Moreover, besides this, there was the still more important fact of the many new cities founded in Asia by the Seleukidæ and the other contemporary kings. Each of these cities had a considerable infusion of Greek and Macedonian citizens, among the native Orientals located there, often brought by compulsion from neighboring villages. In what numerical ratio these two elements of the civic population stood to each other, we cannot say. But the Greeks and Macedonians were the leading and active portion, who exercised the greatest assimilating force, gave imposing effect to the public manifestations of religion, had wider views and sympathies, dealt with the central government, and carried on that contracted measure of municipal autonomy which the city was permitted to retain. In these cities the Greek inhabitants, though debarred from political freedom, enjoyed a range of social activity suited to their tastes. In each, Greek was the language of public business and dealing; each formed a centre of attraction and commerce for an extensive neighborhood; all together, they were the main hellenic or quasi-hellenic element in Asia under the Greco-Asiatic kings, as contrasted with the rustic villages, where native manners, and probably native speech, still continued with little modification. But the Greeks of Antioch, or Alexandria, or Seleukeia, were not like citizens of Athens or Thebes, nor even like men of Tarentum or Ephesus. While they communicated their language to Orientals, they became themselves substantially orientalized. Their feelings, judgments, and habits of action, ceased to be hellenic. Polybius, when he visited Alexandria, looked with surprise and aversion on the Greeks there resident, though they were superior to the non-hellenic population, whom he considered worthless.[650] Greek social habits, festivals, and legends, passed with the hellenic settlers into Asia; all becoming amalgamated and transformed so as to suit a new Asiatic abode. Important social and political consequences turned upon the diffusion of the language, and upon the establishment of such a common medium of communication throughout Western Asia. But after all, the hellenized Asiatic was not so much a Greek as a foreigner with Grecian speech, exterior varnish, and superficial manifestations; distinguished fundamentally from those Greek citizens with whom the present history has been concerned. So he would have been considered by Sophokles, by Thucydides, by Sokrates. [650] Strabo, xvii. p. 797, ὁ γοῦν Πολύβιος, γεγονὼς ἐν τῇ πόλει (Alexandria), βδελύττεται τὴν ταύτῃ κατάστασιν, etc.