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.
[Illustration: ANTIOCHUS (IV) EPIPHANES
AFTER A COIN
(From a drawing by Ralph Iligan)]
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.
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