The climax was reached in about seventy years more. When these had passed into history, so had also the Persian Empire, and the East, as the Greeks had conceived it thus far and we have understood it, was subject to the European race which a century and a half before it had tried to subdue in Europe itself. To this race (and to the historian also) "the East," as a geographical term, standing equally for a spatial area and for a social idea, has ceased to mean what it once meant: and the change would be lasting. It is true that the East did not cease to be distinguished as such; for it would gradually shake itself free again, not only from control by the West, but from the influence of the latter's social ideas. Nevertheless, since the Western men, when they went back to their own land, had brought the East into the world known to them--into a circle of lands accepted as the dwelling of civilized man--the date of Alexander's overthrow of the Persian Empire makes an epoch which divides universal history as hardly any other divides it. Dramatic as the final catastrophe would be, it will not surprise us when it comes, nor did it, as a matter of fact, surprise the generation which witnessed it. The romantic conception of Alexander, as a little David who dared a huge Goliath, ignores the facts of previous history, and would have occurred to no contemporary who had read the signs of the times. The Eastern colossus had been dwindling so fast for nearly a century that a Macedonian king, who had already subdued the Balkan peninsula, loomed at least as large in the world's eye, when he crossed the Hellespont, as the titular Emperor of contumacious satraps and ever-rebelling provinces of western Asia. To accept this view we have only to look back over seventy years since that march of Ten Thousand Greeks, with which our last survey closed. SECTION 1. PERSIA AND ITS PROVINCES Before the expedition of Cyrus there may have been, and evidently were, enough seeds of corruption in the state of Persia; but they had not become known by their fruits. No satrap for a century past had tried to detach himself and his province from the Empire; hardly a subject people had attempted to re-assert its independence. There were, indeed, two exceptions, both of them peoples which had never identified themselves at any time with the fortunes of their alien masters. One of these was, of course, the Asiatic Greek, the other was the Egyptian people; but the contumacy of the first threatened a danger not yet realized by Asia; the rebellious spirit of the last concerned, as yet, itself alone.