The Greeks, then, who passed to Asia in Alexander's wake had no religious message for the East, and still less had the Macedonian captains who succeeded him. Born and bred to semibarbaric superstitions, they had long discarded these, some for the freethinking attitude of the Greek, and all for the cult of the sword. The only thing which, in their Emperor's lifetime, stood to them for religion was a feudal devotion to himself and his house. For a while this feeling survived in the ranks of the army, as Eumenes, wily Greek that he was, proved by the manner and success of his appeals to dynastic loyalty in the first years of the struggle for the succession; and perhaps, we may trace it longer still in the leaders, as an element, blended with something of homesickness and something of national tradition, in that fatality which impelled each Macedonian lord of Asia, first Antigonus, then Seleucus, finally Antiochus the Great, to hanker after the possession of Macedonia and be prepared to risk the East to win back the West. Indeed, it is a contributory cause of the comparative failure of the Seleucids to keep their hold on their Asiatic Empire that their hearts were never wholly in it. For the rest, they and all the Macedonian captains alike were conspicuously irreligious men, whose gods were themselves. They were what the age had made them, and what all similar ages make men of action. Theirs was a time of wide conquests recently achieved by right of might alone, and left to whomsoever should be mightiest. It was a time when the individual had suddenly found that no accidental defects--lack of birth, or property, or allies--need prevent him from exploiting for himself a vast field of unmeasured possibilities, so he had a sound brain, a stout heart and a strong arm. As it would be again in the age of the Crusades, in that of the Grand Companies, and in that of the Napoleonic conquests, every soldier knew that it rested only with himself and with opportunity, whether or no he should die a prince. It was a time for reaping harvests which others had sown, for getting anything for nothing, for frank and unashamed lust of loot, for selling body and soul to the highest bidder, for being a law to oneself. In such ages the voice of the priest goes for as little as the voice of conscience, and the higher a man climbs, the less is his faith in a power above him.