THE SELEUCID EMPIRE

The main portion of the conquests made by Alexander the Great lay in the continent of Asia. On the establishment of the regency this vast district had been divided among over twenty satraps. Ten years afterwards, in the fall of 313 B.C., one of these, Antigonus, known in history as Monophthalmus, or the "One-eyed," had now held for two years all the territory that lay between the fan-shaped offshoots of the Himalaya Mountains and the sea. The whole Asiatic coast of the Mediterranean from the Hellespont to Gaza on the Egyptian frontier was in his possession. His fleet ruled the sea.

The spring of 312 B.C. was one of the most critical moments in ancient history. In Antigonus the man seemed come with the will, ability, and power to take the place of Alexander. By his side stood a son of remarkable attractiveness and brilliancy, Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, or "Taker-of-Cities"; so that a dynasty seemed assured.

The work to be done was plainly indicated and preparations for its accomplishment were already completed. After having stirred up an insurrection in Greece in the preceding year, the fleet of Antigonus had joined his main army which was massed at the Hellespont in readiness to cross into Europe for the conquest of Thrace and Macedon. In this district Antigonus conducted operations in person. His son Demetrius was stationed with a minor army in Palestine with instructions to avoid an engagement, and simply to keep Ptolemy cooped up in Egypt till the European campaign was ended. If beaten in his attack on Thrace and Macedon, Antigonus had nothing serious to fear so long as he was master of the sea; if victorious, he could then fall with irresistible force upon Egypt and complete the unification of Alexander's empire. The whole campaign was admirably planned and the troops well distributed for its successful execution.[101]

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.

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.

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.

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 ??? 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.

According to invariable Greek practice, however, such a city controlled—with certain limitations—its own shrines. The great temples of Apollo at Delphi and Delos, for example, were governed by the citizens of those towns. Hence the natural policy for the Seleucids, and the one which they in fact followed wherever practicable, was to subordinate the high priests and clergy to the adjacent urban authorities, thus solving the ecclesiastical question in a way convenient for themselves and agreeable to European feeling. Where this did not prove practicable, they often despoiled the temple of its lands for the benefit of their followers. Thus the village of BÆtocÆce was taken from the local temple of Zeus and given to a certain Demetrius, and the sacred land of Zeus of Æzani was divided into lots, which were assigned to cleruchs, subjected to a tax, and attached to the financial jurisdiction of an adjoining city.[111] It is simply another aspect of the same general policy when king after king sought to lay "impious" hands upon the treasures stored up in the temples of Bel, Anaitis, Atargatis, and Jehovah.

The secularization of religious properties was a very difficult matter, and it was not pushed at all times with equal vigor by the Seleucids. When the monarchs were embarrassed by foreign or domestic troubles, they had to conciliate the priests even to the point of undoing what they had already done. How easily a reaction might occur we can perceive from the case recorded in the splendid inscription which Mr. Butler has recently found cut on the inner wall of the great temple of Artemis at Sardis.[112] A certain Mnesimachus, presumably a Macedonian officer or adventurer, had got a huge fief from King Antigonus. It consisted of the village of Tobalmura in the Sardian plain and its appurtenances, the villages of Tandu and Combdilipia. On these he had to pay annual dues of £50 to the proper chiliarchy, or subdivision of the satrapy. Near by, in Cinara was a kleros, or lot, on which he paid £3 yearly. The fief consisted, in addition, of the village of Periasasostra, of which the annual dues, payable to another chiliarchy, were £57. Close by, in Nagrioa was again a kleros, on which he paid £3 7s. yearly. The fief consisted, moreover, of the village of Ilu in the territory of the well-known city of Attuda, of which the dues, paid annually to the city of course, were £3 5s. The manor (aule) of the fief was in the village of Tobalmura, and together with certain lodges held by bailiffs and certain gardens and parks tilled by manorial serfs in Tobalmura and Periasasostra, it had once been assigned to Pytheus and Adrastus, likewise Macedonians; but later on it had seemingly come into the possession of Mnesimachus. The happy holder of this great estate enjoyed, doubtless, the total net yield of the manor and the lots, and, in addition, as the possessor of the manor and lots, rights to exact services in money, kind, and labor from the villeins of the villages. Had he been so minded he might have settled down in Lydia and become a baron like the Iranian nobles whom the Macedonians dispossessed; and, doubtless, many Macedonians and Greeks established themselves in Asia in this fashion. Mnesimachus, however, wanted money rather than "rights"; and, turning to the temple of Artemis in Sardis, he secured a loan of £1325 from the temple treasurers. The inscription cut on the temple wall records the sale to Artemis, with right to repurchase, of Mnesimachus's interest in the fief. His inability to repay his loan resulted in the aggrandizement of the temple.

Incidents of this sort were, doubtless, of frequent occurrence and show what the Seleucids had to guard against. Their land policy seems to have been prudent and far-sighted. They were bound to deal cautiously with their gigantic domain, since from it came the most valuable and stable portion of their revenues. On the other hand, they found a limit set to the quantity which they could profitably retain by the fact that, unlike the Ptolemies, they inherited from the Persians a public service adequate, not to administer, but simply to supervise administration. They did indeed increase the number of their satrapies, without, perhaps, diminishing the number of chiliarchies or hyparchies into which each satrapy was divided, and they seem to have paralleled the general service by a distinct fiscal service and by a distinct priestly service; but, none the less, they had to leave the details of fiscal, judicial, and religious administration to the villages. Though we are singularly ill-informed as to how they organized the villages, it is conceivable that they picked out certain persons, like the elders in the Egyptian villages, and held them responsible for the taxes of the villagers and for their general good behavior. These men would be rather hostages than officials, and would be nominees of the central government rather than of the villages. But we really know nothing of the facts, except that the villagers had some means by which they paid their taxes collectively.

One way by which the Seleucids could relieve themselves of the troubles of local administration and at the same time strengthen their hold upon the country was to make grants of whole blocks or complexes of their land, villages and villagers and all, to Macedonian and Greek feudatories, like Mnesimachus, who of course became responsible for the dues owing to the crown. But the evils of this system had been discovered by the Persian kings when they found their vassals more unruly than the villages. Hence the Seleucids refused to give a clear title to those to whom they made grants of portions of the royal domain, and in the case of Mnesimachus the temple of Artemis, to which he sold his rights, had to secure itself in the contract against the loss which it might sustain should the king recall his grant. On the other hand, when the king sold outright parts of the domain, as he frequently did, particularly in times of financial distress, and the lands and villages sold became with their peasants private property, he required that they should be added to the territory of some city-state, it being a privilege highly cherished by the purchasers that they should be given the liberty of deciding to which city their property should belong. The Seleucid policy that land should belong either to a city-state or to the crown was admirably calculated to destroy priestly and feudal sovereignties, and it was taken over by the Roman emperors, into whose patrimony in Asia Minor passed many temple lands which had either escaped secularization under their predecessors or had been regained by the priests during the later, weaker days of the Seleucid dynasty.[113]

By a similar sale, or by a gift outright, the colonists who formed a new city, or the old inhabitants of a village on being constituted citizens of a free town, obtained full ownership of the lots of land assigned to them. The citizens, in turn, had authority, subject of course to the city's laws and the constitutions of the realm, over the serfs when there happened to be any on their holdings. In this way the king lost control of his peasants and his property; for the foundation was not merely a new city, but at the same time a new state. Its sovereign was not, or not simply, the king: it was the body of its franchised inhabitants assembled in general assembly, and it proceeded to manage its public affairs by means of discussion and resolutions, by delegating functions to a council and magistrates, and by determining its own domestic and foreign policies. The language of public life was of course Greek. The code of public and private law was, doubtless, drafted according to Hellenic models. Gymnasia appeared and with them gymnastic and musical contests—the most characteristic marks of Greek education. The deities they honored were those whom they themselves chose: they chose native gods and goddesses as well as Greek; above all they chose as their chief city-god the living emperor.

The Seleucid empire was a state without a citizenship. If an Athenian settled in it, he remained an Athenian, even if he became a satrap, unless he were given citizen rights in some one of the free cities. In other words, the empire had as many different citizenships as there were different cities, and as many distinct states as there were distinct citizenships.

Accordingly, each city could adopt whatever policy it pleased in the matter of admitting foreigners, be they Greeks or Asiatics, newcomers or natives, to its body politic. It might prohibit the intermarriage of citizens with non-citizens altogether, or it might go so far as to open its doors to bastards. It is, therefore, impossible for us, without such sources of knowledge as the papyri afford for Egypt, to speak in any general way of the extent and effects of racial fusion in the Seleucid empire. Two things, however, seem clear: (1) Intermarriage between citizens of different cities was of frequent occurrence and, doubtless, of full legal propriety; (2) the great mass of the agricultural population was not much affected racially by the proximity of Greeks, Macedonians, Jews, or Iranians. The peasants were practically serfs. Their social inferiority protected them against assimilation by citizens. On the other hand, they were, doubtless, much more deeply stirred by the European immigration than were the fellahs in Egypt; for the influx into their land was much more abundant and more spontaneous than was that into the valley of the Nile. Here, too, Hellenism had much more effective agents for its diffusion than it had there. For within the hundreds of city-states in Asia we must presume that intermarriage was permitted among all citizens, whether the elements which mingled with the Greeks were Phrygians, Lydians, Syrians, Jews, Babylonians, or Iranians. We must presume that at least the men knew in a fashion the Greek language. They certainly tended to take Greek names, and in documents of Delos dating from the second century B.C. we meet with natives of Bambyce—now a polis and renamed Hierapolis, or the Sacred City—who would be indistinguishable from native-born Greeks were it not for the Semitic names of their wives. Indeed, some of them may have been Greeks who had married Syrian women. The various circles of Europeans in Syria, and, though to a less degree, elsewhere in Asia, must have been surrounded at an early date by a penumbra of half-breeds, by means of which the sharp contrast of antagonistic civilizations was lessened. In these circumstances Greek ideas and customs became a ferment which stirred the peoples of Asia to the depths. The awakening of the Nearer East was in progress in the third century B.C., and had the Romans succumbed to Hannibal and the Greeks maintained their prestige unimpaired for a century or two longer, the whole course of history would have been changed.

The Greeks came to Asia "not to send peace but a sword." They came to fill the continent up with cantankerous little republics where formerly a dense multitude had lived in a state of political lethargy. And curiously enough those who directed the dismemberment of Asia into far more states than even mediÆval Germany produced were the rulers who had the responsibility for the government of the whole region. How explain this anomaly?

The anomaly is more apparent than real. The ruler was not simply the great landed proprietor of the cities' neighborhood; he was the founder, or the descendant of the heroized founder, of most of them; he was the "benefactor" or the "preserver" of them all. As such he was deserving of their homage and entitled to their obedience. This they could proffer in an unobjectionable manner once Alexander had shown them the way. They had simply to make their proskynesis; to elect him to membership in their circle of deities, furnish him with a sacred precinct, temple, altar, image, procession, and contest, and designate a priest to attend to the sacrifices and other matters pertaining to his worship. This they did of their own volition during the reign of the founder of the dynasty. Apotheosis without territorial limitations Antiochus I demanded for Seleucus "after his departure from the life among men," and the second Antiochus demanded it for himself and his sister-wife during their lifetime as well as for their "departed" father; so that just as in Egypt and for the same reasons an imperial cult of the rulers dead and living was established throughout not only the satrapies and hyparchies but also the cities of the realm.[114]

The city had, accordingly, a dual character: it was at once both in theory and fact a nation and a municipality. In the former capacity it could grant or withhold allegiance to the king; in the latter it had simply to obey. It had for example to pay tribute to him (phoros or syntaxis), which might be viewed as a rent for the land assigned to it, or as the price paid for military protection. It might have not simply a priest of the king and a priestess of the queen, but also a resident (epistates), who on occasion might also be phrurarch, or commandant, of the royal garrison when it had one. The double status of the city is further evidenced by the fact that its citizens were subject not only to the laws which they themselves passed but also to the mandates (prostagmata) which the king issued. In cases of conflict there could be no doubt which was superior. The king was in theory absolute as a god was absolute. He had, of course, citizenship in no state, but was simply basileus, or king. This title, attached to the name without an ethnicum, was the only one that the early Seleucids used; but the later members of the dynasty, beginning with Antiochus IV, added to it the title, such as Epiphanes, or God Manifest, by which their peculiar office as gods was indicated. Thereafter, on their coins and edicts the two titles appeared, and the monarchs were thereby classified in the two worlds to which they belonged—that of men and that of gods—as completely as were citizens when to their names were added the adjectival forms of their city's name. In either capacity they were superior to the cities. On the other hand, the Seleucid god-kings had to consider carefully the demands of their cities, since these, having the means to organize resistance, could easily revolt. When they did not get satisfaction they might choose some other god-king instead, as the cities in Parthia and Bactria actually did; or they might secure immunity from tribute, as did the cities in Asia Minor in the reign of Antiochus I. Room was, accordingly, left for a large measure of municipal liberty; and, in general, the activities of the citizens were numerous and important. They had to attend to the maintenance of order, the administration of justice, and the collection of taxes within their several territories. Hence the cities gave a stimulus to political interest and ambition such as Asia had never known before. They occupied, in fact, a place in the Seleucid empire quite as important as that of the municipalities in the early Roman empire, of which they were, indeed, the prototypes.

The Roman empire, however, had not yet come into existence. It was the Italian federation under Rome's leadership which defeated Hannibal and won the battles of ThermopylÆ and Magnesia. When compared with this aggregate of incorporated and allied states, the Seleucid empire demonstrated fatal weaknesses. Rome had, perhaps, not many more citizens on her army list than there were males of military age in the franchised population of the Seleucid cities; and her public land, which, too, was her chief source of revenue, was far inferior in extent and yield to the royal domain of the Seleucids. Her advantages were twofold and their enumeration will help us to understand the disabilities under which the Asiatic monarchy labored. First, apart from the soldiers on Rome's army list there were few males of military age in Italy; in other words, there was no vast native population to hold in subjection. Second, Rome could mobilize her forces much more easily, quickly, and completely than could the Seleucids. The great distances, often of mountain and desert, which separated the cities of Asia from one another; the considerable trading, industrial, Asiatic, and otherwise unwarlike, element in the free population of the Hellenic and Hellenized cities; and the independence of the cities, particularly in the matter of giving or refusing military aid to their suzerain, had no parallel in Italy, where the territory was compact, the population mainly a warlike peasantry, and the cities all bound to provide troops at the call of Rome to the full extent of their power. Like the giant AntÆus in his trial of strength with Heracles, Rome with every fall renewed her might from contact with her native soil. The Seleucids ruled over a cosmopolitan, denationalized world. They had no native soil on which to fall. It is of profound significance that there were and could be no fellow-citizens of Seleucus in all Asia. The loyalty of true men in his realm was due first of all to their cities, and it was only by the lapse of time that a secondary loyalty to the ruling dynasty ceased to imply treason to their native states. The cities stood always before the decision whether in any given case they had more to gain or to lose by abandoning the Seleucid and transferring their allegiance to his enemy or to some other king.

It was the tragedy of Antiochus IV that through an education in Italy he came to realize fully the political grounds for the military superiority of Rome, and that through a sentimental attachment for Athens and the art, letters, and philosophy for which Athens stood, he renewed his conviction as to the absolute superiority of Greek culture.[115] He attempted to push more vigorously than ever the dynastic policy of Hellenization, by which alone a new nation could be bred in Asia, at a time when native hopes were revived; and he tried to draw the city-states of his realm into more complete dependence upon himself by the only means available to him—the right which he possessed as one of their gods to unhesitating obedience in all matters—at the very time when this policy came into collision with a religion to which deification of kings was an abomination. For in 200 B.C. Palestine had passed from the control of Egypt into the control of Antiochus the Great, whereupon his dynasty had to deal with the Jews. The trouble was, of course, that the Jews were monotheists. Many Jews in Jerusalem, as well as in the other cities of the realm, were not averse to Hellenism, and frequented the gymnasia, enrolled their sons in the ephebe corps, and gave them Greek names, but the devout shrank with horror from worshiping the emperor, and the peasants from everything foreign. Accordingly an open revolt occurred in JudÆa, chiefly among the country people, when Antiochus IV chartered Jerusalem as a Hellenized city, substituted for the bizarre law of Moses an enlightened, up-to-date, Greek code, and set down his own image as the Olympian Zeus in the Holy of Holies.

This is the same Antiochus who twice led his victorious army to the walls of Alexandria, once to retreat after dictating terms to the Ptolemies, once to meet a Roman embassy headed by his old friend Gaius Popillius. Before answering the king's pleasant greeting, the Roman handed to him the message of his Senate and curtly bade him read it. He found it to be an order to evacuate Egypt immediately. On asking for time to consider the proposal, he got a further surprise; for, drawing a circle round the king in the sand with his cane, Popillius demanded an answer "Yes" or "No" before he stepped outside of it. A few months earlier, by crushing Perseus of Macedon on the battle-field of Pydna (168 B.C.), Rome had rid itself of its last serious rival. Since for Antiochus to resist meant now to stand alone against the master of the world, the only answer he could give was "Yes"; yet it meant the ruin of the Seleucid empire. Thereafter, there was but one free will in the vast territory of Africa, Asia, and Europe which lay between the Euphrates River and the Atlantic Ocean—the will of the government of Rome. Instruments to give it continuous effect in Italy that sagacious and persistent corporation, the Roman Senate, had made and used already; and in its march to universal empire it had broken and hurled to the ground the instruments of authority raised against it by its Greek adversaries. To pick them up, mend them, and improve them for further use was the imperial task of the immediate future.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. SchÜrer, E. Geschichte des jÜdischen Volks im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, I³ (1901), II⁴ (1907).

2. Bevan, E. The House of Seleucus (1902).

3. Niese, B. Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten. Especially Vol. III (1903).

4. Beloch, J. Griechische Geschichte, III (1904).

5. Rostowzew, M. Studien zur Geschichte des rÖmischen Kolonates (1910), pp. 240 ff.

6. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen: D. Die makedonischen KÖnigreiche (1910).

7. BouchÉ-Leclercq, A. Histoire des SÉleucides (1913).