king of Bactria, while on others appears Athena Alcis, the haughty, helmeted, _promachus_ Athena, hurling the thunderbolt, whom the Antigonid kings of Macedon and the Greek kings of India had put on their coins.[106] Not without some reason, therefore, is the view now being advanced that the art of China and Japan is derived, like that of Europe and America, from Greek sources.[107] It is an amazing spectacle to observe how Hellenistic civilization flowed simultaneously back the channels to the springs in Italy and China whence came the floods which overwhelmed the Seleucid empire. * * * * * After this rapid survey of the political history of the Seleucids, I wish to devote the remainder of this chapter to considering the domestic policy of the dynasty. I shall point out that Seleucus and his successors continued Alexander the Great's work of founding city-states in Asia, and that, having to deal with priestly communities and feudal lords as well as with the occupants of the widespread royal domains, they refused to exempt from their direct control any lands not placed under the jurisdiction of a city-state. I shall discuss briefly the internal structure of the city-states and more at length their relation in theory and fact to the monarch. This will finally bring up for examination the policy of Antiochus IV, in whose reign the internal as well as the external development of the Seleucid empire culminated. * * * * * Seleucus had been advanced to high position in Alexander's service after Alexander had disclosed his purpose of fusing the Macedonians, Greeks, and Iranians into a new cosmopolitan race. The promotion obtained by him during the course of the bitter struggle which this policy occasioned suggests that he made Alexander's point of view his own. This surmise as to the attitude of Seleucus is confirmed by the fact that he took his place, after Alexander's death, with those who upheld the cause of Alexander's family, and left it for his Babylonian satrapy only when it became clear that to remain meant to perish without accomplishing anything. Seleucus was the only one of the great Macedonian captains who did not take Alexander's death as a license to discard their Iranian wives. The Bactrian maiden assigned to him at the great Susian marriage--Apama, daughter of Spitamenes--became his queen and the mother of his heir, Antiochus. The Seleucid dynasty was, accordingly, half Iranian from the start; and for the policy which it inherited from Antigonus and Alexander, and which it prosecuted vigorously till the death of Antiochus IV in 164 B.C., namely, the Hellenization of Asia, it had as warrant the practice of its idealized founder.