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_, I^3 (1901), II^4 (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).
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 101: Kromayer, _Historische Zeitschrift_, C, p. 50.]
[Footnote 102: Dittenberger, _Orientis Græcæ Inscriptiones Selectæ_,
224; if the king is Antiochus II, and not, as is now claimed (Pozzi,
_Memorie della Reale Accademia di Torino_, serie II, tom. LXIII,
p. 345, n. 4), Antiochus III. See, however, Kärst, _Geschichte des
hellenistischen Zeitalters_, II, I, p. 422 and Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist.
des Séleucides_, pp. 90 _f._, 470 _ff._]
[Footnote 103: See now Kromayer, _Hannibal und Antiochus der Grosse_
(_Neue Jahrbücher für d. klass, Altert._ XIX (1907), pp. 681 _ff._).]
[Footnote 104: Cordier, H., _Journal des Savants_ (1907), pp. 247
_ff._; Cunningham, _Numismatic Chronicle_ (1888), pp. 222 _ff._]
[Footnote 105: _Ruins of Desert Cathay_ (1912), I, pp. 274, 284.]
[Footnote 106: W.W. Tarn, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, XXII (1902),
pp. 268 _ff._, and _Antigonus Gonatas_, frontispiece; Gardner, P.,
_Numismatic Chronicle_ (1887), p. 177.]
[Footnote 107: _Encyclopedia Britannica_^11, _s. v._ _Hellenism_
(Bevan).]
[Footnote 108: _Syr._ 57; cf. Droysen, _Gesch. d. Hellenismus_^2, III,
2, pp. 254 _ff._]
[Footnote 109: XII, 2, 3, p. 535. Rostowzew, _Studien zur Geschichte
des römischen Kolonates_, pp. 269 _ff._]
[Footnote 110: Butler, _Publications of an American Expedition to
Syria_, II (1903), pp. 121 _ff._, 177; cf. Rostowzew, _op. cit._, p.
254.]
[Footnote 111: Dittenberger, _Orientis Græcæ Inscriptiones Selectæ_,
262, 502.]
[Footnote 112: Buckler and Robinson, _Greek Inscriptions from Sardis_.
(_American Journal of Archæology_, XVI, 1912, pp. 11 _ff._)]
[Footnote 113: Calder, _Classical Review_, XXVII (1913), pp. 9 _ff._]
[Footnote 114: Kärst, _Gesch. des hellen. Zeitalters_, II, I, pp.
419 _ff._ Bouché-Leclercq's treatment of this subject (_Hist. des
Séleucides_, pp. 469 _ff._), is inadequate.]
[Footnote 115: _Hellenistic Athens_, pp. 303 _ff._]
VII
THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTIGONIDS
Of the Hellenistic empires the one from which Rome suffered most and
learned least was that of the Antigonids in Macedon and Greece. We say
"Macedon and Greece": the kings of Macedon from Philip II to Perseus
said "Hellas"; for they never ceased to claim that Macedon was a part
of Hellas--_the_ part of Hellas which had earned by the achievements
of Philip II and Alexander the right of hegemony for its kings. It
was an imperial nation for which its king, nobles, and commons had
an intense loyalty and pride, but which stood in their thinking to
Hellas as Virginia did to the United States in the _ante-bellum_ days,
or as Prussia does to Germany, rather than as Austria does to the
Austro-Hungarian empire.
It taught the Romans least because it had least to teach them. The one
thing in which the Macedonians were masterful was the art of war; yet
in this the Romans by native accomplishment were their superiors. They
invented the phalanx, but the phalanx succumbed to the legion. In the
art of government the Antigonids were resourceful, but to lift up a
jellyfish on a spear-point is an impossible task. Yet that is what they
had to do in Hellas. The only lessons of government they could teach
were lessons of failure; but that this is not to their discredit is
shown by the inability of Rome itself to cope with the same situation
till Hellas was dead and desiccated. They were sagacious enough to
realize that for a people with the customs, piety, and bluntness of the
Macedonians a kingship was best which, to speak with Aristotle, was
a perpetual magistracy and not an absolute monarchy. Hence they were
under no necessity to demand that the Macedonians worship them as gods,
and the Macedonians, having inherited rights which no Antigonid dared
to ignore,[116] were under no legal necessity to thrust divinity upon
their rulers. Hence the Antigonids alone of the Hellenistic dynasties
governed as men supported by their people's loyalty, and not as gods to
whom all things were permitted. They, moreover, organized no official
cult of their family in Hellas, for reasons which will appear later. It
was not Macedon but Greece which took the proud Roman victor captive
and bore the arts to rustic Latium. For the Macedonians remained
themselves a rustic people, and added little or nothing to the poetry,
painting, sculpture, architecture, and science of Hellas.[117] Their
élite were rulers and officers, their commons farmers and soldiers.
From the time Philip II came to the throne (359 B.C.) to the battle of
Cynocephalæ (197 B.C.), it is impossible to find a decade, and not
easy to find half a one, during which the able-bodied men of Macedon
were not called to the standards at least once either to defend their
country against foreign attack or to march north, south, east, or west
against their lord's enemies.[118] Their dead were to be found in
every valley of Hellas, and their emigrants in every land of Asia; but
theirs was a prolific race, so that, despite their many losses in the
interval, they put 29,000 Macedonians in the field in the last struggle
with Rome, or 2000 more than stood under the command of Alexander the
Great when he had completed his arrangements for the conquest of Asia.
Rome suffered more from the Antigonids than from any other Hellenistic
dynasty because it had there alone to do with a nation of veterans
under arms. The Macedonians were, as has been said, an imperial people,
loyal to their kings, and ambitious to maintain their ascendancy in
the world. While at war with Rome--the wielder of armies 100,000
strong--they were assailed simultaneously by their Hellenic vassals
and rivals and attacked or abandoned by their Macedonian kinsmen
in Asia and Africa; yet they held out under the Antigonids, in the
first struggle for eight years (212-205 B.C.), in the second for four
(200-197 B.C.), in the third for still another four (171-168 B.C.); and
even after one half of their men of military age had fallen at Pydna,
and their last king had died in captivity and his only son as a clerk
at Alba Fucens, their conquerors were so seriously disturbed by the
"throbbings of their ancient loyalty" that the Senate had finally to
place a Roman proconsul on the throne of the great Alexander (148 B.C.).
* * * * *
Though sprung from a Macedonian stock, the dynasty of the Antigonids
was bred in Asia, and it was transplanted into Macedon only in its
third generation. That came about in the following way. The first
Antigonus was made ruler of Phrygia when Alexander the Great left Asia
Minor in 333 B.C., and he was still in possession of that satrapy when
his sovereign died ten years later. With Phrygia as a starting point
and a nomination as commander-in-chief of the royal forces in Asia as
a pretext, he planned and fought with such success in the next decade
that in the spring of 312 B.C. he seemed destined to add Macedon to
Asia, which he already possessed; and with it to support and not to
oppose him, he counted on being able to master the whole of Alexander's
empire. We have already seen why this project failed, and also how a
later attempt to accomplish the same purpose cost him his life and his
Asiatic realm. He may have been over-ambitious. Possibly no one could
have prevented the dismemberment of the Græco-Macedonian world. Perhaps
the centrifugal tendencies would have proved too strong for Alexander
himself had he lived long enough to test them. That, however, does
not make the issue less of a calamity for the Hellenes; for on the
battle-fields of Gaza and Ipsus it was decided that the alien Romans
and not the kindred Macedonians were to unite the world under a single
government. With the person of the first Antigonus went to the grave
the hope of a great people.
The sharer of his aspirations and the cause in considerable measure
of his defeat was his son Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, or
"Taker-of-Cities." By his disobedience to orders at Gaza and his
impetuosity in action at Ipsus, he had done most to lose his kingdom;
but after the death of his father he still retained the dominion of
the sea, and, with it, value as an ally and ability to use his forces
at such points as he himself chose. After some years of aimless
adventuring and galling inactivity he chose to use them in the attempt,
twice vainly made already in coöperation with his father, to seize
Greece and Macedon. His strength was incomparably inferior to that
used on the earlier occasions and he had still watchful enemies on
all sides. The essential difference was that the house of Antipater,
which had ruled Macedon and Greece since Alexander the Great had
crossed into Asia, was now represented, not by Antipater's able son,
Cassander, who died in 297 B.C. after a reign of nineteen years, but
by his weakly and dissentious children. These looked on inactive while
he blockaded Athens (295-294 B.C.) and starved it into submission;
whereupon he brushed them aside and took their place as king of
Macedon and suzerain of Greece. Since his wife was Phila, Cassander's
sister, his son, Antigonus, surnamed Gonatas, was a grandson of
Antipater I, no less than Antipater II, who was now the sole survivor
of Cassander's family. Hence, if the right of Demetrius Poliorcetes to
the Macedonian throne rested upon nothing more substantial than the
frustrated ambition of his father, the right of his son was flawless
after the death of Antipater II. This, however, occurred in 288-287
B.C. at the very time when Demetrius, on being expelled from Macedon,
abandoned Greece and went to meet captivity in Asia for the rest of his
life. Left behind in Greece, Antigonus Gonatas exercised a watchful
suzerainty there without being king of Macedon, which Pyrrhus of
Epirus and Lysimachus of Thrace shared for a few years (288 to 284-283
B.C.), Lysimachus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy Ceraunus held alone in rapid
succession for another interval (283-280 B.C.), and Celts from the
north plundered and harried for three years. It was not till 277 B.C.
that Antigonus succeeded in freeing it from its troubles and making it
the base of his operations in Greece. He therewith planted in Europe
the dynasty which ruled Macedon till the Roman conquest (168 B.C.).
Antigonus I and Demetrius Poliorcetes had formed their political
ambitions and ideas during the age of the _diadochi_, when the empire
of Alexander stood in all its magnificence and promise as a golden
prize for the able, courageous, and unscrupulous. They had aspired to
rule as god-kings over a world in which men and cities rendered homage
(proskynesis) to them, as they had rendered it to Alexander. They had
viewed Greece and Macedon as alike desirable,[119] the common charm
being that they were the mother of the soldiers and settlers of whom
their limitless realm had need. They may have coveted Greece even more
than Macedon. Certainly, Athens, not Pella, was the city of Demetrius's
dreams. He had gloried in being its liberator in 307 B.C., and when
it dashed his hopes by excluding him after his defeat at Ipsus, he
had suffered bitter disappointment. None the less, and despite the
desperate resistance which it had offered to him in 295-294 B.C., he
treated it with clemency when he was once again its master. What his
father had thought of the approval of Athens he expressed by calling it
the beacon tower of the world. How highly he had esteemed the culture
of its inhabitants he demonstrated by making a colony of Athenians
the nucleus of Antigonia (later Antioch), which he founded as the new
capital of the empire that had been Alexander's, but was now, he hoped,
to be his.