But amidst all this luxury the Muses did not find themselves at home; science in earnest and not less earnest art were never truly cultivated in Syria and more especially in Antioch. However complete was the analogy in other respects between Egypt and Syria as to their development, their contrast in a literary point of view was sharp; the Lagids alone entered on this portion of the inheritance of Alexander the Great. While they fostered Hellenic literature and promoted scientific research in an Aristotelian sense and spirit, the better Seleucids doubtless by their political position opened up the East to the Greeks--the mission of Megasthenes to king Chandragupta in India on the part of Seleucus I., and the exploring of the Caspian Sea by his contemporary the admiral Patrocles, were epoch-making in this respect--but of immediate interposition in literary interests on the part of the Seleucids the history of Greek literature has nothing more to tell than that Antiochus the Great, as he was called, made the poet Euphorion his librarian. Perhaps the history of Latin literature may make a claim to serious scientific work on the part of Berytus, the Latin island in the sea of Oriental Hellenism. It is perhaps no accident that the reaction against the modernising tendency in literature of the Julio-Claudian epoch, and the reintroduction of the language and writings of the republican time into the school as into literature, originated with a Berytian belonging to the middle class, Marcus Valerius Probus, who in the schools that were left in his remote home moulded himself still on the old classics, and then, in energetic activity more as a critical author than as strictly a teacher, laid the foundation for the classicism of the later imperial period. The same Berytus became later, and remained through the whole period of the empire, for all the East, the seat of the study of jurisprudence requisite towards an official career. As to Hellenic literature no doubt the poetry of the epigram and the wit of the _feuilleton_ were at home in Syria; several of the most noted Greek minor poets, like Meleager, Philodemus of Gadara, and Antipater of Sidon, were Syrians and unsurpassed in sensuous charm as in refined versification; and the father of the _feuilleton_ literature was Menippus of Gadara. But these performances lie for the most part before, and some of them considerably before, the imperial period. [Sidenote: Minor literature.]