Chapter I - THE SELEUCID SETTLEMENT

Summary

The Seleucids, whatever from time to time they held or did not I hold in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, were Alexander's heirs in Asia. He had not greatly modified the Persian empire which he had conquered: he might separate the three powers in the satrapies—civil, military, and financial—but they remained the huge Persian satrapies, though they might be governed by men of a different nationality. The Seleucid empire in its turn was still, in outward shape, very much the empire of Persia under different rulers; the great satrapies still remained, their military nature emphasised by the governor of a satrapy being no longer called satrap but strategos, ‘general’. But something was done to tighten up the reins of satrapal government, for in all the lands east of the Euphrates the Seleucids had a more complete system of internal subdivision; it was a threefold division—satrapy, eparchy, hyparchy—corresponding roughly to the threefold division in Ptolemaic Egypt of nome, topos, village, the nome, like the satrapy, being under a strategos or general. This threefold administrative division in each of the two empires must, one supposes, have had a common origin, but what it was is unknown.