Traces of the national reaction appear also in the use of the native language and the native customs. The largest Greek city of the Parthian empire, the ancient Seleucia, continued to subsist, but it was thenceforth called not after the name of the Greek marshal, but after that of its new master, Beh, or better, Ardashir. The Greek language hitherto at any rate always in use, although debased and no longer ruling alone, disappears on the emergence of the new dynasty at once from the coins, and only on the inscriptions of the first Sassanids is it still to be met with by the side of, and behind, the language proper of the land. The “Parthian writing,” the Pahlavî, maintains its ground, but alongside of it comes a second little different and indeed, as the coins show, as properly official, probably that used hitherto in the Persian province, so that the oldest monuments of the Sassanids, like those of the Achaemenids, are trilingual, somewhat as in the German middle ages Latin, Saxon, and Franconian were employed side by side. After king Sapor I. († 272) the bilingual usage disappears, and the second mode of writing alone retains its place, inheriting the name Pahlavî. The year of the Seleucids, and the names of the months belonging to it, disappear with the change of dynasty; in their stead come, according to old Persian custom, the years of the rulers and the native Persian names of months.[75] Even the old Persian legend is transferred to the new Persia. The still extant “history of Ardashir, son of Papak,” which makes this son of a Persian shepherd arrive at the Median court, perform menial offices there, and then become the deliverer of his people, is nothing but the old tale of Cyrus changed to the new names. Another fable-book of the Indian Parsees is able to tell how king Iskander Rumi, _i.e._ “Alexander the Roman,” had caused the holy books of Zarathustra to be burnt, and how they were then restored by the pious Ardaviraf when king Ardashir had mounted the throne. Here the Romano-Hellene confronts the Persian; the legend has, as might be expected, forgotten the illegitimate Arsacid. [Sidenote: Government of the Sassanids.] In other respects the state of things remained essentially the same. In a military point of view in particular, the armies of the Sassanids were certainly not regular and trained troops, but the levy of men capable of arms, into which with the national movement a new spirit may doubtless have passed, but which afterwards, as before, was based in the main on the cavalry-service of the nobility. The administration too remained as it was; the able ruler took steps with inexorable sternness against the highway-robber as against the exacting official, and, compared at least with the later Arabic and the Turkish rule, the subjects of the Sassanid empire found themselves prosperous and the state-chest full. [Sidenote: The new Persians and the Romans.]