indications of this continuity in the case of a number of the Armenian princely houses of the Arsacid and following periods (91). Third, one of Tigranes's princely vassals is called strategos by Appian (92). Now this word may have meant simply a general On the other hand, it had acquired in the late Seleucid period a definite institutional significance. The Achaemenian and the Seleucid satrap tended to be rather a civil official, with the military affairs of the satrapy placed, in the Seleucid realm, occasionally in the hands of a strategus (93). The latter, in the course of the third century B.C. and especially under Antiochus III, tended to replace altogether the satrap in the Seleucid empire and particularly in Asia Minor, becoming thus a military governor entrusted with some civil functions (94) As a matter of fact, Artaxias of Greater Armenia and Zariadris of Sophene were Seleucid strategi, not satraps (95). And this office the Artaxiad Kings of Armenia appear to have borrowed, exactly as the other succession States of the Seleucid Monarchy borrowed it (96). It could, in this connexion, be suggested that the institution of the four vitaxae was somewhat influenced by the pattern of the (three) Seleucid viceroys controlling the satraps and the strategi (97). Their being four in number testifies to the cosmocratic character of the Armenian Monarchy, symbolizing, as they obviously did, the Four Quarters of the World. What is especially interesting about the introduction offices of vitaxa and strategus in Armenia is the witness it bears to the appearance in the Artaxiad period, as in the Urartian, of feudalistic features in a dynaticist federation. These features manifest the tendency of the Crown--which was to become fully revealed in the Arsacid period--to enhance its control of the sub-kings by connecting their sovereign rights with some form of service to itself. Thus the words of the elder Pliny, which professor Adontz interpreted as referring to the Arsacid period, may likewise apply to the Artaxiads: -- 'dividitur [Armenia], quod certum est, in praefecturas, quas strategias vocant, quasdam ex his vel singula regna quondam, barbaris nominibus cxx' (98). Whether this arrangement arrangement was consciously based by the Artaxiad house on the Urartian pattern is impossible to ascertain; but there can be no