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Updated: June 8, 2025
Daily the soldiery poured into Sardis by tens of thousands. Glaucon knew now it was not a vain boast that for ten years the East had been arming against Hellas, that the whole power of the twenty satrapies would be flung as one thunderbolt upon devoted Greece. In the plain about Sardis a second city was rising, of wicker booths and gay pavilions. The host grew hourly.
And to the nobles of the Pasargadae an expedition into Europe could not but present a dazzling prospect of spoil and power of satrapies as yet unexhausted of treasure of garrisons and troops remote from the eye of the monarch, and the domination of the capital.
Plunder, in the animal lust of which alone it originated, remains its law, and its only notion of imperial administration is a coarse division, imposed by the extent of its territory, into satrapies, which, as the central dynasty, enervated by sensuality, loses its force, revolt, and break up the empire.
Subsequently, however, when satrapies were made more numerous, it was detached from these extensive countries and made to form a distinct government, with the mere addition of the comparatively small district of Hyrcania.40 It formed, apparently, one of the most tractable and submissive of the Persian provinces.
The division into satrapies large districts, each under a satrap, or viceroy was a part of this work. He thus introduced a more efficient and methodical administration into his empire, an empire four times as large as the empire of Assyria, which it had swallowed up. GOVERNMENT. Persia proper corresponded nearly to the modern province of Farsistan or Fars.
THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Persia had always looked upon European Greece as politically insignificant, for it had scarcely half the territorial extent of one of her satrapies. Her expeditions for compelling its obedience had, however, taught her the military qualities of its people. In her forces were incorporated Greek mercenaries, esteemed the very best of her troops.
Eastward of the Caspian, the rivers of Oxus and Iaxartes divided the subjects of the great king from the ravages of the Tartar; the Arabian peninsula interposed its burning sands, a barrier to the south while the western territories of the empire, including Syria, Phoenicia, the fertile satrapies of Asia Minor, were washed by the Mediterranean seas.
The two Armenias, hitherto at least nominally Asiatic satrapies, became transformed, if not exactly in pursuance with the Roman treaty of peace, yet under its influence into independent kingdoms; and their holders, Artaxias and Zariadris, became founders of new dynasties. Cappadocia Bithynia
Antiochus the Great, the natural ally of Philip, had, after the decisive victory of the Egyptians at Raphia in 537, to deem himself fortunate in obtaining peace from the indolent Philopator on the basis of the -status quo ante-. The rivalry of the Lagidae and the constant apprehension of a renewed outbreak of the war on the one hand, and insurrections of pretenders in the interior and enterprises of all sorts in Asia Minor, Bactria, and the eastern satrapies on the other, prevented him from joining that great anti-Roman alliance which Hannibal had in view.
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