generally attained it by balancing the great powers one against the other. {1602} Here they are in their order. Atropatene was the kingdom in the northern and western parts of the province of Media, by Atropates, the satrap of Alexander, who claimed descent from the seven Persian chiefs who put Darius I. on the throne. Next came Armenia, hardly conquered by Alexander, and now established under a dynasty of its own. Then Cappadocia, the land in the heart of Asia Minor, where it narrows between Cilicia and Pontus, ruled by sovereigns also claiming royal Persian descent. … Fourthly, Pontus, under its equally Persian dynast Mithridates—a kingdom which makes a great figure in Eastern history under the later Roman Republic. There was moreover a dynast of Bithynia, set up and supported by the robber state of the Celtic Galatians, which had just been founded, and was a source of strength and of danger to all its neighbours. Then Pergamum, just being founded and strengthened by the first Attalid, Philetærus, an officer of Lysimachus, and presently to become one of the leading exponents of Hellenism. … Almost all these second-rate states (and with them the free Greek cities of Heracleia, Cyzicus, Byzantium, &c.) were fragments of the shuttered kingdom of Lysimachus. … We have taken no account of a very peculiar feature extending all through even the Greek kingdoms, especially that of the Selucids—the number of large Hellenistic cities founded as special centres of culture, or points of defence, and organized as such with a certain local independence. These cities, most of which we only know by name, were the real backbone of Hellenism in the world. Alexander had founded seventy of them, all called by his name. Many were upon great trade lines, like the Alexandria which still exists. Many were intended as garrison towns in the centre of remote provinces, like Candahar—a corruption of Iskanderieh, Iskendar being the Oriental form for Alexander. Some were mere outposts, where Macedonian soldiers were forced to settle, and guard the frontiers against the barbarians, like the Alexandria on the Iaxartes. … As regards Seleucus … we have a remarkable statement from Appian that he founded cities through the length and breadth of his kingdom, viz., sixteen Antiochs called after his father, five Laodiceas after his mother, nine Seleucias after himself, three Apameias and one Stratoniceia after his wives. … All through Syria and Upper Asia there are many towns bearing Greek and Macedonian names—Berea, Edessa, Perinthos, Aclæa, Pella, &c. The number of these, which have been enumerated in a special catalogue by Droysen, the learned historian of Hellenism, is enormous, and the first question which arises in our mind is this: where were Greek-speaking people found to fill them? It is indeed