es rebelled
against the king and at length that brother overthrew him and had
put him to death, the hitherto unimportant Armenia rose into power.
This country, which since its declaration of independence(2) had
been divided into the north-eastern portion or Armenia proper, the
kingdom of the Artaxiads, and the south-western or Sophene, the
kingdom of the Zariadrids, was for the first time united into one
kingdom by the Artaxiad Tigranes (who had reigned since 660); and
this doubling of his power on the one hand, and the weakness of the
Parthian rule on the other, enabled the new king of all Armenia not
only to free himself from dependence on the Parthians and to recover
the provinces formerly ceded to them, but even to bring to Armenia
the titular supremacy of Asia, as it had passed from the Achaemenids
to the Seleucids and from the Seleucids to the Arsacids.

Asia Minor

Lastly in Asia Minor the territorial arrangements, which had been
made under Roman influence after the dissolution of the kingdom of
Attalus,(3) still subsisted in the main unchanged. In the condition
of the dependent states--the kingdoms of Bithynia, Cappadocia,
Pontus, the principalities of Paphlagonia and Galatia, the numerous
city-leagues and free towns--no outward change was at first
discernible. But, intrinsically, the character of the Roman rule
had certainly undergone everywhere a material alteration. Partly
through the constant growth of oppression naturally incident to every
tyrannic government, partly through the indirect operation of the
Roman revolution--in the seizure, for instance, of the property of
the soil in the province of Asia by Gaius Gracchus, in the Roman
tenths and customs, and in the human hunts which the collectors of
the revenue added to their other avocations there--the Roman rule,
barely tolerable even from the first, pressed so heavily on Asia
that neither the crown of the king nor the hut of the peasant there
was any longer safe from confiscation, that every stalk of corn
seemed to grow for the Roman -decumanus-, and every child of free
parents seemed to be born for the Roman slave-drivers. It is true
that the Asiatic bore even this torture with his inexhaustible
passive endurance; but it was not patience and reflection that
made him bear it peacefully. It was rather the peculiarly Oriental
lack of initiative; and in these peaceful lands, amidst these
effeminate nations, strange and terrible things might happen,