vassal-kingdom, so that the satraps entered by hereditary right, but were subject to confirmation by the great-king.8 To all appearance this continued downwards, so that smaller dynasts and family chiefs stood in the same relation to the under-kings as the latter occupied to the great-king.9 Thus the office of great-king among the Parthians was limited to the utmost in favour of the high aristocracy by the accompanying subdivision of the hereditary administration of the land. With this it is quite in keeping, that the mass of the population consisted of persons half or wholly non-free,10 and emancipation was not allowable. In the army which fought against Antonius there are said to have been only 400 free among 50,000. The chief among the vassals of Orodes, who as his general defeated Crassus, marched to the field with a harem of 200 wives and a baggage train of 1000 sumpter-camels; he himself furnished to the army 10,000 horsemen from his clients and slaves. The Parthians never had a standing army, but at all times the waging of war here was left to depend on the general levy of the vassal-princes and of the vassals subordinate to these, as well as of the great mass of the non-free over whom these bore sway.

The Greek towns of the Parthian empire.Certainly the urban element was not quite wanting in the political organisation of the Parthian empire. It is true that the larger townships, which arose out of the distinctive development of the East, were not urban commonwealths, as indeed even the Parthian royal residence, Ctesiphon, is named in contrast to the neighbouring Greek foundation of Seleucia a village; they had no presidents of their own and no common council, and the administration lay here, as in the country districts, exclusively with the royal officials. But a portion—comparatively small, it is true—of the foundations of the Greek rulers had come under Parthian rule. In the provinces of Mesopotamia and Babylonia by nationality Aramaean the Greek town-system had gained a firm footing under Alexander and his successors. Mesopotamia was covered with Greek commonwealths; and in Babylonia, the successor of the ancient Babylon, the precursor of Bagdad, and for a time the residence of the Greek kings of Asia—Seleucia on the Tigris—had by its favourable commercial position and its manufactures risen to be the first mercantile city beyond the Roman bounds, with more, it is alleged, than half a million of inhabitants. Its free Hellenic organisation, on which beyond doubt its prosperity above all depended, was not touched even by the Parthian rulers in their own interest, and the city preserved not merely its town council of 300 elected members, but also the Greek language and Greek habits amidst the non-Greek East. It is true that the Hellenes in these towns formed only the dominant element; alongside of them lived numerous Syrians, and, as a third constituent, there were associated with these the not much less numerous Jews, so that the population of these Greek towns of the Parthian empire, just like that of Alexandria, was composed of three separate nationalities standing side by side. Between these, just as in Alexandria, conflicts not seldom occurred, as e.g. at the time of the reign of Gaius under the eyes of the Parthian government the three nations came to blows, and ultimately the Jews were driven out of the larger towns.

In so far the Parthian empire was the genuine counterpart to the Roman. As in the one the Oriental viceroyship is an exceptional occurrence, so in the other is the Greek city; the general Oriental aristocratic character of the Parthian government is as little injuriously affected by the Greek mercantile towns on the west coast as is the civic organisation of the Roman state by the vassal kingdoms of Cappadocia and Armenia. While in the state of the Caesars the Romano-Greek urban commonwealth spreads more and more, and gradually becomes the general form of administration, the foundation of towns—the true mark of Helleno-Roman civilisation, which embraces the Greek mercantile cities and the military colonies of Rome as well as the grand settlements of Alexander and the Alexandrids—suddenly breaks off with the emergence of the Parthian government in the East, and even the existing Greek cities of the Parthian empire wane in the further course of development. There, as here, the rule more and more prevails over the exceptions.

Religion.The religion of Iran with its worship—approximating to monotheism—of the “highest of the gods, who has made heaven and earth and men and for these everything good,” with its absence of images and its spirituality, with its stern morality and truthfulness, with its influence upon practical activity and energetic conduct of life, laid hold of the minds of its confessors in quite another and deeper way than the religions of the West ever could; and, while neither Zeus nor Jupiter maintained their ground in presence of a developed civilisation, the faith among the Parsees remained ever young till it succumbed to another gospel—that of the confessors of Mohammed—or at any rate retreated before it to India. It is not our task to set forth how the old Mazda-faith, which the Achaemenids professed, and the origin of which falls in prehistoric time, was related to that which the sacred books of the Persians having their origin probably under the later Achaemenids—the Avestâ—announce as the doctrine of the wise Zarathustra; for the epoch, when the West is placed in contact with the East, only the later form of religion comes under consideration. Perhaps the Avestâ took first shape in the east of Iran, in Bactria, but it spread thence to Media and from there it exercised its influence on the West. But the national religion and the national state were bound up with one another in Iran more closely than even among the Celts. It has already been noticed that the legitimate kingship in Iran was at the same time a religious institution, that the supreme ruler of the land was conceived as specially called to the government by the supreme deity of the land, and even in some measure divine. On the coins of a national type there appears regularly the great fire-altar, and hovering over it the winged god Ahura Mazda, alongside of him in lesser size, and in an attitude of prayer, the king, and over-against the king the imperial banner. In keeping with this, the ascendency of the nobility in the Parthian empire goes hand in hand with the privileged position of the clergy. The priests of this religion, the Magians, appear already in the documents of the Achaemenids and in the narratives of Herodotus, and have, probably with right, always been regarded by the Occidentals as a national Persian institution. The priesthood was hereditary, and at least in Media, presumably also in other provinces, the collective body of the priests was accounted, somewhat like the Levites in the later Israel, as a separate portion of the people. Even under the rule of the Greeks the old religion of the state and the national priesthood maintained their place. When the first Seleucus wished to found the new capital of his empire, the already mentioned Seleucia, he caused the Magians to fix day and hour for it, and it was