welcomed the tendency of the age towards earnest inquiry
in all departments of enterprise and of knowledge, and knew how to
confine such inquiries within the bounds, and entwine them with the
interests, of absolute monarchy, was productive of direct advantage to
the state, whose ship-building and machine-making showed traces of the
beneficial influence of Alexandrian mathematics; and not only so, but
also rendered this new intellectual power--the most important and the
greatest, which the Hellenic nation after its political dismemberment
put forth--subservient, so far as it would consent to be serviceable
at all, to the Alexandrian court. Had the empire of Alexander
continued to stand, Greek science and art would have found a state
worthy and capable of containing them. Now, when the nation had
fallen to pieces, a learned cosmopolitanism grew up in it luxuriantly,
and was very soon attracted by the magnet of Alexandria, where
scientific appliances and collections were inexhaustible, where kings
composed tragedies and ministers wrote commentaries on them, and where
pensions and academies flourished.

The mutual relations of the three great states are evident from
what has been said. The maritime power, which ruled the coasts and
monopolized the sea, could not but after the first great success
--the political separation of the European from the Asiatic continent
--direct its further efforts towards the weakening of the two great
states on the mainland, and consequently towards the protection of the
several minor states; whereas Macedonia and Asia, while regarding each
other as rivals, recognized above all their common adversary in Egypt,
and combined, or at any rate ought to have combined, against it.

The Kingdoms of Asia Minor

Among the states of the second rank, merely an indirect importance,
so far as concerned the contact of the east with the west, attached
in the first instance to that series of states which, stretching from
the southern end of the Caspian Sea to the Hellespont, occupied the
interior and the north coast of Asia Minor: Atropatene (in the modern
Aderbijan, south-west of the Caspian), next to it Armenia, Cappadocia
in the interior of Asia Minor, Pontus on the south-east, and Bithynia
on the south-west, shore of the Black Sea. All of these were
fragments of the great Persian Empire, and were ruled by Oriental,
mostly old Persian, dynasties--the remote mountain-land of Atropatene
in particular