The vein of humor is too rich to be left unnoted. If the Greeks could laugh at their gods, and even mock them, the Armenians could also make sport of them. For what could be more delightfully humorous than the picture of a bearded god, a slayer of dragons, whose hair was of flame and whose eyes like suns, stealing corn from the Assyrian king and dropping the ears from his shoulders in his hasty flight across heaven? The character thus brought out, together with the richness of imaginative quality, especially in the song of his birth, the wholesome and unveiled anthropomorphism (wholesome because it is unveiled), and the correspondence between the Greek fire-god Vulcan whose wife was Venus, the goddess of beauty, with the fire-god Vahakn whose wife Astghik was also goddess of beauty, stamp the legend with its unmistakable origin in Greek mythology. SECTION 5. THE HISTORIC BACKGROUND OF THE LEGEND OF VAHAKN The Greek period from which this legend dates began with the defeat of the Armenian king Vahy, who was overcome by Alexander the Great somewhere about 328 B.C. [27] The Greeks chose their own representative to rule over the province, who at the time of Alexander's death was Seleucus. Historians have taken the name of this governor to indicate the dynasty of Greek supremacy which followed; i.e., the Seleucid dynasty. This method of the Greeks of selecting their own man to govern a subject people, which was of course in pursuance of their policy of superimposing their own culture upon all subject nations, was contrary to the policy of the Parthians, Romans, and Persians, who allowed the Armenians to maintain their national independence provided they permitted the use of their armies and duly paid their taxes. And it is this policy of the Greeks that accounts for the fact that large portions of Greek mythology and religion were taken over by the Armenians.