In lieu of Europe being fused with Asia, Asia itself was split up.  For nearly a thousand years, from the formation of the great Assyrian empire to the death of Darius Codomannus, Western Asia, from the Mediterranean to Affghanistan, or even to India, had been united tinder one head, had acknowledged one sovereign.  Assyria, Media, Persia, had successively held the position of dominant power; and the last of the three had given union, and consequently peace, to a wider stretch of country and a vaster diversity of peoples than either of her predecessors.  Under the mild yoke of the Achaemenian princes had been held together for two centuries, not only all the nations of Western Asia, from the Indian and Thibetan deserts to the AEgean and the Mediterranean, but a great part of Africa also, that is to say, Egypt, north-eastern Libya, and the Greek settlements of Cyrene and Barca.  The practical effect of the conquests of Alexander was to break up this unity, to introduce in the place of a single consolidated empire a multitude of separate and contending kingdoms.  The result was thus the direct opposite of the great conqueror’s design, and forms a remarkable instance of the contradiction which so often subsists between the propositions of man and the dispositions of an overruling Providence.

The struggle for power which broke out almost immediately after his death among the successors of Alexander may be regarded as having been brought to a close by the battle of Ipsus.  The period of fermentation was then concluded, and something like a settled condition of things brought about.  A quadripartite division of Alexander’s dominions was recognized, Macedonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria (or south-western Asia) becoming thenceforth distinct political entities.  Asia Minor, the kingdom of Lysimachus, had indeed less of unity than the other three states.  It was already disintegrated, the kingdoms of Bithynia, Pontus, and Cappadocia, subsisting side by side with that of Lysimachus, which was thus limited to western and south-western Asia Minor.  After the death of Lysimachus, further changes occurred; but the state of Pergamus, which sprang up this time, may be regarded as the continuation of Lysimachus’s kingdom, and as constituting from the time of Eumenes I. (B.C. 263) a fourth power in the various political movements and combinations of the Graeco-Oriental world.

Of the four powers thus established, the most important, and that with which we are here especially concerned, was the kingdom of Syria (as it was called), or that ruled for 247 years by the Seleucidae.  Seleucus Nicator, the founder of this kingdom, was one of Alexander’s officers, but served without much distinction through the various compaigns by which the conquest of the East was effected.  At the first distribution of provinces (B.C. 323) among Alexander’s generals after his death, he received no share; and it was not until B.C. 320, when upon the death of Perdiccas