CHAPTER X

ANTIOCHUS THE MANIFEST GOD

“And there arose from them [the companions of Alexander] a root of sin, to wit, Antiochus Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus, he who had been hostage in Rome.” That to the writer of I Maccabees is a complete characterization of the king whose reign was to be of fateful consequences to the Jews, a ῥίζα ἁμαρτωλός, an ill sapling of a noble tree. Perhaps the writer had in mind the שרש פרה ראש ולענה (Deut. xxix. 17), “a root bearing gall and wormwood.” And he had been a hostage in Rome; a man, that is, of no usual character and no usual career.

Except in this general way, he can scarcely be said to have a personality at all to the writers of the Books of Maccabees. He is merely the type of tyrant, proud and presumptuous, unduly exalting himself above God because of his vain and transitory successes, and dying in agony, after an edifying deathbed repentance. No more than the Nebuchadnezzar of the Book of Daniel, is he anything other than an instrument of the wrath of God. It is hard to believe that there was any real feeling on the writer’s part.

But Antiochus had a real personality and an especially interesting one. Both in modern and in ancient times characterization of this strange figure has been attempted, and the verdicts have been so widely different that the summary may be given in Livy’s words: _Uti nec sibi nec aliis, quinam homo esset, satis constaret_, “So that neither he himself nor anyone else could clearly state what manner of man he was.”

The freakish outbursts, which amazed and scandalized his contemporaries, amply justified the common parody of his title Epiphanes by Epimanes, “the madman.”[126] Some there were—perhaps his royal nephew and biographer, Ptolemy of Egypt, among them—who regarded him as unqualifiedly demented.[127] It is likely enough, if the stories about him are even partly true, that he had periods of real derangement. But it seems evident that he was a right royal personage, of unusual charm of manner, of undoubted military capacity, quick and decisive in action, fostering a dream of empire whose rude shattering must have been an important contributing cause to his death.

His was a strange blend. Various epochs met in him, and it is not surprising that many incongruities resulted from that fact. First of all he was in every sense a Macedonian despot. Macedonians had always been accustomed to the concentration of supreme power in the hands of a single individual. For four or five generations Antiochus’ immediate ancestors had wielded such power over a rabble of nations stretching from the Aegean to the frontiers of India.[128] The emotional reactions which the existence and the possession of this power must have, were present in him. One constant result of it, the absence of any real social life, is an especially fertile source of deterioration, but the worst effects are noticed chiefly in those born to the purple. Antiochus’ exile saved him from them. Yet nothing could save him from the consciousness that he might, if he chose, gratify every whim, and yield to every impulse, and his associates found quickly enough that his _bonhomie_ and engaging simplicity were moods, which might be succeeded by bursts of quite incalculable and murderous rage.

There was the additional fact that the monarchy founded by Alexander was in legal contemplation the reign of a god made flesh. Seleucus, we may remember, entered almost at once into the titularies of Sumer and Akkad.[129] The second Antiochus was styled “the God,” Θεός, _tout simple_. Our Antiochus called himself Epiphanes—which, it need scarcely be said, is to be translated “the Manifest Deity,” and not “the Illustrious.”[130] And, at any rate at certain moments, the designation was doubtless a real one to him and not a conscious pose. Worship of the king, the foundation of the later Augustus-cult, was an apparent unifying element in the hopeless jumble of gods and rituals. For that purpose it might be encouraged even by hard-headed peasants like Vespasian, or philosophers like Marcus, who had no illusions about the character of their divinity. But that Alexander in all sincerity believed himself to be god can scarcely be questioned, and Epiphanes may often have similarly impressed himself.

Secondly, he was a Greek. Hellenism was to him a real and profound enthusiasm. His early life as a Roman hostage must have immensely stimulated this side of his character. At Rome his associates were the Scipionic circle, to whom Greek culture had come as a revelation. The distinguished Roman families with whom the young prince lived read Greek, spoke Greek, discussed Greek, and were eager to act as the interpreters of Hellenism to their slower-witted countrymen. In these surroundings anyone boasting not only Greek but regal blood must have found his racial self-esteem flattered to an extraordinary degree. Antiochus’ first act on his release was to betake himself to the intellectual capital of Greece, to Athens, in whose citizenry he eagerly enrolled himself. In fact, he was an Athenian magistrate—στρατηγὸς ἐπὶ τὰ ὅπλα[131]—when news came to him of the assassination of his brother Seleucus and of the opportunities waiting one who could act quickly.

When he was king, so much of his policy as did not look to the aggrandizement of his empire was directed to the rehabilitation of Greek cities and temples. Megalopolis, Tegea in Arcadia, Delos, Rhodes, were the beneficiaries of his Philhellenic enthusiasm. The truckling Samaritans—at least the Hellenizing party among them—knew that nothing would make a quicker appeal to him than to rename the sanctuary on Gerizim in honor of Zeus Hellenius.[132] He would probably have found it difficult to understand that anyone could seriously maintain the claims of any other culture against that of the Greeks, and no doubt received as a matter of course the representations of the Jewish Hellenizers that a little impetus would greatly expedite the Hellenizing process in Palestine.

When we find Antiochus, king of kings, Manifest God, soliciting the suffrages of the Antiochene burghers for the office of “market-commissioner,” or of “district mayor,”[133] we are not to regard it as an eccentricity of the same sort that set him wrangling in the public squares with Hob and Dick, or pouring priceless ointments on his fellow-bathers in the public baths.[134] The maintenance of the structure of the Greek polis was an expression of Hellenic pride in a characteristically Hellenic institution. No one, to be sure, was deceived by it into thinking that Citizen Antiochus could not incontinently change into an irresponsible master at will, but, comedy as it was, it had a real significance, which did not escape even the scoffers and, least of all, the king.

Finally there was an ultra-modern side in him. Antiochus was also a cultivated gentleman, to whom skepticism was an index of education and sacrilege a concrete instance of skepticism. He lived in a very unsettling age. As has been said before, the Greek culture that found its way into Rome after the Hannibalic wars was a sophisticated, disintegrating culture, to which the ancient institutions had at best a practical utility, and which acknowledged theoretically no binding principles in the physical or moral world. It was in this culture that the young Antiochus was reared. He was not alone in it. Many of the incidents of this period show a revolting cynicism on the part of the actors. One Greek commander erected altars to “Impiety and Illegality.” A Spartan brigand called himself “Hybristas,” “the Outrager.”[135]

Indeed it was as a wanton desecrater of shrines that Antiochus gained an unenviable notoriety. His pillaging of the temple at Jerusalem was only one of a series of similar acts. At Hierapolis, as well as at many other Syrian shrines, and finally at Elymaea, he coolly appropriated the temple treasures, which in most cases involved violence on his part. But it needed his outrageous “marriage” to Diana to set the seal upon his derisive attitude toward his fellow-gods. The sober Polybius attributes his death to his impiety, a conclusion which naturally is warmly supported by Josephus.[136]

It is idle to attempt to reconcile this sort of cynicism with the pretensions to actual divinity which he probably made in all seriousness. The two are of course quite irreconcilable, and represent merely the shifting moods of a complex and slightly abnormal personality. Under almost any king such an outbreak as the Hasmonean revolt might have taken place. Perhaps the conflict was inevitable. But the form the conflict took, the high degree of religious and national enthusiasm which it evoked, and the powerful aid that enthusiasm gave to the propaganda which was preparing itself, were directly consequent upon the character of Antiochus the God Manifest. The rigor and thoroughness with which he strove to suppress the Jewish cult were characteristic of him. His indifference to sacred traditions made his violation of the temple almost a casual act on his part, his Hellenism justified his plans, and his despotic nature, raging under the humiliating rebuff he had received from Rome, found an outlet in the punishment of a disobedient province.

The writer of I Maccabees places the responsibility for the persecution by Antiochus directly upon the Jews themselves. Many, he tells, were persuaded to identify themselves wholly with the Greeks.[137] The first offense to Jewish religious sentiment did not come from the king at all. The men who waited upon Antiochus, and obtained permission to set up a gymnasium at Jerusalem, acted quite of their own volition. Antiochus’ direct action in the matter begins with his return from Egypt. “Embittered and groaning,” Polybius says, he left Egypt and returned to Syria. Now, just what happened in Judea is not quite clear. First Maccabees tells of an unprovoked pillage of the temple and a massacre of the people. Second Maccabees reports a furious struggle between the two pretenders, Menelaus and Jason, upon a rumor of the king’s death. In all likelihood the fight ended with the discomfiture of Antiochus’ appointee, Menelaus, and the king immediately proceeded to rescue him. The sack of Jerusalem and a massacre followed. No doubt the massacre was no worse than befell any captured city, since of a special policy of extermination there can as yet have been no question.

Menelaus was restored, the temple treasures were surrendered to the king, and, either directly or after an interval of two years, the programme of forcible suppression of the Jewish cult was announced.

It is for this programme that an adequate explanation is wanting. There is nothing really quite like it in Greek history. Not that religious persecution, or the suppression of an obnoxious cult, was an unheard-of undertaking. The establishment of the worship of Dionysus had encountered vigorous opposition in continental Greece. A probable tradition recounts the attempts at thorough repression with which several Greek communities, notably Thebes, met the intruder.[138] But this movement had as its object the preservation of an ancestral religion, not its destruction. To compel anyone to abjure his national customs, to forsake τὰ πάτρια, must have seemed monstrous to all people in whom the sense of kinship with the deity, and the belief in the god’s local jurisdiction, were as strong as they were among the Greeks.

Somewhat later, among the Romans, a successful attempt was made to extirpate the Druidic ritual in Cisalpine Gaul. As far as this was an effort to destroy root and branch an ancient and established form of worship, it presents many analogies to the project of Antiochus. But the persecution of the Druids was based on specific charges of immoral and anti-social practices associated with their ritual, especially that of human sacrifices. That may have been a pretext. The Druids may not after all have been guilty of these enormities. However, the pretext was at least advanced, and the exile of Druidic brotherhoods and the destruction of their sanctuaries were publicly justified only by that.[139]

In the case of the Jews no such assertions are to be discovered. Antiochus, instigated by renegade Jews, sets about a systematic obliteration of the distinctively Jewish ritual. The synagogue services were to be checked by the destruction of the Torah. Perhaps periodic reunions in the synagogue were forbidden altogether, since meetings of citizens were proverbially looked at askance in monarchies.[140] The temple was rededicated to the Olympian Zeus, and the ceremony of circumcision was made a capital offense. Observance of the Sabbath was construed as treason. No detail was overlooked.

This complete scheme is not to be explained by the existence of a strong animosity toward the Jews. There is, in the first place, none of the evidence that was met with in Egypt, that such animosity existed. And, secondly, animosity between racial groups expressed itself in bloody riots, not in a carefully prepared plan for extirpating a religion while sparing its professors. Nor can we find in the personal character of Antiochus a sufficient cause for the persecution. He undoubtedly exhibited the gusts of passion common enough among those who wield irresponsible power, but the sustained and bloody vindictiveness of such a programme is a very different thing.

It has been frequently suggested that his cherished policy was the thorough Hellenization of his empire, that among the Jews only was there a determined resistance, that upon learning that the basis of their resistance was a devoted attachment to their ancestral superstition, he determined to root out the latter. The difficulties with this view are, first, that opposition was not confined to the Jews, but was met with everywhere—a dull and voiceless opposition, which, however, unmistakably existed. Secondly, among the Jews a very large number, we are told, “were persuaded”; and it is highly likely that Antiochus came in direct contact wholly with the latter, or almost wholly, so that the situation in Judea cannot have impressed him as radically different from that of Syria or Babylonia.

But, above all, it is the conclusion that the obstacles to his policy would lead to persecution on his part, which is more than doubtful. No one could have known better than he did himself that ancestral religious customs are not to be eradicated by violence. The Egypt which was so nearly in his grasp might have taught him that, if nothing else could. There the indigenous religion had triumphed. He himself, upon his entry into the kingdom, had crowned himself _more Aegyptico_, “after the Egyptian fashion,”[141] that is, with full acknowledgment of the sovereignty of Ptah and Isis over their ancient demesnes.

We shall probably have to look to the Hellenizing Jews not only for the initiation, but for the systematic carrying out, of the policy of persecution. And, as has been suggested, it is one of the commonest phenomena of ancient life. There was scarcely a Greek city in which a defeated faction had not at some time summoned the public enemy into the city, and by their aid taken a cruel vengeance on their opponents. If the Hellenizing faction in Judea found its influence waning, its action was from the point of view of ancient times natural enough. It appealed to foreign aid and strove systematically to stamp out the institutions it opposed, just as at Athens the Athenian oligarchs, placed in power by Spartan arms, tried to maintain themselves by wholesale proscription and by systematically removing all the democratic institutions that had developed since Clearchus.[142]

It is likely too that the impelling motive was not solely the rancor which apostates feel for the faith or nation they have quitted. They saw themselves in the presence of a real danger. Among them was to be found most of the wealth of the community, and no doubt a great deal of the intellectual culture. Many of them were already in the third or fourth generation of Hellenistic Jews. The ancient ritual had for these men no personal associations whatever. In the various communes they enjoyed the position which wealth necessarily, and in those days especially, brought. That there was any virtue in poverty or privation in themselves had not yet been preached to the world, and would have seemed a wild paradox; and although the vanity of wealth without wisdom was a philosophic truism, ordinary wits would not always trust themselves to make the distinction.

When these men, who formed almost a hereditary nobility, and already cherished a superb aloofness from the mass, felt their influence and power challenged, perhaps saw themselves outvoted in the governing councils of the synagogues and communes, and the foundations of their petty glory sapped, they were roused to a counter-effort, of which the results have been indicated. The danger in which they found themselves came from the Hasidim, the group of brotherhoods that made a conscious opposition to Hellenism their bond of union. In Egypt the opposition had found its organs in the caste-like corporations of priests. In Judea the organs had to be created. And that they were successful, the words of I Maccabees testify. They contained the leaders of the nation; their position was already one of dominating influence.

It is unnecessary to detail the course of the Hasmonean revolt. Even the brilliant successes of Judas in the field, and the less splendid but equally solid triumphs of his brothers, would have had fewer political consequences than they had except for the chaos in the Seleucid succession. But of the permanent triumph of the movement there was never any doubt. If the revolt had ended with the death of Judas, the discomfiture of the Hellenists would have been complete. No Macedonian king would ever be tempted to provoke another revolt by a similar project. It could never be a part of a sane ruler’s policy to sacrifice valuable military material in order to gratify a local faction. And it must never be forgotten that the Greek rule of the Syrian kingdom was the domination of a military class. Every diminution of the army was a dead loss.

The suggestion may be hazarded that not merely the Hellenistic Jews, but also the Greeks themselves, viewed the progress of the Hasidim with real alarm. We are far as yet from the epoch of real propaganda, but to some extent it may already have begun. Where and when we can only speculate. Perhaps the fervor of Hasidic preaching had touched non-Jewish Syrians; perhaps some of the younger men of the Hellenists “relapsed” under Hasidic stimulation into Judaism. However the case may be, Greeks of influence may have noted that the Grecizing of Coele-Syria was not merely hindered by obstacles in Judea, but that the Judaizing of portions already won was a possibility that was attaining a constantly greater vividness. If this was the case, the persecution by Antiochus was a precaution, insensate and futile, but less at variance with Greek methods than it seems in the usual interpretation of the facts we know.