Part 13
That it did not even get started was partly due to Ptolemy, who, impelled by the magnitude of his danger, took the desperate step of adding many natives to his army; and partly due to Demetrius, who, despite his numerical inferiority, his instructions, and the judgment of his staff officers, risked a pitched battle at Gaza, and was decisively defeated. That the project could never again be renewed on similarly advantageous terms was due to Seleucus, the son of Antiochus. For taking a thousand men with him this accomplished officer, old in service though still young in years, set out straightway after the battle of Gaza for Babylon, his own satrapy, whence he had fled to Egypt for fear of Antigonus four years earlier. Ten years afterwards, in 302 B.C., when Antigonus again proceeded to conquer Macedon and Thrace, after having beaten Ptolemy back into Egypt, his great aim was frustrated, not only because the king of Thrace, Lysimachus, outmanoeuvred him by getting an army across into Asia Minor, but also because Seleucus, now master of all the territory in the rear of Antigonus between the Euphrates and the frontiers of India, threw the decisive weight of his new army into the scale, and joined Lysimachus in crushing their common enemy at the great battle of Ipsus in 301 B.C.
Thereby Seleucus advanced his western frontier from the Euphrates to the edge of the Mediterranean, shifted his capital from Babylon to newly founded Antioch, and brought his empire into immediate proximity with the districts whence alone Greek and Macedonian immigrants could come. The Seleucids dated the founding of their dynasty from the return of Seleucus to Babylon in 312 B.C. There is, however, much to be said for the view that their empire was first established after the battle of Ipsus.
For the next twenty years (301-281 B.C.) Seleucus had the great good fortune to remain in secure possession of the vast territory which called him king; and while he failed to pass on to his descendants all the fruits of his crowning victory over Lysimachus at Corupedion in 282 B.C., he left to his son Antiochus I, surnamed Soter, or the Savior, and he in turn about twenty years later, to _his_ son Antiochus II, surnamed Theos, or the God, the fabric of their dominions, somewhat tattered at the edges, to be sure, but otherwise whole.
The evil genius of the Seleucid empire during the century when it was a great power was a woman--Laodice, the wife of Antiochus II and mother of his successor, Seleucus II, surnamed Callinicus, or the Glorious Victor (246-226 B.C.). Her power as queen is attested by other evidences, and also by the fact that she was associated with the king in the worship accorded by the satrapies of the realm to their rulers, every satrapy being required by Theos to establish a chief-priesthood in her especial honor.[102] None the less, she had to yield her place to Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy Philadelphus, when that crafty monarch seduced her husband from his alliance with Macedon by giving to him along with his daughter a prodigious dowry and extensive territorial concessions (249 B.C.). She retired to Asia Minor, where she owned large estates secured in earlier days at the expense of the royal domain, and where she could live in almost regal state. For the death of her former husband, which occurred three years later, she was probably not responsible,--though rumor held her guilty,--since Theos had already, on his deathbed apparently, and for reasons of sound dynastic policy, designated her oldest son, then a "youth nearing manhood," as his successor, to the exclusion of the boy with whom his Egyptian queen had recently presented him. Nor is she to be condemned harshly for having had her rival and her son's rival put out of the way; for she acted not only in self-defense, but also to save the Seleucid empire from becoming simply an appanage of Egypt during the long minority of Berenice's child. For conducting to a successful termination, despite initial disasters, the campaign against Ptolemy III, by which she put her son in possession of his throne, she is deserving of high credit. It was when this was accomplished, and her son was king, that her ambition led her into maternal and political crime; for, in order to retain the government, which her oldest son, now arrived at years of discretion, threatened to take from her, she set up against him her younger son Antiochus, surnamed the Hawk, for whom she got the administration of Asia Minor. The Seleucids became thereby divided against themselves, and for twenty years (242-223 B.C.) they were so weakened by a dynastic feud that they not only neglected vital questions of foreign policy, but had to permit the total loss of certain frontier satrapies and the rebellion of almost all the rest. Antiochus III, surnamed the Great, opened his reign with an error--the attempt to deal with the foreign situation before he had put his house in order; and he ended it with a great disaster--his irreparable defeat by the Romans at Magnesia in 190 B.C.; but in between he restored his authority over what Bevan in his _House of Seleucus_ calls "the essential body of the Empire" and his suzerainty over its "outside sphere." The latter he accomplished by an impressive campaign, in Armenia (where ruled Xerxes, betrayed by his name as an Iranian), in Parthia (where Arsaces, the third king of a barbarian line from the Turanian desert, which had mastered that country a little less than forty years before, had just come to the throne), in Bactria (where Euthydemus, a Greek from Magnesia, had recently founded a new Hellenic dynasty in the place of an old one established nearly fifty years earlier by Diodotus, "lord of the thousand Bactrian cities," as he is called), and in India, where a certain Sophragasenus, following the examples of Arsaces and Euthydemus, recognized the superior power of the Seleucid.
On his return to Antioch after five years of marching and fighting in the Far East (210-205 B.C.), Antiochus wrested Palestine from the now feeble grasp of the Ptolemies. This exploit gave him the long-desired, long-lacked, and long-fought-for access to the sea; and for the first time in the history of the realm an opportunity was secured for the construction of a great fleet. Simultaneously, Philip of Macedon fell before the Romans at Cynocephalæ (197 B.C.); whereupon Antiochus went vigorously to work dislodging all "foreigners" from the Mediterranean seaboard of Asia Minor. This led in 192 B.C. to conflict with Rome.
Antiochus the Great has been late in coming into his due.[103] The mere fact that Hannibal, whom the undying hatred of Rome had driven into his service, worked out for him a plan of campaign against the Romans which he rejected, and that he put the greatest general of his age in charge of a new squadron of his extemporized fleet, have sufficed to rule out of court in advance any apology for his defeat. The issue showed that the view taken by Hannibal of the power of Rome was right. It is true that it could have been checked only by a great combination of all the Mediterranean states. But it is equally true that such a combination was impracticable. Antiochus had to deal with the situation as he found it. He risked too much for a few frontier districts and a possible hegemony in Greece. But he seems to have greatly underestimated the power of Rome, and to have credited the Senate with far less energy and tenacity of purpose than it actually possessed. Once his vanguard was thrown out of Greece by the incomparable Roman legions, his main hope of defending Asia Minor did actually rest with his fleet. Hannibal was, accordingly, in the right place. But the fleet was too new and too weak as well as too scattered to hold the Romans in Europe; and, once the veterans of the Second Punic War were across the Hellespont, no army in Asia could have resisted them.
The Seleucids learned a terrible lesson on the battle-fields of Thermopylæ and Magnesia: the fatality was that all the peoples in Asia learned it also. That Antiochus the Great consented to surrender all his possessions in Asia Minor and to pay to the Romans an indemnity of one thousand talents a year for twelve years; to hand over his battleships and to limit his fleet to ten decked vessels and a few small craft; to give up all his war elephants and to keep no others in the future; to take no Italians into his service as mercenaries, and to throw open his empire to the merchants and traders from Rhodes, proclaimed only too clearly to the Orientals that the days of the lordship of the Macedonians in the world were past.
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It was not, however, till after the untimely death of his son, Antiochus IV, surnamed Epiphanes, or the "God Manifest," in 164 B.C. that the storm broke in all its fury. The forces then set in motion for the destruction of the Seleucid empire were of two kinds, external and internal. Of the external forces we have already considered one--the advance of the Roman power toward the East. The Roman Senate had at this time only one concern in its dealings with Syria, namely, to make the Seleucids harmless. This it accomplished in a variety of ways. Immediately after the death of Antiochus IV, it sent commissioners into Syria who executed an unenforced article of the treaty struck after the battle of Magnesia: they burnt the Seleucid battleships found in the cities of Phoenicia and hamstrung the war elephants which they discovered in the royal arsenals. By jealously restricting the military establishment of the Seleucids the Senate broke their power in all respects. Not content, however, with binding the feet of its victim, the Senate held out an encouraging hand to all rebels against his authority. A case in point is that of the Jews. Again and again, between 164 and 120 B.C., Judas and Jonathan Maccabæus and Hyrcanus I sought and obtained Roman recognition in their struggle against their overlords. They had national causes for their repeated outbreaks and religious stimuli to resist desperately, but it is doubtful whether they could have carried their war of independence to a successful termination without the assurance that Rome sympathized with their enterprise. The Senate helped on the disruption of the Seleucid realm by still another unfriendly act: it joined with Pergamum and Egypt in lighting the fire of dynastic war in Syria in 153 B.C. and in adding fuel to it from time to time thereafter, with the result that the realm was devastated by civil war almost continuously from that date till the end of the dynasty, ninety years later. Then, the blackened hulk, manned by a mutinous crew, lay helpless in a sea infested with pirates, when Pompey picked it up and towed it into a Roman harbor.
The other external force which contributed to this inglorious end of a voyage begun with such fair promise was set in motion from the Farthest East. I do not reckon it in this account that the Parthians again rebelled and in 140 B.C. advanced their western frontier to the Euphrates, thus forming the philhellen kingdom of west Iran which grew behind the breastwork of the Seleucid empire to such power that later it disputed with some success Rome's claim to suzerainty in Asia. Nor do I enter it here that Armenia established its complete independence, and under Tigranes the Great annexed for a time (83-69 B.C.) all of the Seleucid realm then remaining. For these are internal movements analogous to the insurrection of the Jews. It was from the banks of the Hoang-Ho that an advance toward the west occurred in the early part of the second century B.C. which may be paralleled with the simultaneous advance eastward of the Roman power from the banks of the Tiber.[104] The oncoming Eastern assailant was the conglomerate of Indo-European peoples whom the Chinese call the Yue Tchi. They came along the edges of the great desert of shifting sand in Eastern Turkestan down which flows the mouthless Tarim River, not with the _élan_ of conquerors, but retreating slowly before the superior strength of the Huns (Hioung Nou), their former subjects, with whom they had recently fought an unsuccessful war for the possession of North China. It was against their conquerors, we may remark in passing, that the Chinese emperors, Chi-Houang-ti and Wou-ti of the Ts'in and Han Dynasties respectively, constructed in the third and second centuries B.C., to the south of the Desert of Gobi, the great Chinese _Limes_, or Wall. In 159 B.C. the Yue Tchi occupied Sogdiana. Twenty years later (139 B.C.) they crushed the Greek kingdom of Bactria; so that in this general region it was only in India, in the vast district drained by the Indus River, that Greek kingdoms existed thereafter. Somewhere near the opening of the Christian era these, too, succumbed to the Yue Tchi, now properly designated Indo-Scythians by the Greeks. For several centuries the Indo-Scythians, like the Huns who followed them in the fifth century of our era, and the Turks who followed the Huns in the sixth, kept open the trade routes along which they had themselves advanced when driven westward from the Hoang-Ho. Their successors transmitted to the frontiers of China Manichæism, the cosmopolitan religion of Iran: _they_ did a greater work. They not only forwarded Buddhism to the Chinese; but before it, and with it, the pure as well as the debased art of Greece. Among the priceless treasures which Dr. Stein has brought back from the desert cities of Cathay, none are more remarkable than certain clay seals attached to documents of the third century of our era, found at Niya in a district then under Chinese control;[105] for one of them might have been made for Diodotus, the first Greek king of Bactria, while on others appears Athena Alcis, the haughty, helmeted, _promachus_ Athena, hurling the thunderbolt, whom the Antigonid kings of Macedon and the Greek kings of India had put on their coins.[106] Not without some reason, therefore, is the view now being advanced that the art of China and Japan is derived, like that of Europe and America, from Greek sources.[107] It is an amazing spectacle to observe how Hellenistic civilization flowed simultaneously back the channels to the springs in Italy and China whence came the floods which overwhelmed the Seleucid empire.
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After this rapid survey of the political history of the Seleucids, I wish to devote the remainder of this chapter to considering the domestic policy of the dynasty. I shall point out that Seleucus and his successors continued Alexander the Great's work of founding city-states in Asia, and that, having to deal with priestly communities and feudal lords as well as with the occupants of the widespread royal domains, they refused to exempt from their direct control any lands not placed under the jurisdiction of a city-state. I shall discuss briefly the internal structure of the city-states and more at length their relation in theory and fact to the monarch. This will finally bring up for examination the policy of Antiochus IV, in whose reign the internal as well as the external development of the Seleucid empire culminated.
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Seleucus had been advanced to high position in Alexander's service after Alexander had disclosed his purpose of fusing the Macedonians, Greeks, and Iranians into a new cosmopolitan race. The promotion obtained by him during the course of the bitter struggle which this policy occasioned suggests that he made Alexander's point of view his own. This surmise as to the attitude of Seleucus is confirmed by the fact that he took his place, after Alexander's death, with those who upheld the cause of Alexander's family, and left it for his Babylonian satrapy only when it became clear that to remain meant to perish without accomplishing anything.
Seleucus was the only one of the great Macedonian captains who did not take Alexander's death as a license to discard their Iranian wives. The Bactrian maiden assigned to him at the great Susian marriage--Apama, daughter of Spitamenes--became his queen and the mother of his heir, Antiochus. The Seleucid dynasty was, accordingly, half Iranian from the start; and for the policy which it inherited from Antigonus and Alexander, and which it prosecuted vigorously till the death of Antiochus IV in 164 B.C., namely, the Hellenization of Asia, it had as warrant the practice of its idealized founder.
Of the Greek cities which Seleucus planted in his realm, fifty-nine are named by Appian.[108] They lay especially in Syria, in the district between the Euphrates and the sea which he sought to make a second Macedonia. His son Antiochus, to whom he gave the administration of the eastern satrapies in 293 B.C., was particularly active in developing cities on the Greek model in that region; and to him and his son Antiochus Theos belongs the honor of establishing the urban habits of Hellenic life in the interior of Asia Minor. In the arm of their realm which reached through this peninsula to the rear of the Greek strip on the Anatolian coast, new cities sprang up under their auspices by the score. Nor did the movement come to an end with the reign of the second Antiochus in 246 B.C., though it probably weakened at that time. Over two generations later, in the reign of Antiochus IV, it was again resumed actively and directed especially into Palestine, which had been newly added to the realm.
The most striking feature in the internal policy of the Seleucids is the attempted transfer into Asia of the urban form of life theretofore characteristic of Hellas. Evidently, these monarchs believed with Aristotle, Alexander, and, we may add, Polybius, and, indeed, all Greeks, that men who did not live in cities were uncivilized men. Evidently, too, they thought it wise and possible to civilize their dominions.
It is not easy to form a definite impression of the political situation in the Seleucid realm when the Macedonians first took possession, but cities in the Greek sense seem to have been entirely absent. This does not mean that towns were lacking altogether, since, even if we disregard administrative centres like Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, Persepolis, we may use the term "town" properly of places like Bambyce in Syria, fourteen miles west of the Euphrates. There, in a fertile, well-watered valley, stood a famous temple of Atargatis, the Syrian goddess. It was a wonderful establishment, as readers of Lucian know, with its wide approaches, its obelisk-like _phalli_, its sacred fish-pond, its shocking rites. At its head were emasculated priests, who not only conducted the ceremonies and directed a far-reaching proselytism, but also governed the community of temple slaves (_hieroduli_) who tilled the land of the neighborhood for their own support and that of the church. This clerical form of local organization had been carefully fostered by the Persians. We all know how in reorganizing Judæa they put the common people, who were there simply to pay tithes, under the control of the high priest, elders, and Levites, and made the so-called law of Moses the civil law of the land. They proceeded in similar fashion throughout Asia Minor. There Seleucus found scores of towns, big and little, to which the description, given by Strabo[109] of the sacred city of Ma at Comana in Cappadocia, is applicable: "In itself it is," he says, "a notable city, but most of its inhabitants are god-possessed, or temple slaves. They are all of Cataonian stock and are subject generally to the authority of the king, but are under the immediate control of the priest. He is lord at once of the temple and of the temple slaves, of whom there were more than six thousand, including men and women, at the time of my visit. Attached to the temple is much land, of which the priest enjoys the revenues, and there is no one in Cappadocia of higher dignity than he except the king." Similar to this was the temple of Zeus at Venasa with its three thousand temple slaves and its land which yielded to its priest an annual income of twenty thousand dollars (fifteen talents); the temple of Zeus Asbamæus near Tyana, of Apollo in Cataonia, Mater Zizimene near Iconium, and Artemis Perasia in Castabala. Similar, too, was the temple of Ma in Pontic Comana with its swarming mart, its wide acres, and its six thousand temple slaves, of whom the young women, here as elsewhere, were sacred prostitutes; the temple of Anaitis in Zela, of Men in Cabira, of Selene in Iberia, of the Great Mother at Pessinus, of Zeus at Olba, and of other gods in other places scattered through Phrygia, Pisidia, and Lydia, as well as Palestine, Syria, and Babylonia. The Seleucids must have found the body of their empire thickly studded with religious communities, each subject to its own code of divine law, each dominated by a masterful and long-petted theocracy. Under this baleful rule the whole country had settled gradually down during the Persian time in progressive political and economic stagnation.
Apart from the mountains and the deserts, where tribal and nomadic liberty reigned,--a constant menace to central government,--the peoples of Asia lived in villages when the Macedonians came. Many of these villages, villagers and all, were owned by princelings and noblemen, who, if natives, had been undisturbed by the Persians, if Iranians, had come into their possessions by reason of royal grants. All through Syria and Asia Minor may be seen to-day the ruins of "square towers" (_tetrapyrgiæ_) and manorial castles such as these grandees built and fortified for defense against their neighbors and, if need be, against the royal authority itself.[110] Those who built them had apparently had little loyalty to the Persian king, but also little inclination to obey his successor. They were, accordingly, ejected right and left. Of the estates thus obtained, the Macedonian kings could dispose at their pleasure. They formed again part of the royal domain, which stretched in all directions at the edges of the deserts and the mountains, among the temple lands, the feudal fiefs, and administrative cities--a veritable archipelago of landed property, tilled for the crown by myriads of royal serfs. Here was the ὑλη the material, of which the Seleucids founded many of their city-states.
The handle for reorganization which the priestly towns offered to the new government was often the non-ecclesiastical part of the population. That the temple was regularly the centre of local trade and the scene of a recurrent bazaar tempted to its proximity money-changers and the like. When the Greek immigration began this element was naturally strengthened. It was, therefore, possible for the Seleucids to give it an urban organization--a general assembly, a council, and magistrates; and in this way to create a new city-state.