The native Persians, in the earliest and very limited
import of that name, were a poor and hardy race of mountaineers. So were
the men of Macedon; and neither one tribe nor the other found any adequate
resistance in the luxurious occupants of Babylonia. We may add, with
respect to these two earliest monarchies, that the Assyrian was undefined
with regard to space, and the Persian fugitive with regard to time. But
for the third--the Grecian or Macedonian--we know that the arts of
civility, and of civil organization, had made great progress before the
Roman strength was measured against it. In Macedon, in Achaia, in Syria,
in Asia Minor, in Egypt,--every where the members of this empire had begun
to knit; the cohesion was far closer, the development of their resources
more complete; the resistance therefore by many hundred degrees more
formidable: consequently, by the fairest inference, the power in that
proportion greater which laid the foundations of this last great monarchy.
It is probable, indeed, both _a priori_, and upon the evidence of various
facts which have survived, that each of the four great empires
successively triumphed over an antagonist, barbarous in comparison of
itself, and each _by_ and through that very superiority in the arts and
policy of civilization.
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