tive. For, after Rome's advent to the Eastern Mediterranean in entering upon Alexanders inheritance, and after Iran's withdrawal from the world of Hellenism, the Caucasian States were, perpetually subjected to two rival aggressions, from the east and from the west, and were constrained perpetually to waver between Iran, on the one hand, and Rome and, then, Byzantium, on the other.

The immediate effects of the change wrought by Alexander were also of no small moment for Caucasia, economically, socially, and politically. The exclusively agricultural economy and rura1 existence of Achaemenian Caucasia--money made its appearance there only at the end of the Achaemenian period--were rather suddenly altered. Caucasia, and especially Armenia, found itself in close proximity to a number of Hellenistic countries and thus open to new influences both cultural and economic. An important overland route of transit trade, connecting China, India, and Central Asia with the Mediterranean world, passed through Armenia and Colchis, and also through Iberia and, possibly, Albania; great cities arose along that route--Armavira, Artaxata, Phasis--which were at the same time homes of foreign merchants and centres of diffusion of Hellenism (78). A money economy made, thus, quite forcefully its appearance. This speeding up of the economic development brought about the disintegration of Caucasia's tribal-patriarchal society at its non-dynastic levels. Exactly as the passing from the tribe to the people-state, on the one hand, and the conditions of the Heroic Age, on the other, had emancipated the dynastic group from the tribal ways and helped its crystallization as a social class, so now the new economic and cultural factors spelt the freeing of the lower social layers from these ways and the crystallization of new social stratifications among them.