230 Oiitlijies of European History head of each. In Europe, Macedonia is in the hands of Antig- onus, who endeavors to maintain control of Greece ; in Asia we find the territory of the former Persian Empire under the rule of Seleucus ; while in Africa, Egypt, a clearly demarked region by itself, is held by Ptolemy. But the boundaries between these states were not constant. Ptolemy found it impossible to maintain his power with native Egyptian troops. He was obliged constantly to draw upon Greece. He made his capital Alexandria the greatest port on the Mediterranean. With statesmanlike judgment he built up a fleet which gave him the mastery of the Mediterranean, with the control of Cyprus and the Phoenician ports, the ^gean and parts ot southern Greece, and at times also of various points along the coasts of Asia Minor. Indeed, for a century (roughly the third century e.g.) the eastern Mediterranean was an Egyptian sea. To make his frontier toward Asia safer against his Asiatic rival he finally took possession of Palestine and southern Syria. Such an aggressive policy maintained the power of the Ptolemies for over a hundred years. But after 200 B.C. they allowed their navy to decay and their army to decline. Then Egypt became the cat's-paw of Rome. In Asia the Seleucids-^ selected the northeast comer of the Mediterranean as their home, and here they endeavored to build up another Macedonia in the valley of the lower Orontes and the plain between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. Here they founded the great city of Antioch as their capital. Without the hardy peasantry of the Macedonian homeland, from which to recruit their armies, the Seleucids found it almost impossible to hold together their vast empire of western Asia. Forced out of Asia Minor by the Romans, they lost also much of their east- ern territory at the hands of the Parthians, kinsmen of the Per- sians, who energetically pushed their boundary westward even to the Euphrates. As a result there arose on the east of the Seleucid empire a new Persian state which not even the power ^ The descendants of Seleucus.
