This interpenetration of the East and Hellenism, which has nowhere been carried out so completely as in Syria, meets us predominantly in the form of the good and noble becoming ruined in the mixture. This, however, is not everywhere the case; the later developments of religion and of speculation, Christianity and Neoplatonism, have proceeded from the same conjunction; if with the former the East penetrates into the West, the latter is the transformation of the Occidental philosophy in the sense and spirit of the East--a creation in the first instance of the Egyptian Plotinus (204-270) and of his most considerable disciple the Syrian Malchus or Porphyrius (233 till after 300), and thereafter pre-eminently cultivated in the towns of Syria. For a discussion of these two phenomena, so significant in the history of the world, this is not the place; but they may not be forgotten in estimating the position of matters in Syria. [Sidenote: Antioch.] The Syrian character finds its eminent expression in the capital of the country and, before Constantinople was founded, of the Roman East generally--inferior as respects population only to Rome and Alexandria, and possibly also to the Babylonian Seleucia--Antioch, on which it appears requisite to dwell for a moment. The town, one of the youngest in Syria and now of small importance, did not become a great city by the natural circumstances of commerce, but was a creation of monarchic policy. The Macedonian conquerors called it into life, primarily from military considerations, as a fitting central place for a rule which embraced at once Asia Minor, the region of the Euphrates, and Egypt, and sought also to be near to the Mediterranean.[128] The like aim and the different methods of the Seleucids and the Lagids find their true expression in the similarity and the contrast of Antioch and Alexandria; as the latter was the centre for the naval power and the maritime policy of the Egyptian rulers, so Antioch was the centre for the continental Eastern monarchy of the rulers of Asia. The later Seleucids at different times undertook large new foundations here, so that the city, when it became Roman, consisted of four independent and walled-in districts, all of which again were enclosed by a common wall. Nor were immigrants from a distance wanting. When Greece proper fell under the rule of the Romans, and Antiochus the Great had vainly attempted to dislodge them thence, he granted at least to the emigrant Euboeans and Aetolians an asylum in his capital. In the capital of Syria, as in that of Egypt, a commonwealth in some measure independent and a privileged position were conceded to the Jews, and the position of the towns as centres of the Jewish Diaspora was not the weakest element in their development. Once made a residency and the seat of the supreme administration of a great empire, Antioch remained even in Roman times the capital of the Asiatic provinces of Rome. Here