perhaps the Median Wall. But on the east of the Tigris lay a long strip of land from Susiana in the south to Armenia in the north—the country of the Assyrians—and it is nowhere said in our authorities under what government it was placed. From the fact, however, that Babylonia as a geographical term is sometimes found to include this country, it may be inferred as probable that the satrap of Babylonia had under him Assyria east of the Tigris as well. This strip of land is sometimes called Parapotamia, and it had perhaps by 218 a separate strategos from Babylonia.

To the south of Babylonia the region next to the sea appears to have been detached before the time of Antiochus III as a separate province, called after the “Bed Sea” (i.e. the Persian Gulf). This seems to be identical with the region which we find later called Mesene.

There was one respect in which Seleucid rule left a conspicuous and lasting impress upon the country — the destruction of Babylon. Sennacherib had razed it to the soil, and it had risen again to new glory. Cyrus and Alexander had conquered it, and it was still the capital of the world. But Seleucus Nicator brought its doom upon Babylon at last. It had subsisted, we have seen, through all changes of empire owing to a prerogative which was founded upon natural conditions. But the prerogative belonged to the land rather than the particular city. It was a natural necessity that there should be in this alluvial region a great center of human life, and if Babylon were merely dispersed, as by Sennacherib, the human swarm again gathered. There was only one way by which Babylon could really be undone—by the creation of another center. This was what Seleucus did. Forty miles north of Babylon, on the Tigris, about fifteen miles below Baghdad, Seleucus marked the foundations of a new city, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris. It was a favorable position for commanding the traffic of both rivers, for it was here that the space between the rivers narrows to twenty-five miles. It was a better “focus of continental trade” than a city on the Euphrates. From this moment Babylon was doomed.

The legend of the founding of Seleucia, as narrated by Appian, represents the wise men of Babylon as being conscious of all that the marking out of the new walls meant for them. When they were required by King Seleucus to fix the lucky day and hour for beginning to build, they purposely gave him a wrong time. Only when the lucky moment came, a sudden inspiration thrilled through the Greek and Mace­donian troops, so that with one accord and in disregard of the royal heralds they flung themselves upon the work. Then the wise men saw the finger of God. “0 King, there is neither man nor city that can change the thing decreed. Even as men, cities have their hour and their appointed end.”

Seleucia, chosen for the capital of the eastern half of the Empire, grew apace. It was soon what Babylon had been, one of the largest cities of the world. The estimate of its free population, preserved in Pliny, made how soon after its found­ing we do not know, is 600,000. Elements from all quarters must have entered into the human mass which jostled in its streets. Its prevailing tone, no doubt, was Greek; in later times, under barbarian rule, it prided itself on keeping the Hellenic tradition. But the native population of old Babylon, no doubt, were driven or drifted into the new city. In a way, therefore, what Seleucus did was less to destroy Babylon than transfer it to another site. It was usual, as Strabo observes, to describe a man of Seleucia as a “Babylonian.” Perhaps no city has left so little memory of itself in proportion to its size and consequence as Seleucia. Babylon and Baghdad are both familiar names to our ears with great associations, but to how many people does Seleucia mean anything? So little trace is left of those great multitudes, akin in civilization to ourselves, who for centuries lived and worked beside the Tigris.

As to the political constitution of Seleucia, some people called Adeiganes are mentioned, who are taken to be a magisterial body of some sort. If so, it is significant that their title is not Greek. But Seleucia, as a royal capital, had its autonomy openly curtailed by its being put under an epistates and watched by a garrison. The strategos of the province (Babylonia) sometimes holds the office of epistates of the city as well. Democrates the son of Byttacus is strategos, epistates of the city, and commander of the garrison all at once. But the inscription which mentions him proves at any rate that Seleucia could, as a city, pass honorary decrees.

And while Seleucia grew, the old Babylon decayed. The famous walls, slowly crumbling, enclosed deserted, crumbling streets. Only in the midst of the desolation the huge temples still rose, and societies of priests clustered about them, performing the ancient rites and cultivating the traditional wisdom. The policy of Alexander in honoring the gods of the nations was followed by Seleucus and his house. In March 268 Antiochus laid the foundation for the rebuilding of the temple of Nebo at Borsippa. His inscription proclaims: “I am Antiochus, the Great King, the Mighty King, the King of the armies, the King of Babylon, the King of the lands, the restorer of the E-sagila and E-zida, the princely son of Seleucus, the Macedonian King, the King of Babylon.”

It was not Seleucia only which displayed in this quarter the colonizing activity of the new rulers. There were the Alexandrias founded by Alexander near the coast (i.e. in Mesene). There was an Apamea also in Mesene. The Assyrian country east of the Tigris got its complement of new foundations. Opposite Seleucia was Ctesiphon, under the Seleueid kings apparently only a place of cantonments, but destined to be refounded by the Arsacids as their chief city. Sittace is described by Pliny as of Greek origin, but we hear of Sittace in Xenophon as a great city, so that it was only a case of Hellenization. In the same region as Sittace (Sittacene) was an Antioch and an Apamea, Apollonia, Artemita, and perhaps a Laodicea. A Seleucia-on-Hedyphon, a Seleucia-on- the-Red-Sea, and a Seleucia-on-the-Eulaeus are also mentioned.

The Greeks of Babylonia seem to have contributed their proportion of great names to Hellenic literature and science. Diogenes of Seleucia, called “the Babylonian” (about 243-155) listened to Chrysippus, and became in time head of the Stoic school. Apollodorus of Artemita was in Strabo’s time the great authority for Parthian history. But what is above all interesting is to see the ancient Babylonian mind caught in the movement of new ideas and exercising itself in the field of Hellenic culture. Berosus, the priest of Bel, aspires to the distinction of a Greek historian, and writes the fables and the history of his race for these Western people to read, encouraged by the grace of King Antiochus I. From the work of Berosus almost all that was known of Babylonian history, till the inscriptions were found and deciphered, was ultimately derived. There is another figure of peculiar interest in this connection. A native of lower Babylonia, of the region near the sea, he is drawn to the great centre of Seleucia, takes the Macedonian name Seleucus, and goes deep into the mathematical science of the Greeks. His writings were given to the world about the middle of the second century B.C.; they were still known to Strabo and Plutarch. They seem to have been indeed of a high scientific order. Not only did he advance true views about tides, but he set about proving that the earth and the planets really go about the sun. The Babylonian, quickened by contact with Hellenism, anticipates Copernicus.

While the Babylonians were drawn to the light of Hellenism, the Greeks on their part were sensible of that fascination which the darkness of the ancient East has often had for the children of light. Alexander paid attention to the counsels of Babylonian magic; so did his successors. When Alexander fell ill, a number of the Macedonian chiefs, among them Seleucus, consulted a Babylonian oracle. Antigonus changes his mind at once on a warning from the “ Chaldaeans.” Seleucus, as we saw, is represented by the legend as applying to the Babylonian wise men to fix the lucky hour for his city’s foundation. Throughout the later epoch of classical paganism the roving Babylonian enjoyed great prestige as a diviner. Such men were found, no doubt, in all the great Greek cities, muttering strange words and magical formulae under the patronage of rich women, very much as the Indian gum may get a circle of curious listeners in the drawing-rooms of Europe and America today.