The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.11

c9.s1.11

The Seleucid empire was nothing organic, in the sense that the Roman state, up to a point, was organic. The latter resembled a vertebrate animal; it expanded outwards from a solid core, the city of Rome. The Seleucid empire resembled rather a crustacean, not growing from any solid core but encased in an outer shell; the empire was a framework which covered a multitude of peoples and languages and cities. What there really was to the empire, officially, was a king, an army, and a bureaucracy—the governing and taxing officials in the several satrapies. It had no imperial citizenship, as the Roman empire had; it hardly even had a unified state worship, for each satrapy had its own cult of the deified kings. Even before the final dissolution, any satrapy could easily set up for itself, as Bactria did for good and Media spasmodically, without endangering the life of the rest; and in the general break-up even eparchies, like Osrhoene, Adiabene, Mesene, easily became little kingdoms, because the governor of an eparchy, just as much as the governor of a satrapy, had an organisation ready to his hand, even to a *basileion* or palace residence,¹ while the Greek cities or settlements in his territory were only separate units and not parts of a whole. What actually held the empire together was the personality of the quasi-divine monarch, for the army was his and the officials were in his hand; how this might work out will be seen when we come to Antiochus Epiphanes. It had one advantage; the king—commander-in-chief, head of every service, the fount of law—stood high above the clash of nationalities or creeds; he could hold the balance level, for he had the power, and in particular he could if he chose hold it level between the Greek and the Asiatic. But it was not precisely of a level balance that the Seleucid kings were thinking.