ed them from masters into slaves. It would
scarcely much tend to mitigate the painfulness of their feelings that
they could not but confess their conquerors to be a civilized
people--as civilized, perhaps more civilized than themselves--since the
civilization was of a type and character which did not please them
or command their approval. There is an essential antagonism between
European and Asiatic ideas and modes of thought, such as seemingly
to preclude the possibility of Asiatics appreciating a European
civilization. The Persians must have felt towards the Greco-Macedonians
much as the Mohammedans of India feel towards ourselves--they may have
feared and even respected them--but they must have very bitterly hated
them. Nor was the rule of the Seleucidae such as to overcome by its
justice or its wisdom the original antipathy of the dispossessed lords
of Asia towards those by whom they had been ousted. The satrapial
system, which these monarchs lazily adopted from their predecessors,
the Achaemenians, is one always open to great abuses, and needs the
strictest superintendence and supervision. There is no reason to believe
that any sufficient watch was kept over their satraps by the
Seleucid kings, or even any system of checks established, such as
the Achaemenidae had, at least in theory, set up and maintained. The
Greco-Macedonian governors of provinces seem to have been left to
themselves almost entirely, and to have been only controlled in the
exercise of their authority by their own notions of what was right or
expedient. Under these circumstances, abuses were sure to creep in; and
it is not improbable that gross outrages were sometimes perpetrated by
those in power--outrages calculated to make the blood of a nation boil,
and to produce a keen longing for vengeance. We have no direct evidence
that the Persians of the time did actually suffer from such a misuse of
satrapial authority; but it is unlikely that they entirely escaped the
miseries which are incidental to the system in question. Public opinion
ascribed the grossest acts of tyranny and oppression to some of the
Seleucid satraps; probably the Persians were not exempt from the common
lot of the subject races.

Moreover, the Seleucid monarchs themselves were occasionally guilty of
acts of tyranny, which must have intensified the dislike wherewith
they were regarded by their Asiatic subjects. The reckless conduct
of Antiochus Epiphanes towards the Jews is well