The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.13

c9.s1.13

Such was the theoretical outline of the monarchy; and it was very well understood by the two capable men, Seleucus and his son the first Antiochus, who made of the empire what it was to be. They knew the weakness of their position over against their vast and strange inheritance, and set to work to remedy it in their own way, by filling Asia with Greek settlements. I see no reason to believe that they had any deliberate intention of hellenising Asia; their object was not to spread Greek culture or turn Asiatics into Greeks, but to make of their unwieldy empire a strong state. Certainly they were hard-working, conscientious men who meant to govern as well as they could according to their lights; but their lights were the commonplace Greek lights of Plato and Aristotle—the barbarian was a person who was to be kept in his place and ruled by Greeks, though the Seleucid kings added well ruled. Alexander had gone far beyond that, and we shall hear something later about his ideas and their consequences, but to Seleucus a strong state meant the support of his own people: on them the state must be founded. The Seleucids did get the support of their own people; the dynasty was popular, and the abiding loyalty of the Graeco-Macedonian settlers to the person of the reigning Seleucid became notorious (Chap. v).