that succeeded Ipsus, and Seleucus in a short time made it his ordinary residence.  The change weakened the ties which bound the Empire together, offended the bulk of the Asiatics, who saw their monarch withdraw from them into a remote region, and particularly loosened the grasp of the government on those more eastern districts which were at once furthest from the new metropolis and least assimilated to the Hellenic character.  Among the causes which led to the disintegration of the Seleucid kingdom, there is none that deserves so well to be considered the main cause as this.  It was calculated at once to produce the desire to revolt, and to render the reduction of revolted provinces difficult, if not impossible.  The evil day, however, might have been indefinitely delayed had the Seleucid princes either established and maintained through their Empire a vigorous and effective administration, or abstained from entangling themselves in wars with their neighbors in the West, the Ptolemies and the princes of Asia Minor.

But the organization of the Empire was unsatisfactory.  Instead of pursuing the system inaugurated by Alexander and seeking to weld the heterogeneous elements of which his kingdom was composed into a homogeneous whole, instead of at once conciliating and elevating the Asiatics by uniting them with the Macedonians and the Greeks, by promoting intermarriage and social intercourse between the two classes of his subjects, educating the Asiatics in Greek ideas and Greek schools, opening his court to them, promoting them to high employments, making them feel that they were as much valued and as well cared for as the people of the conquering race, the first Seleucus, and after him his successors, fell back upon the old simpler, ruder system, the system pursued before Alexander’s time by the Persians, and before them perhaps by the Medes—­the system most congenial to human laziness and human pride—­that of governing a nation of slaves by means of a class of victorious aliens.  Seleucus divided his empire into satrapies, seventy-two in number.  He bestowed the office of satrap on none but Macedonians and Greeks.  The standing army, by which he maintained his authority, was indeed composed in the main of Asiatics, disciplined after the Greek model; but it was officered entirely by men of Greek or Macedonian parentage.  Nothing was done to keep up the self-respect of Asiatics, or to soften the unpleasantness that must always attach to being governed by foreigners.  Even the superintendence over the satraps seems to have been insufficient.  According to some writers, it was a gross outrage offered by a satrap to an Asiatic subject that stirred up the Parthians to their revolt.  The story may not be true; but its currency shows of what conduct towards those under their government the satraps of the Seleucidae were thought, by such as lived near the time, to have been capable.