Accordingly, each city could adopt whatever policy it pleased in the matter of admitting foreigners, be they Greeks or Asiatics, newcomers or natives, to its body politic. It might prohibit the intermarriage of citizens with non-citizens altogether, or it might go so far as to open its doors to bastards. It is, therefore, impossible for us, without such sources of knowledge as the papyri afford for Egypt, to speak in any general way of the extent and effects of racial fusion in the Seleucid empire. Two things, however, seem clear: (1) Intermarriage between citizens of different cities was of frequent occurrence and, doubtless, of full legal propriety; (2) the great mass of the agricultural population was not much affected racially by the proximity of Greeks, Macedonians, Jews, or Iranians. The peasants were practically serfs. Their social inferiority protected them against assimilation by citizens. On the other hand, they were, doubtless, much more deeply stirred by the European immigration than were the fellahs in Egypt; for the influx into their land was much more abundant and more spontaneous than was that into the valley of the Nile. Here, too, Hellenism had much more effective agents for its diffusion than it had there. For within the hundreds of city-states in Asia we must presume that intermarriage was permitted among all citizens, whether the elements which mingled with the Greeks were Phrygians, Lydians, Syrians, Jews, Babylonians, or Iranians. We must presume that at least the men knew in a fashion the Greek language. They certainly tended to take Greek names, and in documents of Delos dating from the second century B.C. we meet with natives of Bambyce--now a _polis_ and renamed Hierapolis, or the Sacred City--who would be indistinguishable from native-born Greeks were it not for the Semitic names of their wives. Indeed, some of them may have been Greeks who had married Syrian women. The various circles of Europeans in Syria, and, though to a less degree, elsewhere in Asia, must have been surrounded at an early date by a penumbra of half-breeds, by means of which the sharp contrast of antagonistic civilizations was lessened. In these circumstances Greek ideas and customs became a ferment which stirred the peoples of Asia to the depths. The awakening of the Nearer East was in progress in the third century B.C., and had the Romans succumbed to Hannibal and the Greeks maintained their prestige unimpaired for a century or two longer, the whole course of history would have been changed. The Greeks came to Asia "not to send peace but a sword." They came to fill the continent up with cantankerous little republics where formerly a dense multitude had lived in a state of political lethargy. And curiously enough those who directed the dismemberment of Asia into far more states than even mediæval Germany produced were the rulers who had the responsibility for the government of the whole region. How explain this anomaly?