could best be found. They were Greeks and Jews. Nowadays Armenians also would be available; but at that

time Armenia had hardly come within reach of even the most elementary civilisation. Only among the Greeks

and the Jews was there that familiarity with ideals, that power and habit of thinking for themselves and of

working for a future and remote end, which the kings needed in their colonists. Modern students do not as a

rule conceive the Jews as an educated race, and some can hardly find language strong enough to describe

their narrowness and deadness of intellect. But when compared with the races that surrounded them, the

Greeks excepted, the Jews stood on a far higher intellectual p latform: they knew one book (or, rather, one

collection of books) well, and it was a liberal education to them.

One might hardly expect to find that the Greeks were loyal subjects of Seleucid kings. They were apt to be

democratic and unruly; but it is as true of ancient as it is of modern times that the Greeks are "better and

more prosperous under almost any other government than they are under their own." They accommodated

themselves with their usual dexterity and pliancy to their position; and circumstances, as we have seen,

made them dependent on the kings. The stagnant and unprogressive Oriental party looked askance at and

disliked the Greek element; and the latter must regard the kings as their champions, even though the

Seleucid kings were far too autocratic and too strongly tinged with the Oriental fashions for the Greek

colonists to feel in thorough sympathy with them. But settlers and kings alike had the common interest that

they must dominate the uneducated mass of the ancient population. Thus the constitution of the new cities

was a compromise, a sort of limited monarchy, where democratic freedom and autocratic rule tempered and

restrained each other; and the result was distinctly favourable to the development and prosperity of the

It may seem even stranger that the Jews should be found by Seleucid kings their best and most loyal

subjects outside of Palestine, for those kings were considered by the Jews of Palestine to be the most

deadly enemies of their race and religion. But the Jew outside of Palestine was a different person and

differently situated from the Jew in his own land. Abroad he was resigned to accept the government of the

land in which he lived, and to make the best of it; and he found that loyalty was by far the best policy. He

could be useful to the government; and the government was eager to profit by and ready to reward his

loyalty. Thus their interest were identical. Moreover, the Jewish colonies planted by the Seleucid kings in

Asia Minor and Cilicia were all older than the Maccabean rising, when the Jewish hatred for the Seleucid

kings came to a head.

Their moral scruples divided the Jews from their neighbours in the cities, and thereby made them all the more

sensible of the fact that it was the royal favour which maintained them safe and privileged in the places

where they lived as citizens. In Palestine their ritual kept the Jews aloof from and hostile to the Seleucid

kings, and fed their national aspirations. But in the Graeco-Asiatic cities their ritual actually bound them

more closely to the king's service.

Through similar causes, at a later time, the Jews in Palestine hated the Roman government and regarded it as

the abominable thing, and they were subdued only after many rebellions and the most stubborn resistance.

And yet, through that troubled period, the Jews outside Palestine were loyal subjects of the Empire,

distinguished by their special attachment to the side of the Emperors against the old Roman republican

party.

Moreover, the Jews, an essentially Oriental race, found the strong Oriental tinge in the policy of the Seleucid

kings far more congenial to them than the Greek colonists could do. The "grave Hebrew trader," if one may

imitate the words of Matthew Arnold, was by nature essentially opposed to "the young, light-hearted

master of the wave." Hence the Jewish settlers formed a counterpoise against the Greek colonists in the

Seleucid cities, and, wherever the Greek element seemed too strong, the natural policy of the kings was to

plant Jews in the same city.

That remarkable shifting and mixing of races was, of course, not produced simply by arbitrary acts of the

Greek kings, violently transporting population hither and thither at their caprice. The royal policy was