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 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.
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 7_s._ 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 5_s._
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.