Before, however, all this blending of Semitic religiosity with Hellenic philosophical ideas, and with something of the old Hellenic mansuetude, which had survived even under Macedonian masters to modify Asiatic minds, could issue in Christianity, half the East, with its dispersed heirs of Alexander, had passed under the common and stronger yoke of Rome. Ptolemaic Alexandria and Seleucid Antioch had prepared Semitic ground for seed of a new religion, but it was the wide and sure peace of the Roman Empire that brought it to birth and gave it room to grow. It was to grow, as all the world knows, westward not eastward, making patent by its first successes and by its first failures how much Hellenism had gone to the making of it. The Asian map of Christianity at the end, say, of the fourth century of the latter's existence, will show it very exactly bounded by the limits to which the Seleucid Empire had carried Greeks in any considerable body, and the further limits to which the Romans, who ruled effectively a good deal left aside by their Macedonian predecessors--much of central and eastern Asia Minor for example, and all Armenia--had advanced their Graeco-Roman subjects. Beyond these bounds neither Hellenism nor Christianity was fated in that age to strike deep roots or bear lasting fruit. The Farther East--the East, that is to say, beyond Euphrates--remained unreceptive and intolerant of both influences. We have seen how almost all of it had fallen away from the Seleucids many generations before the birth of Christ, when a ring of principalities, Median, Parthian, Persian, Nabathsean, had emancipated the heart of the Orient from its short servitude to the West; and though Rome, and Byzantium after her, would push the frontier of effective European influence somewhat eastward again, their Hellenism could never capture again that heart which the Seleucids had failed to hold. This is not to say that nothing of Hellenism passed eastward of Mesopotamia and made an abiding mark. Parthian and Sassanian art, the earlier Buddhist art of north-western India and Chinese Turkestan, some features even of early Mohammedan art, and some, too, of early Mohammedan doctrine and imperial policy, disprove any sweeping assertion that nothing Greek took root beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire. But it was very little of Hellenism and not at all its essence. We must not be deceived by mere borrowings of exotic things or momentary appreciations of foreign luxuries. That the Parthians were witnessing a performance of the Bacchae of Euripides, when the head of hapless Crassus was brought to Ctesiphon, no more argues that they had the Western spirit than our taste for Chinese curios or Japanese plays proves us informed with the spirit of the East.