the Greek language and Greek ideas. From his time Hellenism in Asia becomes a factor to be counted. He and the generals who divided his Empire after his death spoke, of course, Greek. Their courts were outposts of Hellenism in the midst of barbarians. But they did not Hellenize all their subjects. The native populations went on, after another change of masters, much as before. Through all Eastern history, behind the battles and triumphs, behind intrigues at court, embassies, alliances, treachery, you see dimly a vast patient crowd, silent and unchanging while kings clamour and fight. These are the great mass of the people. You figure them like flocks of sheep, driven by first one shepherd and then another, harried by taxes, forced to build palaces and serve in armies against other flocks (against whom they have no quarrel); yet all the time keeping their own languages, customs, religions, not really changed at all by the fact that, after half their villages have been burned, their men murdered and their women ravished, they have to pay taxes to a tyrant in the far West instead of to one in the far East. Provinces are handed to and fro; on our maps we colour vast districts red or green or yellow, according as they form part of Assyria, Persia, or Rome. They do not care. They lead their unknown life, follow their own immemorial customs, while far above over their heads empires crash together and shatter. To a child of the people the only law is the custom of his tribe, the only authority the village headman and village priest. What does it matter to him whether the booty torn from his people's fields is sent West to Rome or East to Persia; whether the soldiers he eyes with terror as they plunder his home, march under the eagles of Rome or the equally strange standard of the Great King? Admirably is all this expressed by the Arabic name for subject races, rayah.[1] We must understand this, because most of all in the East political divisions are no clue to race. The people we have to study are not Assyrians, nor Greeks, nor Persians, Egyptians, Romans. They have been bandied about between all these powers. All the time they remain just the same Semitic Syriac-speaking native population of Mesopotamia and Eastern Syria. Nearer than that one cannot go in defining their race. Practically a real bond is their language;
- ↑ Ra‘iyah, pl. ra‘āiā, a flock, from ra‘a, pascere.
