It has already been stated that the Parthian dynasty, although it had wrested Iran from Hellenism, was yet regarded by the nation as, so to speak, illegitimate. Artahshatr, or in new Persian Ardashir--so the official biography of the Sassanids reports--came forward to revenge the blood of Dara murdered by Alexander, and to bring back the rule to the legitimate family and re-establish it, such as it had been at the time of his forefathers before the divisional kings. Under this legend lies a good deal of reality. The dynasty which bears the name of Sasan, the grandfather of Ardashir, was no other than the royal dynasty of the Persian province; Ardashir’s father, Papak or Pabek,[70] and a long list of his ancestors had, under the supremacy of the Arsacids, swayed the sceptre in this ancestral land of the Iranian nation,[71] had resided in Istachr, not far from the old Persepolis, and marked their coins with Iranian language and Iranian writing, and with the sacred emblems of the Persian national faith, while the great-kings had their abode in the half-Greek border-land, and had their coins stamped in the Greek language and after the Greek style. The fundamental organisation of the Iranian state-system--the great-kingdom holding superiority over the divisional kings--was under the two dynasties as little different as that of the empire of the German nation under the Saxon and the Suabian emperors. Only for this reason in that official version the time of the Arsacids is designated as that of the divisional-kings, and Ardashir as the first common head of all Iran after the last Darius, because in the old Persian empire the Persian province stood related alike to the other provinces and to the Parthians, as in the Roman state Italy stood related to the provinces, and the Persian disputed with the Parthian the legitimate title to the great-kingdom connected _de jure_ with his province.[72] [Sidenote: Extent of the Sassanid kingdom.] What was the relation of the Sassanid kingdom to that of the Arsacids in point of extent, is a question to which tradition gives no sufficient answer. The provinces of the west collectively remained subject to the new dynasty after it sat firm in the saddle, and the claims which it set up against the Romans went, as we shall see, far beyond the pretensions of the Arsacids. But how far the rule of the Sassanids reached towards the West, and when it advanced to the Oxus which was subsequently regarded as the legitimate boundary between Iran and Turan, are matters withdrawn from our field of vision.[73] [Sidenote: The state of the Sassanids.]