y the Greek writers and
philosophers; by those Alexandrians who were not all at Alexandria.
Unfortunately, nearly the whole of his work has been lost.

At the end of a century and a half Babylon shook off Hellenism, and
Mesopotamia fell into the hands of the Parthians. These people affected, in
some degree, the poetry and arts of Greece, but at bottom they were nothing
more than Oriental barbarians. Their capital, Ctesiphon, seems never to
have attracted learned men, nor ever to have been a seat of those inquiries
into the past of the older races in which the cultured cities of the Greek
world took so great a pleasure. When Rome became the heir of Greece and the
perpetuator of her traditions, we may believe that, under Trajan, she set
about establishing herself in the country; but she soon found it necessary
to withdraw within the Euphrates, and it was her loss when the Parthians
fell from power to be succeeded in the lordship of Mesopotamia by the
Sassanids.[82]

We see, then, that, with the exception of one short period, Chaldaea was
what the Greeks called a barbarous country after the fall of its native
royalty, and that it will help us little in our endeavour to grasp the
nature and extent of its religious beliefs. The last of the Athenian
philosophers, Damascius, has certainly left us some information as to the
Babylonish deities which seems to have been taken from authentic
sources.[83] This, together with a few fragments from the work of Berosus,
is all that Hellenic tradition has handed down to us. There is nothing here
which can be even remotely compared to the treatises upon Isis and Osiris
and the Goddess of Syria preserved under the names of PLUTARCH and LUCIAN.

But we cannot enter upon the discussion of Chaldaean art without making an
effort to describe the gist of the national religion and its principal
personages. In every country the highest function of art is to translate
the religious conceptions of its people into visible forms. The architect,
the sculptor, the painter, each in his own fashion, carries out this idea;
the first by the dimensions he gives to his temples, by their plan, and by
the decoration of their walls; the second and third by their choice of
feature, expression and attribute for the images in which the gods become
visible to the people. The clearness and precision with which this
embodiment of an idea is carried out will depend upon the natural aptitudes
of the race and the assist