CHAPTER V. SYRIA AND THE EAST

I.

THE EMPIRE OF THE SELEUCIDS, ITS CHARACTER AND DEVELOPMENT

IN 281 BC Seleucus I, for some time past the acknowledged king of Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran, added to his Empire most of Asia Minor with its Greek cities and the Greek or hellenized population of its western coast and seemed to have firmly established his authority over it. At once, like his predecessors the Persian kings, like Alexander, Antigonus and Lysimachus, he found himself face to face with many problems vastly important and quite insoluble. These problems passed by inheritance to his earlier successors down to Antiochus III the Great, whose unsuccessful struggle with Rome entirely changed the character of the Seleucid Empire and therewith the main lines of Seleucid policy.

The Empire of Seleucus I and his immediate successors was an aggregation of many nations and many civilizations. On the Iranian table-land were the various Iranian and pre-Iranian tribes, one in the nationality of the dominant race but infinitely varied in the manner of life of the different nations and tribes: nomads of the steppe, shepherds of the hills, agriculturists, gardeners and vinedressers—these, together with the great urban centres of trade and administration, made up the eastern third of the Seleucid Empire and had been for the Persian kings the centre and foundation of their power and rule over the remaining parts of their empire. One part of this vast province had attained to a high culture, imperial in character, that of the Persian kings and the Persian nobles: there entered into it the ancient Sumerian and Elamite culture, Babylonian and Assyrian elements, some mixture of Hittite and Aramaean, the basis of life and religion being that of the Iranian tribes to whom belonged the first place in the state: to this cultural province adjoined as it were two wings, on the south-east the region of the Indus and Ganges with its highly developed civilization, and on the north-west the Armenian table-land and the valleys and foothills of the Caucasus with their high civilization made up of Hittite and Caucasian elements and once so flourishing in the kingdom of Van.

The centre of the Seleucid Empire was made up of the former kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria, going back thousands of years, and of the lands which depended upon them for their civilization, Syria, the land of Aramaean cities dependent upon the caravan trade, Phoenicia, a land of great trading and manufacturing coasttowns, and Palestine, of which the coast or Philistine region was a continuation of Phoenicia, while the interior or Jewish part went on with the primitive life of shepherds, agriculturists and gardeners under the protection of Yahweh and his temple at Jerusalem. In these dependent regions there was the strangest mixture of old-fashioned Semitic nomad life with the high civilization of Babylon and Assyria, Egypt and the Hittites. The foundations of life in Babylonia were laid on permanent and immutable lines: they might be destroyed but there was no changing them, whereas the adaptable trading and manufacturing towns of Syria and Phoenicia with their mixed population were ready for every novelty. The stability of the new theocratic system in Jewry had not yet been exposed to serious trial. If we can call the eastern third of the empire mainly Iranian, its middle part was predominantly Semitic. The star of imperial Ashur had set, but his successor Ahuramazda had made no attempt to try his strength against Bel, Marduk, Yahweh and the many Baalim.

The third or north-western part of the empire, Asia Minor, was even more miscellaneous and the various systems of life made up a more complicated whole. Behind the belt of Greek coast cities with its Graeco-oriental civilization and Graeco-oriental temples, there lived, on the one hand, in the river-valleys, on the Anatolian table-land, in the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains elements going back to the ancient Hittite culture, itself sufficiently mixed, and, on the other, strange new developments, Phrygian Pessinus, Lydian Sardes, Carian Halicarnassus, Lycian Termessus, Cilician Tarsus and so on, and little do we know even now of their complex civilizations and religions.

To build up anything out of this aggregation of tribes, peoples and regions, lacking any mutual connection and naturally tending in different directions, was a hard task, especially for the new lords of the empire, the successors of Alexander. The Persian kings had a solid base in their Iranian subjects who had always been the dominant nation and remained such in spite of the very liberal policy of the Persian kings. Alexander had behind him his own people the Macedonians, and on them and on the glamour of his personality his power was based till the day of his death.

The position of Seleucus I and his successors was far more difficult. After the death of Seleucus it became clear that it was idle to dream of uniting the Seleucid power with Macedon. Such a union was not beyond the bounds of possibility (everything was possible in the fantastic world of Hellenistic politics), but to build a policy upon this vague possibility would have been madness. The facts had to be reckoned with and the facts spoke plainly. Within the boundaries of their rule Seleucus and his successors, as Macedonians and Greeks, had, like the Ptolemies in Egypt, no single part of their empire on which they could rely and dare to use as a basis for their power. They had gained their power by the hands of Macedonian soldiers. As they had not Macedon and Greece behind them, they might have let this handful of Macedonians dissolve in the sea of their Iranian, Semitic and Anatolian subjects, but they did not and could not make up their minds to this experiment. It would have meant exchanging a stable though purely personal rule for the vision of a precarious support by the East at the price of orientalizing dynasty, army and administration. It was simpler and safer to do as did the Ptolemies in Egypt, and rely on the community of interest between the dynasty and the army, the dynasty and the dominant nation of conquerors, the Macedonians and the Greeks. The logical inference from this, an inference probably suggested to Seleucus by his experience and observation in the eastern third of the empire during the first years of his rule, was the necessity, once Macedon and Greece proved to be beyond his reach, of building up a new Macedon and Greece of his own in those parts of the empire which he had best hope of keeping permanently in his power.

In the very first years of the Seleucid Empire it was clear that there was no escaping endless rivalry with the Ptolemies and that there was no chance of getting hold of Macedon, so that to create this new Macedon and Greece in western Asia Minor on the basis of the liberty-loving cities of the coast was against all common sense. It was clear that for the possession of these cities and access to the sea, and likewise for the cities of Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine, there was going to be a long and obstinate struggle (which as a matter of fact never did cease), and accordingly the centre of the state, the military and political headquarters of the kingdom, must be in a region more easily defended, less open to attack, and closer to the eastern part of the empire.

Hence the Seleucid policy, pursued consistently, though hastily, with an enormous expenditure of money and energy, the policy of settling Macedonians and Greeks within the empire especially in its central regions. This settlement was the work of the first two rulers, Seleucus I and Antiochus I. To them was due the Graeco-Macedonian nucleus which secured to the dynasty and empire permanence for more than two hundred years. By them the system was worked out. They had predecessors in Alexander and Antigonus, but their purpose and the speed with which it was carried out were new.

Their purpose was not only to secure the frontiers and great trade-routes with urban foundations for soldiers and civilians, to plant single islands of Hellenism in the eastern sea, but to create whole regions thickly covered with a network of Macedonian and Greek cities and villages, regular Greek and Macedonian provinces. These settlements were sometimes new centres of population, sometimes ancient towns or villages transformed by a new name and a new social and political life, while into their population a large and powerful group of new settlers was introduced. Communication between these newly settled regions was secured by chains of Graeco-Macedonian fortified cities planted along the chief roads.

These groups of Graeco-Macedonian cities reached from the coasts of the Aegean right through Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia all the way to Bactria and Sogdiana. The first was the Lydian, Phrygian and Carian group in Asia Minor, with its military and administrative centres in Sardes and Celaenae (Apamea Cibotos). The second, still more compact and powerful, stretched from the north end of the Syrian coast (above Phoenicia) along the whole course of the Orontes and its tributaries, along the middle course of the Euphrates and along the Khabur and its tributaries. This was Syria, the heart and kernel of the empire with its political capital Antioch on the Orontes, the military Apamea, and the commercial Seleuceia in Pieria and Laodicea. Babylonia and Susiana were the last group of Greek cities in the western half of the empire, holding the gate to the eastern half and its administrative and military centre. The political and economic capital of this group and the second capital of the empire was Seleuceia on the Tigris. How far Babylonia and Susiana were hellenized we shall discuss later. But an attempt, and a not unsuccessful attempt, was made.

To judge by the few scraps of information given by our miserable sources the settlement policy did not stop short at the Tigris: but what was its character in the eastern satrapies we do not know. The purpose of the Seleucids may have been no more than to maintain and strengthen, partly to restore, Alexander’s network of colonies along the routes of trade and war, or here again they may have tried to make other great groups of Hellenic cities and villages. This appears the more probable explanation; we have  evidence for the existence of groups in Media, Parthia and Ariana, in Persis, and finally in Bactria and perhaps in Sogdiana.

It was on this new Graeco-Macedonian population and on those elements among the natives who were assimilated to it that the Seleucids relied as their most permanent support; and on the whole, as in Egypt, the Graeco-Macedonians faithfully and firmly supported their kings.

The political history of the Seleucids, as set forth elsewhere, shows how the empire was gradually pressed back towards its centre. Seleucus I soon failed to dominate Bithynia and Pontus; in the reign of his successor, Antiochus I, Ptolemy Philadelphus extended the power of Egypt in Asia Minor; while the western part of the empire suffered a severe blow when the Gauls seized the centre of the peninsula and Pergamum fell away. Under Antiochus II came the turn of the eastern provinces, of which India was already lost. About 255 BC Bactria, too, revolted under Diodotus and gradually asserted her liberty; the year 248-7 BC marks the Era of Parthia, the sign of its independence. About the same time arose the separate kingdom of Great Cappadocia. Farther west things went better. After the dizzy exploits of Ptolemy Philadelphus the battle of Cos restored the power of Antiochus II in Asia Minor apart from Pergamum. The brilliant victories of Ptolemy III for a long time contracted the boundaries of the Seleucids’ empire not in its centre but in Asia Minor: except for the Troad they lost their influence all along its western coast. For a short while both in west and east the old power of Seleucus I and Antiochus I was restored by Antiochus III, but he too had to accept the independence of Pergamum, Bactria and Parthia as accomplished facts. A new epoch in the history of the empire begins with the defeat of Antiochus III by Rome (190 BC). Asia Minor was lost for ever. Direct access by land to Greek civilization and to the Greek ports of Asia Minor was for ever cut off. An end was put to all hopes of independent commerce in the Mediterranean supported by a navy: the Syrian merchants were made dependent on the kind offices of Rhodes and of Delos which became more and more a Roman port. It is not surprising that Antiochus III in his latter years, and particularly Antiochus IV with his more able and active successors such as Demetrius I and Antiochus VII Sidetes, henceforward chiefly aim at confirming and strengthening the centre of their kingdom, Syria (to which Coele-Syria and Palestine had been reunited), Mesopotamia and what could still be kept of the nearer parts of Iran.

Their problem was accordingly a double one: to make their kingdom more compact and to resist with this kingdom compacted of Greeks and Semites the pressure of a reborn Iran. There was only one way to attain the first object, the way of Seleucus I and Antiochus I: to extend and confirm the patches of Hellenism by the creation of new Greek cities and the strengthening of the Greek element in the old ones so that the whole kingdom should bear but one stamp, the Greek. To this Antiochus IV and his successors devoted themselves wholeheartedly. They had no reason to think that this course would meet with any invincible obstacles. The experience of the past, the success of their earliest predecessors, allowed them to think that the surface hellenization and urbanization of the new provinces conquered from the Ptolemies, Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Palestine and Transjordania and the more intensive hellenization of Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Media, Susiana and Persis would give as little trouble as the experiment of hellenizing the Aramaean provinces, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan and Babylonia, and the Iranian Media and Persis under Seleucus I and Antiochus I. After all, in Phoenicia, Coele-Syria and Transjordania the chief work of city-building and hellenization had been already done by the Ptolemies. There was only Palestine left: and even here much had been done in the last years of Ptolemaic rule by the efforts of the house of Tobias, Philhellenes and business men of the regular new Hellenistic type. Relying on the new cities with their Greek appearance, on the hellenized population and on a sensible utilization of the abundant resources of the country, the Seleucids hoped to defend the country against the Parthians, and keep at any rate a part of the Iranian provinces, Media, Susiana and Persis. In this they were mistaken. The hellenization of Palestine failed in spite of heroic efforts. This is to be explained not so much by the desperate resistance of the Jews as by the way in which the successors of Antiochus III had their hands tied. Behind them stood Rome and her consistent and cunning policy of weakening the Seleucids. Rome would not allow them either to break right down the resistance of the Jews, or to weld Syria and Mesopotamia into one whole or to support Hellenism in Mesopotamia against the steady pressure of Iranian-ism. Not the Maccabees nor the Parthians conquered the Seleucids but Rome. To Rome were due the successes of the Jews and of the Parthians under Mithridates I and Phraates II. The fictitious independence of Judaea was the beginning of a feudalization of Syria and Mesopotamia. Most of the cities both on the coast and inland become independent: in many appear petty princes of local  origin. The same process recurs in so-called Parthian Mesopotamia after the defeat of Antiochus VII Sidetes in 129 BC. In the last century BC. the Seleucid kingdom has come to an end and Rome herself has to undertake the task of saving Syrian Hellenism from the Iranians who threaten it from the East and the Aramaeans who rise up against it from the depths of Syria itself.

II.

 THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SELEUCID EMPIRE A. THE KING’S POWER

Seleucus I, like Ptolemy Soter, first drew close his connection with the country which afterwards became the centre of his empire, in his case Babylonia, through being its satrap, first after the agreement of Triparadeisus, and afterwards from 312 BC, the time of Ptolemy’s victory at Gaza. This is the year from which is reckoned his Era (from 1 Dius = October for the Greeks; 1 Nisan = March or April for the Babylonians), which is even now in use in Syria, and from about this date his oriental subjects began to call him king long before the other Diadochi had officially assumed that style. The power of Seleucus and his successors, like that of the Ptolemies, had two sides to it. In the eyes of his army, his friends and the Macedonian and Greek inhabitants of his empire, as well as of Greeks outside, the king’s power was personal, founded upon his personal supremacy and personal qualities and on the support given by the army and his ‘friends.’ This gave him the right to claim that he and his descendants were the lawful heirs of Alexander. This point of view is quite definitely expressed both in the probably spurious speech made by Seleucus I to his friends and troops on the occasion of his son’s romantic marriage and nomination as king of the East and partner in the government, and in the decree passed by Ilium in honour of Antiochus I: the honours offered by the city to Antiochus are based upon his having ensured peace to the cities, and increased his kingdom, ‘thanks mainly to his personal superiority and to the devotion of his friends and troops.’ In general, in the eyes of the Greeks, the king, his family, his ‘ friends ’ and his army make up one indissoluble whole, the holders of power in the empire. This is the de facto basis for the king’s power, which rests entirely upon the devotion of his ‘friends,’ that is his officers in military and civil service, and on the loyalty of his army, these being assured him as long as he shows himself worthy of his position and conducts the affairs of state with success, so working on behalf of his friends and troops. But side by side with this the Seleucids like the Ptolemies had of course need for another, a higher, philosophic and religious, sanction for their power, a sanction which should make them less dependent on the goodwill of their court and army.

No doubt, like the Ptolemies and Antigonus Gonatas, a philosophic sanction was suggested to the Seleucids or formulated for them by the philosophers of the time. An echo of such a formula can be heard for instance in Seleucus I’s speech to his army, just mentioned. Explaining the marriage of Antiochus I with his own stepmother he says ‘ it is not the customs of the Persians and other peoples that I impose upon you, but a law common to all, by which that is always just which is decreed by the king.’ The phrase offers a philosophic justification for the absolutism of the king, as against a historical one, the inheritance of power from Persian kings and Persian tradition. The same search for a higher sanction which should justify their power in the eyes of the Greek and hellenized population of the empire, especially in the eyes of the Greek city-states whose whole nature and tradition revolted against subjection to a king, is to be seen in the gradual process by which the cult of the deceased kings of the Seleucid dynasty and of the living king and queen changed into a state institution. From the days of Seleucus I, certainly from those of Antiochus I, the divine descent of Seleucus from Apollo was generally accepted and became part of the royal style1. This divine descent made it possible for the Greek cities on their own initiative to set up a cult of the king, as at Ilium. Further, we may assume that divine honours were paid to Seleucus after his death in cities which he had founded, and that this practice was followed with his successors, until in the time of Antiochus III if not earlier there can have been no Greek city in the Seleucid Empire without a cult in some form or other of the deceased kings and of the reigning sovereign. At some time, not before Antiochus II, order was brought into this chaos and the cult of the kings became a state institution with its own priests and special ceremonies repeated at fixed intervals. In a rescript to the governor of Lydia Antiochus III appoints a lady of rank to be high priestess of the cult of Laodice, ‘queen and sister,’ in all the temples of the satrapy, and remarks that high priests of his cult exist throughout the kingdom1. But the cult epithet of which there was one for each of the Seleucids did not form part of their official style before the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

Such was the royal power of the Seleucids from the point of view of the Greeks. What formula they found for the miscellaneous non-Greek population of the empire we do not know. Over a country in which they were foreigners the Seleucids bore rule by right of conquest. Perhaps, too, like the Ptolemies in Egypt, they tried to assume in the eyes of the natives the forms of their previous kings and gain recognition from the local gods and their priests, but of this we have neither direct nor indirect evidence. In any case the religion and cult of local deities suffered no persecution from them and it is unlikely that they insisted on introducing their Greek cult in the eastern temples. Some form or other of king-worship no doubt already existed in all the eastern temples, for in all eastern monarchies the king played a conspicuous part in the cult of the gods and it is unlikely that his figure disappeared from ritual with the extinction of the legitimate native dynasties. Probably the earlier Seleucids, down to Antiochus III, did not find it necessary to interfere with the affairs of temples and priests. In Babylon and throughout Babylonia masses of business documents, almost all concerned with the affairs of the temples, show that at this time the temples were living their old life with all its peculiarities, worshipping the ancient gods after the ancient forms and using the offerings of the faithful to support their priests and servants.

It is possible that with their expulsion from Asia Minor the Seleucids rather modified their attitude to eastern temples. We hear of repeated cases of Antiochus III and his successors ‘plundering’ eastern temples, and these, as also the ‘plundering’ of the temple at Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes, may be regarded as attempts on the part of the later Seleucids to insist on their sovereign right to the possessions of the temple, a right belonging to them as ‘the Lord’s anointed,’ representing the god upon earth. In the difficult times that followed the defeat of Antiochus III by Rome the Seleucids thought they had a right to use for the state the vast resources of the eastern temples. But they had overrated their strength and the degree to which their right had been recognized as religious. Antiochus III was slain after plundering the temple of Bel in Elam. Antiochus IV could not succeed even in penetrating to the very wealthy temple of Nanaia in the same district. An even fiercer opposition was put up by the orthodox part of the Jewish population, and he was compelled for the first time in the history of the Seleucids to have recourse to religious persecution and perhaps to the forcible establishment of his own cult in Greek forms so as to break down this opposition. The mild policy of Antiochus III towards the temple at Jerusalem was probably the traditional policy of the earlier Seleucids towards eastern temples in general: non-interference with the forms of religious life and the privileges of the priests in return for their loyalty and support.

There can be no doubt that the native non-Greek population of the empire failed to show any particular enthusiasm for the Seleucids. Passive acquiescence was the very utmost that the Seleucids could demand of them. That is why one part after another breaks off so easily: that is why even the centre of the Seleucid power, Syria and Mesopotamia, swiftly turned Aramaean and feudal the moment the central power and the imperial army collapsed. On the other hand, the Graeco-Macedonian population of the central parts, and even of the extremities, was quite loyal, one may even say deeply devoted to the Seleucid dynasty. It felt that the state was its own, that it must stand or fall together with the Seleucids. This comes out very clearly in the difficult times of the second century BC. The mob of the cities and the army again and again take a hand in the often unsavoury and always sanguinary dynastic quarrels, but when they so interfere and revolt the main reason is always devotion to the dynasty and a desire to support its worthiest representative.

B.

THE COURT AND CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION. GOVERNMENT OF THE PROVINCES

Amid this Graeco-Macedonian population the king’s family, his court, his highest officials, the officers, armies and fleets play the chief part in determining the king’s mode of life. All this must have been much the same for the Seleucids as for the Ptolemies and other Hellenistic dynasties. In all of them there was a strange mixture of Macedonian traditions with those of the oriental monarchies. Among the Seleucids, too, the wives of the kings play a great part in public life, court ceremonial, and policy. But on the coinage the queen’s portrait appears later among the Seleucids than among the Ptolemies, not before Demetrius Soter. The succession is governed by the Macedonian and Greek law of inheritance. The king’s ‘friends’ make up his council. There also  enter into it other members of the group which surrounds the king, bearing the titles of ‘ tutor ’ (tropheus), ‘ comrade’ (syntrophos), ‘kinsman’ and ‘body-guard.’ The king is surrounded by the ‘king’s pages’ and a great number of servants, under the direction of different members of the court, bearing the same titles as at the courts of the other Hellenistic rulers. As usual such titles as Butler. Carver, Chamberlain become purely honorary.

From time to time our sources give us the names of the highest and most influential officials: ‘The Minister for Affairs ’, the head of the royal chancery, finance minister, the financial secretary and quarter-master general, the chief physician. The finance minister managed the so-called basilikon, a term which embraced both the state (i.e. royal) exchequer and the administration of the king’s property, taxation and probably currency. The coinage was mostly produced at Antioch, directed by special officers whose monograms appear regularly on Seleucid coins of this mint. As with the Ptolemies, there were also provincial mints, especially that of Seleuceia on the Tigris: Tyre also issued abundant coinage for the empire. Political and economic conditions governed the coinage of imperial currency in other great towns. The king’s privy purse, his ‘treasure’ or ‘money-chest,’ had its own guardian called as in other Hellenistic monarchies gazophylax or rhiskophylax. No doubt there were many more important officials than are mentioned in our scanty sources. The king had his own chancery and archives, doubtless with a special director. The extent and ramifications of the central bureaucracy with its groups of subordinate officials can be only conjectured until it is defined by systematic excavations at Antioch.

Unfortunately the local provincial administration of the Seleucids is little better known to us. The few inscriptions scattered over the whole extent of their empire cannot compare with the thousands of papyri from Egypt. Only systematic excavations in the cities on the edge of the desert where there is hope of finding parchment documents can illuminate this darkness. In the Seleucid empire there was no strong contrast, such as we find in the Ptolemaic, between the country which served as the centre and base of the king’s power and the king’s dominions oversea. Nor again is there the deep division between the capital, as the Greek centre of the king’s power, and the provinces. In Egypt Alexandria was opposed on the one hand to the country and on the other hand to the dominions. The Seleucid Empire had a different past and different traditions—the traditions of the Persian kings, especially Darius and his successors, and those of Alexander the Great. The empire, being made up of many nations and many regions, had to be divided into separate administrative units. This division was natural, historical and not artificial, and on the whole was the same as under the Persians and Alexander. To go back to the tradition of Cyrus, who administered the country as a conglomeration of vassal kingdoms under a ruling nation, was impossible. We find a return to this state of things in the Seleucid Empire, as in the Persian, only at the time when it was swiftly and finally falling to pieces. Our information as to how the Seleucid Empire was divided into administrative units and how these units were ruled is extremely scanty and contradictory. But we may assume that under the Seleucids, as under the Persians and under Alexander, the administrative divisions bore the names of satrapies, though the governors with military and civil authority were called not satraps but strategoi1. Subdivisions of the satrapies were entrusted to subordinate governors, hyparchs and probably meridarchs, while on the other hand the Eastern satrapies or those of Asia Minor were sometimes grouped together under governor generals. It is almost certain that the strategoi commanded the contingents of their satrapies as well as the military police, who were probably recruited from military settlers and had as their main duty the task of assisting the chief financial officer of the satrapy or hyparchy, presumably in the collection of taxes and imposts.

The financial administration of the satrapy was concentrated in the hands of a special ‘finance officer.’ Whether he was subordinate to the strategos and hyparch or immediately under the minister of finances in Antioch we do not know. To judge by certain inscriptions the management of the king’s property, mostly his lands in the provinces, was entrusted to oikonomoi and dioiketai. One shows that the oikonomos did not receive his orders immediately from the king but from the strategos of the satrapy to whom the king gives his immediate directions. The king’s command is executed in accordance with a special order from the oikonomos, by the hyparch. This probably implies that the oikonomos had in his charge the king’s lands throughout the satrapy and that the Finance officer also was subordinated not only to the king but to some extent to the strategos of the satrapy.

Each satrapy certainly had its own capital. The capital of Lydia was Sardes. It is possible that in the life of Asia Minor Sardes played an even greater part, that it was the capital both civil and military of a whole group of satrapies. Here probably was the royal treasury with branches in the other big towns. Here too was a central record office under the charge of a special archivist (bibliophylax). Such record offices were scattered over the whole empire not only in the capitals but in the smaller towns where there were also branches of the exchequer. So in the ancient Uruk we find a special state chreophylakion, with its chief ‘the chreophylax of Uruk,’ whose seal bearing the same types as the coins of his time, the head of the deified king as Apollo, shows that he was a royal, not a municipal official nor yet a private person like the ‘keeper of contracts’ in Egypt. At a somewhat earlier period the same official is found at the capital of Susiana (Seleuceia on the Eulaeus) and probably at Doura-Europos on the Euphrates1. In Syria and Palestine we have mention of local thesauroi. In the eastern provinces of Mesopotamia and Media, as we see from the inscriptions of Doura and the Avroman parchments, the Parthians left the main features of the administration unchanged.

The relation between the strategoi and the Greek cities in their satrapies will be discussed later . It is very probable that they had control of all the temples of their satrapies and that this is why, like the Ptolemaic governors of Cyprus, they were called archiereis under Antiochus III and later, though it may have been as chief priests of the cult of the kings. But the use of this title side by side with that of strategos in Syria and Phoenicia only occurs in one inscription.

Of taxation in the Seleucid Empire we have little information. We have, however, every reason to think that it was different in different parts, being adapted to the economic conditions of each and determined by very ancient traditions, as was the case in Egypt. Accordingly we shall treat taxation in connection with our examination of the economic and social life of the different parts of the empire. We may, however, note here that not only the terminology but the leading features of the fiscal system so far as it is known to us were Greek. We do not know whether Greek was the regular language used for documents dealing with provincial government and with the taxation of the natives, but we may perhaps infer that as in Egypt so in the Seleucid Empire Greek was predominantly the official language. On the other hand, the form of documents by which the business of private persons was transacted was probably determined by the nationality of the parties. The contracts found at Doura-Europos are Greek and are drawn according to Greek law, the parties being Macedonian settlers. Those at Avroman are also in Greek: the parties, though of Iranian extraction, were descendants of military settlers probably planted in Seleucid times and undoubtedly largely hellenized. We may, however, observe that in the Parthian period we find Greek and Pahlavi documents existing side by side, a fact which shows that the once hellenized settlers were turning Iranian again. At Uruk, on the other hand, we have many tablets of the Seleucid period, written in the Babylonian language and in cuneiform. They differ neither in form nor contents from documents of an earlier date, yet some of the parries concerned, as their double names show, were either hellenized Babylonians or Babylonized Greeks. But there is reason to think these documents were also transcribed on parchments in Greek (or in Aramaic). Not only is a ‘parchment-scribe’ often mentioned as a witness, but also there have been found clay bullae bearing private or official seals, which were probably appended to parchment documents of this kind.

In any event Greek law with Greek administration penetrated with the Seleucids to countries which had hitherto lived under another system. As in Egypt, Greek law spread from the Greek settlers to the native population. This is definitely proved by the fact that as late as the fourth century A.D. the so-called Syro-Roman Law-Book which fixes the law practised in Syria at that time is founded neither on native law, nor on Roman, but upon Greek. This has recently been made quite clear by the comparison of the rules laid down by the Law-Book for succession ab intestato with those of a Hellenistic law on the same subject, a chapter from a first century BC copy of the laws of the Macedonian colony, Doura-Europos on the Euphrates, probably the laws given it by its founder Nicanor in the time of Seleucus I.

C.

THE ARMY AND FLEET

The composition and organization of the Seleucid army are very little known to us. The historians tell us of its size and composition in time of war, some inscriptions and the parchments of Doura and Avroman speak of the composition of the garrisons, and supply some information about the katoikoi or klerouchoi, the soldier occupiers of allotments of land, who, as in Egypt were reservists .

The standing army was not large, the utmost efforts could not raise more than 70,000 men. This is to be explained by the difficulty of provisioning and moving about a bigger army, the absolute need of recruiting for it only efficient soldiers who really would fight, the necessity of drawing the greater part of the recruits from material upon which the king could rely, that is the military settlers from within the empire, who could be opposed on the one hand to the mercenaries, on the other to the native levies raised mostly from Iranian and Anatolian tribes. Finally, there was the enormous cost of paying and supporting the army.

Unfortunately we do not know what was the pay of a soldier on active service nor that of those serving in garrisons. Cavalry received three times the pay of infantry, mercenaries were probably better paid than soldiers from among the military settlers or than the native levies. The Seleucids had to meet keen competition in hiring mercenaries and even the military settlers might go over to their rivals. Further, the number of experienced officers was limited, and 1 good officer cost a great deal and was not tied to any particular country. It is thus no wonder that the Seleucids were often unable to find the money for their army on a war footing and had either to seek the help of their ‘ friends ’ or utilize temple funds. A highly developed military technique required great expenditure on military bases, arsenals, siege-trains, a remount and horse-breeding department, war-chariots, elephants to be fed and looked after, to say nothing of expenses on the construction and upkeep of naval bases. The main centre of the land forces was Apamea near the chief capital Antioch and not far from great forests which could provide timber; iron and copper probably came down from the mines on the Black Sea. The horse-breeding centre was in Media, a fact which explains the efforts made by the Seleucids to keep that province at all costs and hellenize it as much as possible.

The Seleucid army consisted of cavalry and infantry. The cavalry, as in the Ptolemaic and other Hellenistic kingdoms, besides receiving higher pay, was specially privileged and ranked before the infantry. A letter begins ‘King Antiochus (III) to the strategoi, hipparchs, leaders of the infantry, soldiers and others,’ i.e. the civil population (?). In time of peace the standing army was divided between the capital, being the station of the king’s guard, and the military bases and principal points d’appui in the provinces, which were garrisoned. The army on a war footing falls into two parts, the regular cavalry and infantry as against auxiliary units and the corps concerned with special arms. The regular army was nominally composed of Macedonians and was recruited from the Macedonian and Greek population of the empire, mainly from the military settlements both urban and agricultural. In the Macedonian cavalry we hear of the Companions, the Royal Regiment and the so-called ayima. We cannot draw clear lines between these groups. It seems that in the regular cavalry which included the royal guard there was a large proportion of Iranians probably recruited from Iranian military settlers. There was also the heavy cavalry formation of the kataphraktoi with man and horse protected by armour. We also have mention of bodies of horsemen called Tarentines (special type of cavalry, each man leading two horses), Scythians, Dahae and Arabs on their dromedaries, the Elephant corps and that survival from the ancient East, scythed-chariots.

The strength of the infantry lay in the Macedonian phalanx and in the Hypaspistae which may have belonged to the king’s guard. The light infantry consisted of mercenaries, Greeks, Cretans and men from Asia Minor (Pamphylians, Pisidians, Carians, Cilicians, Mysians), Cypriotes, Thracians, Illyrians and Gauls. Special corps were the slingers (Thracians and Kurds), archers (Mysians, Elymaeans, Medes, Persians) and javelin men (Lydians). So motley was a Seleucid army, and there were doubtless other corps of which our sources do not inform us. The mercenary Greeks and Anatolians were an important source of strength, and after the battle of Magnesia the Romans were careful to forbid the Seleucids to recruit troops within the Roman sphere of influence. It was impossible to cut off entirely the flow of mercenaries, but Rome did put an end to regular organized recruiting outside the boundaries of the Seleucid Empire. But from the days of Seleucus I and Antiochus I the mainstay of the army had been the Macedonians and Greeks settled in great masses within the boundaries of the empire, in Asia Minor, in Syria, in Mesopotamia and Babylonia, in Media, Persis and Elymais. Unfortunately we cannot determine the number of these immigrants. But the fact that the Macedonian phalanx at the battle of Raphia numbered 20,000 men, at Magnesia 16,000, at the review at Daphne again 20,000, that to these numbers we must add the Macedonian cavalry, the city garrisons and the military police recruited from the same Graeco-Macedonian stratum of the population, shows how great must have been this population which was officially classed as Macedonians and Greeks. It is true that certain native elements soon began to mingle with this population; no doubt, as the Avroman parchments show, many Iranians also became military settlers; no doubt from the time of Antiochus III natives (e.g. Jews) were occasionally recruited as military settlers; but, for all this, the number of Macedonians and Greeks in the Seleucid Empire must have been very great. We must assume that military service was demanded not only of the soldiers who received land from the king but also of the Greek and Macedonian population of the cities. But what were the exact duties to the state of either class unfortunately we do not know.

The evidence for the organization of the katoikoi is contained in a few inscriptions from Asia Minor. The soldiers or officers resident in any given place were distinguished from the other Macedonians and enrolled on military lists. Each soldier received a plot of land (kleros) perhaps in free possession but more probably against some payment. In exceptional cases soldiers received immunity from land tax or tithe on the harvest. The parchments found at Doura show that the plots of land, of which katoikoi may hold more than one, pass by inheritance, may even pass to women and may be sold. The rights of inheritance are limited: in default of heirs within certain degrees the property reverts to the king, and this may too have happened if the settler failed to fulfil his various obligations. If this was so then the land always remained in theory the king’s property, but our documents do not prove it. During peace part of the katoikoi serve in garrisons receiving pay, others may be employed in training or may be cadets, the remainder cultivate their allotments. From these scattered facts we can gather what enormous expenditure was involved in establishing each military settlement. From the accounts of the refoundation of Lysimacheia and the planting of a Jewish colony in Asia Minor by Antiochus III we see that not only had grants of land to be made to the settlers but they must be given stathmoi, houses to live in, and helped to stock their farms and guaranteed, for a time at least, certain immunities from taxation.

The inscription of Mnesimachus at Sardes and the inscription dating from the time of Antiochus II which tell of a sale of lands to Laodice give us some idea of the sources from which the Seleucids made good their enormous expenses for the upkeep of their standing army and their military settlements. We know from Plutarch that Eumenes, Alexander’s secretary, got money to pay his army by selling to his officers lands formerly belonging to the Persian barons. The need of money for the same purpose explains in large part the way the Seleucids disposed or land wholesale to cities, members of their own family, army officers, probably receiving payment even for lands granted as fiefs. In the Mnesimachus inscription the revenues (in gold) from the lands granted or sold to the officers of the army do not go to the local exchequer but to this and that battalion (chiliarchy). Here the chiliarchy is not a part of the active army, still less is it a division of a satrapy, but rather a definite group of military settlers belonging to such and such a chiliarchy both in time of peace and in war. The money went partly for the needs of the katoikoi (e.g. the orphans’ fund and various sorts of pensions), partly to pay those soldiers of the chiliarchy who were actually on service in garrisons or as military police.

We know even less of the Seleucid fleet. Antiochus III confronted Rome with so imposing a naval force that the Romans found it necessary to put into the peace-treaty a clause confining the sphere of action of the Seleucid fleet to Asiatic waters. There was a special squadron maintained by the Seleucids in the Persian Gulf. But the fleet had no decisive importance for the empire and gained no laurels in war. It co-operated with the active army, protected military transports which carried mercenaries and was a considerable factor in the political and commercial life of the period. How the royal fleet was equipped and maintained we are very ill-informed. It is possible that the system of trierarchies also existed in the Seleucid Empire, that is to say that the ships were built, equipped and maintained by particular groups of individuals. In the second book of the Maccabees (iv, 19 sqq.} there is a curious story of how Jason, a candidate for the Jewish High-priesthood, sent three hundred drachmae to Antiochus Epiphanes for sacrifices to Heracles and how his envoys asked that the money should be used for equipping triremes.

It is possible that the general command of the naval bases and the navy itself was in the hands of a controller of the naval ports. At least Athenaeus who bears that title under Antiochus I not only holds wide tracts of land granted him by the king but plays a great part in protecting the Greek cities of Asia Minor against the Galatians (about 274 BC). Separate squadrons were under the command of admirals (nauarchoi).

D.

THE ECONOMIC POLICY OF THE SELEUCIDS

Our lack of information about the Seleucid Empire, the king’s policy and efforts on behalf of it makes us unable to form any definite idea of the objects to which they directed their economic policy. One of the chief items in their revenues, little as we know about it in detail, was undoubtedly the revenue derived from taxes on commerce. The great trade-routes of the ancient world which joined Central Asia, India and Arabia with the Mediterranean, both by sea and by land, passed through the Seleucid Empire. The Ptolemies had to make great efforts to divert part of the Arabian and Indian trade from routes under Seleucid control to routes in their own hands, that is to the Red Sea ports of Egypt on the one side and to those of Palestine, Phoenicia and Coele-Syria on the other. The loss of these last provinces to Antiochus III was undoubtedly a very severe blow to the Ptolemies and made them pay special attention to developing the sea trade between Egypt and India by Arabia. But for the Seleucids the reunion in their hands of the whole Syro-Palestinian coast-line nearly made up for the loss of Asia Minor and its ports, due to the war between Antiochus III and Rome. Control over this coast kept the empire alive. During the first period of the empire’s existence, down to the end of Antiochus Ill’s reign, the Seleucids were specially concerned in keeping in their own hands both the sea route from India by the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the land routes which from China, Central Asia and India crossed the Iranian plateau to Mesopotamia. The ancient trade-routes had been confirmed and regulated by the Persians and taken over from them by Alexander who set his chief colonies all along them: they were not neglected by the Seleucids. Intercourse with India under Seleucus I and Antiochus I, in spite of its having escaped their political control, was constant and lively. We find proof of this in the work of Megasthenes and Daimachus and their embassies to the courts of Chandragupta and Amitrochates in India, and particularly in the expedition of Patrocles, a close associate of the first Seleucids, who explored the trade route from the Caspian to the Caucasus and Black Sea and collected in his book very valuable information both about the shores of the Caspian and about India, information of which Eratosthenes made use1. Still farther penetrated Demodamas of Miletus, ‘a general under Seleucus and Antiochus who crossed the Jaxartes and raised altars to the Didymean Apollo’. The Seleucids, particularly Antiochus I both before and after his father’s death, made very great efforts to hellenize as much as possible Media, Parthia and Ariana, and to restore and support Alexander’s principal foundations along the far-eastern trade routes, Alexandria Ariana (Herat), Antiochia Margiana (Merv), Alexandria in Arachosia (Candahar), and Alexandria on the Etymandrus (Helmund). Many cities were founded and maintained by them in north-eastern Iran: we have mentions of Antioch in Scythia and Alexandreschate on the Jaxartes.

The efforts of the Seleucids to maintain permanent connection with the Far East were by no means in vain. Not even the defection of Bactria, and subsequently of Parthia, cut it off. This is proved by the recent discovery in Northern Mongolia of woollen textiles from Syria, and by the strong probability that Hellenistic art exercised direct influence on the development of Chinese art under the Han dynasty. There had been a large import of Greek manufactures into the nearer Iranian countries even under the Persians: under the Seleucids it was a regular thing: witness the Rhodian amphora handles found at Susa. Both the sea trade to India and the chief-land routes from the same country and from Central Asia had from time immemorial converged upon Babylonia near the mouth of the two rivers. Here Seleucus I founded the second capital of his kingdom Seleuceia on the Tigris in a situation more convenient and favourable than that of Babylon for concentrating in it the Asiatic trade. But Seleuceia lay too far from Greece and the Mediterranean to be the chief capital of the whole empire. This distinction therefore fell to Antioch on the Orontes with its port Seleuceia in Pieria. Once Antioch was founded, the chief care of the Seleucids was to join their eastern and western capitals by convenient and safe roads, and make this route more attractive and cheaper than the desert route to the ports of Palestine and Phoenicia. They therefore made two chief roads connecting Antioch with the great Mesopotamian roads of the Persian kings; one ran from Antioch to Zeugma on the Euphrates, thence by a bridge to Edessa and Nisibis to join the Persian road that led to the Iranian satrapies, the other also by Zeugma but across the Mesopotamian plain by Anthemusias and Ichnae to Nicephorium and so by the great Persian road to Babylon and Seleuceia on the Tigris.

Seleuceia in Pieria never succeeded in attracting a large trade, and the chief outlets of the eastern trade still remained the great ports of Asia Minor; moreover the road through Asia Minor remained the main road from the Seleucid Empire to the Greek world and the Aegean, as the sea route from the North Syrian ports could always be blocked by the Ptolemies. The early Seleucids accordingly paid on the whole most attention to the Persian trade routes through Asia Minor, in which they improved and developed the net-work of roads, securing the chief stations and intersections with Macedonian colonies.

The position changed entirely in the latter period of the empire, during the second century BC. Intercourse with the East, in spite of the Parthian advance, was not interrupted, as is shown by the fact that the finds in Mongolia belong to the last century BC. There was, however, no longer any reason to prefer the northern routes to the southern. Accordingly the desert route from Seleuceia to the ports of Palestine came to life again, especially when the road along the Euphrates described above was closed to wholesale trade by the plundering practices of the Arab sheikhs who, during the political anarchy of the second half of the second century and the beginning of the last century BC, had seized the chief points in the Mesopotamian plain. This, and the continual interruptions due to war with Parthia, made the sea route to India by the Persian Gulf and its continuation the desert routes to the ports of Palestine more important. Part of the Arabian trade had always passed through Seleucid territory: witness the large quantity of Arabian sweet-smelling gums presented by Seleucus I and Antiochus I to the temple of Apollo at Didyma . Now, by a new development, it finally escaped from Ptolemaic control and went either by Petra to Gaza or by Damascus to the ports of Phoenicia, lately fallen into Seleucid hands. Finally, the exclusion of the Seleucids from Asia Minor and the revival of commercial life in Palestine and Phoenicia brought these ports into direct communication with the Greek world and left Alexandria on one side. This explains the lively intercourse between the Seleucids and Delos, Rhodes, and the cities of Greece, and the appearance of large numbers of Phoenician and Syrian traders both at Delos and at the Italian Delos, Puteoli.

How the upkeep of the roads was organized, how they were made safe and what imposts there were upon commerce in the Seleucid Empire we know most imperfectly. The roads, it appears, were, at any rate in Asia Minor, partly the king’s highways, partly the charge of cities. In the Pergamene kingdom their upkeep was the duty of the owners of the land through which they passed, and it is quite likely that this rule was taken over from the Seleucids, who had it from the Persians. The Persians too had made for the Seleucids the organization of posts along the king’s highways .

We do not know whether the Seleucids did much to improve agriculture and manufactures. We have a chance mention that they introduced the cultivation of ammonium and nard into the empire. There can be no doubt that the settlement of large masses of Greek and Macedonian colonists in all parts of the empire must have had its influence in the introduction of Greek methods of agriculture and in the enlargement of the area under cultivation. So the appearance of Greek artisans and manufacturers in the commercial cities brought about a certain hellenization of the goods manufactured, and their export went mainly to countries entirely dominated by Greek taste and Greek habits.

Finally, trade must have been facilitated by the abundance of money coined in the Seleucid Empire. Whereas the Ptolemies began by coining on the Rhodian standard and then passed to the Milesian, that is the Phoenician, the Seleucids adopted and kept almost to the end the Attic standard which was accepted by the other kingdoms of Asia Minor and the Far East. In the worldmarket Seleucid currency competed successfully with Ptolemaic, but neither of them became world-wide or even drove out of circulation the coins of the Greek cities and of the lesser Hellenistic kingdoms.

III.

THE EMPIRE: ASIA MINOR

. Asia Minor, with its mountains and mountain-valleys, its steppe-like tablelands, luxuriant river valleys and fertile coastline close-set with admirable harbours open to the north, west and south, had always been a country of contrasts with one facade to the East, another to the West. In its geography, economics, nationality, social structure and civilization, it has from the earliest days of its secular past presented a most miscellaneous conglomerate: the cities of the coast with their developed culture of corn, wine and fruit, with their ever-growing manufactures and commerce; the temples of the coast region and of the interior also great centres of intensive agriculture and cattle-raising, manufacture and commerce; the great estates of the kings and nobles, successively Hittite, Phrygian, Median, Persian, who lived in fortified burghs and castles, surrounded like the commercial cities with villages of tillers of the soil, ploughmen, vine-dressers and herdsmen, serfs of the king and of the urban aristocracy; the mountain tribes of cattle-keepers and bandits, living their primitive tribal life; such had from the beginning been the social and economic ensemble of Asia Minor.

No less diverse were the races: an ancient autochthonous population, invading Hittites and Thracians, certain Semitic wedges, Persians during the time of Persian rule, Greeks in the coast cities,—all these were mingled in Asia Minor. Diverse too was its civilization. Babylonian and Egyptian influences, the mighty Hittite culture and its later offshoots, those of the Phrygians, Lydians, Lycians and Carians mixed with Minoan and Achaean elements, finally the rich and varied Ionian society at once Greek and Oriental, all combine to stamp a special impress of variety upon what we call Anatolian civilization.

This was the general character of the country which the Seleucids took over from their predecessors, though, as we have seen, they never held Bithynia and Pontus, and fought a losing battle for much of the rest. The permanent possessions of the Seleucids were the Troad and the wide belt running along the middle of the peninsula and joining its western coast to the centre of the empire in Northern Syria. The description of the political entity Asia Minor in official documents of the Seleucid period is ‘the kings, dynasts, cities and tribes’. Within the Asia Minor part of their empire the Seleucid kings distinguish between symmachia, the territory of their allies inhabited by citizens of Greek states and their subjects, and what they probably called ‘royal land’, the territory of the kingdom inhabited by the king’s direct subjects.

What the Seleucids and Ptolemies exactly understood by the term symmachia is not quite clear to us. Whether it consisted only of the ancient Greek cities with which the kings had definite treaties of alliance or included also the cities founded by the kings themselves and indebted to them for their constitution and laws we do not know. Also we have little information as to the relations between the Seleucids and individual cities. The official policy of all Hellenistic kings, what they proclaimed abroad, as did the Romans after them, was that they protected or restored the cities’ freedom. But the fact that they all kept promising this freedom to the cities in their enemies’ hands shows that this guarantee of freedom was nothing more than propaganda. The underlying reality was quite different. The degree of freedom and autonomy allowed to the cities by the Seleucids and the other Hellenistic kings was precisely defined by the political situation. The weaker the king, the more need he had of support and sympathy from the Greek city, the more likely he was to refrain from interfering in the city’s internal affairs and autonomy and to lower or waive his demands for tribute and imposts.

In any case the king’s principle was that autonomy, democracy and immunity from tribute and imposts were the definite gift of the king, and the guiding rule was that the king’s will is the highest law and the king’s decree overrides any decision of the people. ‘The cities under our dominion’ is the official term used by the king to define his relations to the Greek cities. And he claims the right to give orders to them when necessary. This rule is recognized by the cities, and they occasionally insert in their resolutions a clause ‘if the king shall not make other arrangements in this matter.’ With all this the king may show the most courteous consideration for the necessities of the cities, may make them from time to time the most generous presents, as those made by Seleucus I and Antiochus I to Miletus, confirm or grant them freedom, autonomy and immunity (Smyrna, Miletus, Erythrae). On the other hand, however, the same Seleucus I and Antiochus I interfere with a high hand in the internal affairs of free cities as readily as Antigonus or Lysimachus, and if their successors do not, it is because of the political situation rather than of their personal dispositions.

The normal position of most of the old Greek cities of Asia Minor within the empire of the Seleucids was that the city preserved its constitution and life ordered after its own laws, but was obliged to obey the king’s commands and pay tribute and imposts to the king’s treasury. Subjection to the king was most clearly exemplified in the payment of tribute (phoros). This is very clearly brought out by the complaints made by the envoys of Antiochus III to Rome and the Roman arrangement that after the battle of Magnesia the cities that used to pay tribute to Antiochus should receive freedom, while those that paid to Attalus should still pay to Eumenes. Most interesting on this point is an inscription of one of the Greek cities on the Hellespont in honour of Corragus, strategos of that region. The inscription probably belongs to the time when the towns of the Hellespont had passed from Antiochus III to Rome and, as having been ‘conquered by force of arms’ and forced to surrender (deditio), had lost all their rights and were afterwards handed over by Rome to Eumenes. This appears to the present writer to be the right interpretation of the inscription. The position was desperate. The war had ruined both city and citizens, and they were absolutely at the mercy of the conqueror. The king restores to the city what it possessed before: (1) its laws and its ‘ancestral constitution,’ (2) the temples and sacred plots of land, with money for worship and for administering the city, (3) oil for the young men and (4) all it had before. Further, he confirms the citizens’ rights to their holdings of land and to those who had none land is granted from the king’s treasury. Finally, immunity from all imposts is guaranteed for three years, extended to five at the request of the governor. Besides all this there are many presents made by the king and personal gifts from the governor.

The inscription shows that under Antiochus III and probably earlier the city had enjoyed freedom and autonomy but paid tribute to the royal treasury, probably not in one single payment made by the city, but separately under various heads. Some of these payments the king returned to the city for the expenses of worship and the like. The treasury also allows a certain quantity of olive oil for the needs of the city’s palaestrae and gymnasia. This would suggest that the oil produced in the city’s territory passed either all (as a monopoly) or in part (as an impost) into the king’s treasury. The private property of the citizens in their own pieces of land is recognized: but side by side with this private land there is in the city territory a considerable amount of royal land. The city as such owns the temples and their lands, but apparently has no other landed property. The same arrangement of imposts maybe deduced from the letter of Antiochus I to Erythrae. The city receives immunity from all tributes and imposts, including a special contribution exacted for the defence of the country against the Gauls. Still this immunity scarcely included freedom from the payment of lump sums as presents to the king, ‘crowns’ or ‘gold for presents.’ This probably had to be provided both by cities subject to tribute and those immune from it.

The Seleucids, as we said before, did much towards the urbanization of those regions within the country which were in their possession. Part of their settlements were military colonies, part cities with a civilian population. Of the military colonies some were organized as cities or afterwards attained to that rank, others were villages (komai) before the Macedonian settlers came, and remained so. To draw a line between one class and the other is very difficult. The case of Magnesia by Sipylus shows that even ancient Greek cities might be converted into military settlements, and yet keep their old civil population. The colonization of Central Asia Minor by the Seleucids was undoubtedly very intensive: we know the names of not less than thirty Seleucid cities and settlements. .

This business of settlements was complicated and expensive. The modus operandi is shown us by one or two chance documents. Lysimacheia, which had been the capital of Lysimachus in Thrace, was restored by Antiochus III. For this purpose he summoned together the former inhabitants of the city, some of whom he redeemed from being prisoners of war, invited new settlers, gave them cattle and agricultural implements, and fortified the town at his own expense. Another type of settlement is represented by the story of the foundation of Nysa on the Maeander. Antiochus I created this city by settling in it the population of three neighbouring communities. The town received the privilege of asylia afterwards confirmed by Antiochus III. This was the ordinary and frequent method of synoikismos. So was created the town of Apollonis under one of the Attalids. The settlers were given a subvention out of the funds of the person who directed the synoikismos. Finally, the foundation of a purely military colony is illustrated by the story in Josephus how Antiochus III settled Jewish colonists from Mesopotamia and Babylonia in Lydia and Phrygia. Whether we have to do with a historical fact or with mere fiction and whether the letter of Antiochus to Zeuxis quoted by Josephus is genuine or not (its style is singularly like the letter from the same Antiochus to the city of Amyzon) is immaterial for our purposes. There is no doubt that the letter gives us exactly the normal procedure when the Seleucids founded a military colony. By a resolution of the council of the king’s ‘friends,’ it was decided to settle in some fortified posts where such settlements were especially needed, two thousand families with their belongings. The settlers were guaranteed autonomy, sites for houses, allotments for agriculture and planting vineyards, immunity from taxation upon their lands for ten years, grain to keep them the first year, support for the representatives of the new communities and a guarantee of their safety—presumably in the form of fortifications. All these measures so closely agree with the reorganization of the town on the Hellespont carried out by Corragus and the procedure at Lysimacheia that we need have no doubt as to their authenticity.

The organization of the new cities is not likely to have differed essentially from that of any Greek city. Each had its constitution granted by the king and the same laws. Whether there was always in the city a representative of the central power, an epistates, or only in certain cities and for particular times, as under the Ptolemies, we cannot tell. Nor do we know anything of the organization of the military settlements that were not cities.

The new cities arose on lands which the Seleucid kings took over from their predecessors by right of conquest.

But apart from the royal land allotted to cities and military settlements the king had left in his hands enormous stretches of tilled land which had formerly belonged, as we have said, to native or immigrant proprietors and inhabited by the so-called ‘king’s folk’ (laoi basilikoi). The centre of each estate was the manor-house or castle of the proprietor. These lands had been even before Seleucid times the property of the king held of him by the Hittite, Phrygian, Lydian and Persian barons. The title of the temples to their lands and serfs was sounder. But even in this case, as the representative of the god upon earth was the king, the land in the last resort was at the king’s disposal. Large tracts of land also belonged to the king in the near neighbourhood of the Greek cities. Such for instance was the land given by Ptolemy Philadelphus to Miletus. Such lands are mentioned in inscriptions dealing with their sale or grant to Greek cities, members of the roya1 family and high officials or friends of the king.

In the years which followed Alexander’s death lands were sometimes seized by his officers, but later on the lands were precisely registered and their enjoyment systematized. In their need of cash to pay their army, the Seleucids used to sell some of the lands to the Greek cities, to members of their family, and probably to other persons possessing large sums of money. Rich men were not rare in the Seleucid Empire, mostly in the king’s entourage. Hermeias the Carian, the grand vizier of Antiochus III, was rich enough to pay the troops when at the time of Molon’s insurrection the king himself lacked the means to do so. Dionysius, epistolographos of Antiochus IV, could send to take part in a procession at Daphne a thousand slaves each with a silver dish in his hand worth a thousand drachmae or more. We must believe that Laodice, first wife of Antiochus II, and Aristodicides, the friend of Antiochus I, his admiral Athenaeus and Larichus, their contemporary, and Mnesimachus of the Sardian inscription were no poorer than those other grandees. The lands that these persons bought; became in most cases their private property. Inasmuch as outside the Greek cities fee simple did not exist, one condition of the purchase was that the land must be ascribed to the territory of some city.

Often, however, the lands were granted not in fee simple but as fiefs, perhaps in return for the payment of one lump sum. The best example is perhaps the Mnesimachus inscription in which we see how the practice of granting fiefs exists side by side with the practice of providing officers with allotments, military kleroi. Mnesimachus received three estates with three villages and two allotments in the territory of two of these villages. ‘When the division took place, Pytheus and Adrastus (probably two officers) received as their separate property the manor-house with the serfs’ houses round it and gardens near one village, and arable land with gardens and serfs near the other.’ It is evident that the legal position of the village and land granted as a fief is different from that of a military allotment but in what the difference consists we do not know. Both pay rent to the king in gold. Both are part of the estate of Mnesimachus and are accordingly mortgaged to the temple at Sardes, possibly to raise the money for the lump sum to the king.

How arbitrarily the Seleucids disposed of lands which they for some reason considered to be theirs, and how greedily their ‘ friends ’ pounced upon them although they had only just come into possession of the royal house we can see from the story of the so-called Anaitis, a well-known tract of land on the coast opposite Samos. There were many claimants for it, especially the Samians, at the moment when Antiochus II seized it for a short space. The grandees evidently thought that it was crown land, that is that they might make petition for it. So the officers of Antiochus divided it up without delay and the Samians had to make very great efforts before they could establish their right to it in the king’s eyes. This meant a long and difficult embassy which began by missing the king at Ephesus and finally caught him at Sardes. During the occupation power was in the hands of a phrourarchos, and the distribution of the land was managed by a dioiketes.

The chief characteristic of these lands was that they were the territories of villages and that near or in the villages were the fortified manor-houses of the holders of the villages and lands. In the Laodice inscription and in an inscription from Magnesia these manor-houses are called baris like the castle of Hyrcanus the son of Tobias in the land of the Ammonites. The inhabitants of the villages (mandrai) were no doubt adscripti glebae and bound to render the feudal proprietor a certain proportion of the harvest and also probably a certain amount of labour. More exact information as to these obligations is lacking. The technical word for these people was laoi. How far besides receiving the rents from these villeins the landholders cultivated their own demesne with the villeins’ labour and that of their own slaves we cannot say. The same laoi, superintended by the royal oikonomoi or dioiketai, also tilled the land which remained in the king’s possession. Whether there already existed in Seleucid times the custom of letting great tracts of land with their laoi we do not know. But when it was embodied in the territory of a city, they went with it and were then numbered with the paroikoi or katoikoi who had from all time lived on the city territory working on the land which belonged to the citizens. Finally, a similar position, with perhaps some extra obligations, was that of the peasants who tilled the wide-stretching temple-lands.

These temples, as has been said, were a peculiarity of many parts of the Near East. In Asia Minor they are found near the Greek coast cities, in the interior and near the ancient native cities. Even after their priesthood and cults had been in large part hellenized, they kept a certain autonomy. Indeed many of them were never brought into touch with Greek cities at all. Their lands were regarded by the earlier Seleucids as not beyond the king’s reach, and were disposed of by the kings as it is shown by their action at Baetocaece and Aezani  But, as in Egypt, we find that when the dynasty began to fail there was a return to the former state of things. The later Seleucids return their lands and privileges to the temples and many of them once more become the feudal possessions of sacerdotal dynasties. This we see most of all in Syria as the Seleucids had lost Asia Minor before their final stage of weakness.

The ancient Greek cities, the new urban foundations of the Seleucids, temples, royal estates, estates of the royal family and the grandees did not fill up the whole area of Asia Minor. Many tribes living in the mountains and valleys of Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, Isauria and Lycaonia, nominally formed part of the empire, probably paid tribute and supplied soldiers, but for all that continued to live their own independent tribal life, of which we know very little. Finally, from the time when the Persian Empire was falling to pieces Asia Minor had contained petty states, centred in tribes, cities or temples governed by local dynasts of native or of Greek origin. In the fourth century there were many of them: the houses of Gongylus and Demaratus, the tyrants of Aeolis, Atarneus, Zelea and the like, and, most important of all, the dynasts Hecatomnus and Mausolus in Caria with their capital at Halicarnassus. During the two generations after Alexander we hear little of these states. But from the time of Antiochus II they begin to appear everywhere. At Cibyra in Pisidia there is reigning in 189 BC a local dynast Moagetes; Olba in Cilicia is ruled in the third century by the priest-kings of the house of Teucer: somewhere in Cilicia there flourishes the house of Xenophanes. The Pergamene kingdom itself was to spring from such a state, and finds its closest analogue in the principality of Lysias, son of Philomelus, a Macedonian, probably descended from Lysias the general of Seleucus I. Rulers of this house probably founded the cities of Lysias and Philomelium in Phrygia; and it is possible that one of the line is mentioned by Polybius under the name of Lysanias, alongside of Olympichus, a dynast in the region of Mylasa, and Limnaeus whose principality is unknown.

IV

THE EMPIRE: SYRIA, MESOPOTAMIA AND BABYLONIA

Cilicia, Northern Syria and Mesopotamia became, as we have seen, the centre of the Seleucid Empire and its main support. Here too the Seleucids inherited ancient traditions and built their Syria on the foundations of an ancient civilization and a stable social, economic and religious system. Here too as in Asia Minor, even more so in fact, they found many great and flourishing commercial cities, Damascus, Aleppo, Carchemish and the like, many rich temples with developed agriculture, commerce and manufactures (the temple of Zeus near Baetocaece, Baalbek, Emesa, Bambyce Hierapolis and so on), any number of rich and populous villages, such as were so characteristic of Syria in the later, Roman period, a number of mountain tribes and of tribes on the borders of the desert living by their cattle and if occasion served by plunder.

The Seleucid policy in Syria and Mesopotamia has already been described: it was a steady policy of founding cities and bringing in Macedonians and Greeks. Syria and Mesopotamia were to be made a second Macedonia but a Macedonia of cities and fortresses not of tribes and villages. Seleucus I, Antiochus I and later Antiochus IV pursued this policy steadily and with energy. To Seleucus I was due the foundation of the political capital of the empire, Antioch on the Orontes, its military capital Apamea in Syria and its commercial capitals Seleuceia in Pieria and Laodicea. Round these were scattered dozens of settlements, cities or almost cities, like the group—Larissa, Casiana, Megara, Apollonia and the rest—which Strabo describes as near Apamea and assessed along with it.

It is very difficult for us to get an idea of these cities and of their relation to the native population. Their ruins are in part excellently preserved but still await their investigator. What is on the surface belongs to the Roman or Byzantine period, ruins of buildings and inscriptions. The four capitals of the empire were apparently quite new creations; perhaps there were old villages or groups of villages on the sites. Many of the smaller cities were probably equally new foundations. But in many other instances founding a city meant settling Macedonians and Greeks in an already existing and flourishing urban centre or in a town-like settlement closely connected with one of the ancient and powerful temples. We shall only learn something about each of these settlements when at last we begin systematically to explore their ruins.

Equally scanty is our knowledge of the inner organization of the Greek cities in Syria. Even of the capital Antioch, which by the time of Antiochus Epiphanes had grown into an enormous city, we know considerably less than of its Egyptian rival Alexandria. Like Alexandria and like the other cities of Syria Antioch was made up of many nationalities. How the non-Greek inhabitants of the city, Syrians, Jews and the like were organized, we do not know. The Greek part of it was no doubt organized like a Greek polls with tribes and eighteen demes, a city council, colleges of magistrates. Colleges of ephebes with their gymnasia and palaestrae, probably with their gymnasiarchs and cosmetae, clubs and associations of various sorts, are known to have existed at Antioch. Some change in this organization was made by Antiochus Epiphanes. As a great admirer of Rome, he not only tried to romanize the civic life of Antioch, introducing tribunes and aediles, but evidently wished to make Antioch not only his Rome, the centre of an empire for himself, as later Rome was for Augustus, but also the metropolis of the other Greek cities of the empire. The cities he founded were to him colonies of the great city in which he was both king and chief magistrate.

The story of Seleuceia in Pieria is very typical: at the beginning of the third century probably its constitution hardly differed from that of Antioch. In 229 BC it received freedom from Seleucus II and acts as a free city in its relations with Athens. But it is quite characteristic that this very liberty is granted to the city for the second time by Antiochus Grypus in 109 BC.

The only site from which we can gain some idea of the history and constitution of a Seleucid settlement is Doura-Europos on the Euphrates, part of which has been recently excavated by M. Cumont. The town was founded on the site of an ancient Assyrian fortress and perhaps of a Syrian village. Its first settlers were Macedonians, soldiers. For them there were built houses, civic buildings and temples, the whole surrounded by a strong wall. Inside the town was a citadel occupied evidently by a garrison to protect the town, command the crossing of the Euphrates and keep in order the neighbouring nomads. The land round the town and perhaps the land on the other side of the Euphrates was divided into ekades and kleroi. Perhaps twenty kleroi went to the ekas. This was called after the name of the officer who presumably first allotted the kleroi among their original holders and was the commander of that group of klerouchoi. The kleroi kept as in Egypt the names of their original holders and passed by inheritance. Whether the holders paid any impost and what were their obligations in return for receiving a kleros we do not know. The mode of descent by inheritance, even to women, was governed by the laws of the city. If direct heirs as provided by law failed the lot again became the property of the king. So likewise in all probability in case of failure on the part of a klerouchos to fulfil his obligations to the king.

The group of settlers in the new urban centre was organized as a Greek polis. On its foundation it received of the king a constitution and laws. One chapter of those laws, on inheritance ab intestato, we have in a later copy upon parchment. The town had its council and its magistrates, a popular assembly is not mentioned, the chief was the strategos either elected or nominated by the king. In one inscription of the Parthian period he is also the epistates of the city, that is the commander of the garrison. The Macedonians in the city side by side with their political organization retained their religious and social organization based upon the tribe with a division into gene at the head of which stood genearchoi. In the city there was a bank-treasury and a special official institution for registering and authenticating private contracts ; at its head stood a chreophylax, probably a state official. Part of his business was to exact the duties imposed on the completion of various kinds of transactions.

The Macedonians undoubtedly from the very beginning shared the town with Syrians, whoever these Syrians may have been, inhabitants of the village which already existed on the site, or traders and artisans who came and settled there. But the fact that one of the oldest temples was dedicated to the local goddess Nanaia, identified with the Graeco-Macedonian Artemis, suggests that important and wealthy Syrians lived in the city from the moment of its foundation. The temple of Nanaia had its own resources and probably its own landed property. A later inscription mentions a special temple-treasurer.

The documents found at Doura are very closely allied to the parchments from Avroman in Media and lead us to think that the conditions under which that province was settled differed little from those in Mesopotamia. It is, however, probable that in Media the military settlers, especially those outside the cities, were not Macedonians or Greeks but Iranians.

South of Mesopotamia lay Babylonia and beyond it Susiana, two important satrapies, governed by strategi. We know rather more of Babylonia than of the other eastern parts of the empire. A few Greek inscriptions, the ruins of some buildings of Hellenistic date and, most important of all, thousands of cuneiform tablets of the same period mostly from Babylon and Uruk have been found. Very few of these have been read and published and even fewer translated, but we can draw certain conclusions about the history of Babylon and Babylonia under Seleucid rule, and, when the tablets scattered through Europe and America are published and translated, we shall doubtless know a great deal more.

From the time of Seleucus I the capital of the Babylonian, or as the tablets call it the Akkadian, satrapy was the royal city of Seleuceia founded by Seleucus I on the Tigris, on the site of the ancient Opis, to be the second or even the first commercial capital of the kingdom. Here lived the Governor-general of the East, under the early Seleucids usually the heir-apparent, with his staff and chancery, his guard and army, also the strategos of the satrapy and the epistates of the city, the commander probably of the strong garrison. No doubt even in military affairs Seleuceia was of great importance as the base for numerous expeditions to the East and also for the navy on the Persian Gulf. The city had an enormous and heterogeneous population, probably larger than that of Antioch. In it lived a certain number of Macedonians and Greeks, many Syrians and an enormous part of the population formerly in Babylon: there were also a good many Jews. For a time Seleuceia existed side by side with Babylon but under Antiochus I a large part of the population of Babylon was forcibly removed to Seleuceia and what was left in Babylon, with the exception of the population of the temples, was condemned to die out by lack of subsistence. The constitution of Seleuceia was probably on the same lines as that of Antioch. The Macedonians and Greeks formed a self-governing polis with a popular assembly, a council of three hundred and a gerousia, probably magistrates and everything else that made up a Greek polis. The native elements were quite separate, likewise the Syrians and Jews. In late times the city, like Seleuceia in Pieria, receives freedom and the right to coin money.

As to the position of Babylon under the early Seleucids we have some data. Under Seleucus I the city, as we have said, was not yet dead. It had a hard time under Antiochus I when it was finally sacrificed to Seleuceia and in it during the first Syrian war reigned hunger, sickness and despair: this is clearly described in the chronicle for 276-4 BC. The inhabitants of Babylon were little consoled by the restoration of their ancient temples, E-sagila and E-zida. A little earlier (287 BC) the same despair of Uruk, Akkad, Nippur is heard in a little cuneiform Babylonian poem. There is also a confused story about certain lands, cattle and other valuables referred to in the above chronicle and in a copy of an inscription of Seleucus II on a Babylonian tablet. In 280 BC the land was given by Antiochus I to Babylon, Borsippa and Kuthah to support their inhabitants, in 276 it was taken back by the king’s exchequer, under Antiochus II it was granted to his wife Laodice and her sons and by them handed back again to Babylon, Borsippa and Kuthah; finally under Seleucus II it passed to the temples. These vicissitudes probably mark the veering of early Seleucid policy towards Babylon.

A new era in the history of Babylon and the other cities of Babylonia comes in with Antiochus Epiphanes. An inscription from Babylon calls him the founder of the city and the Saviour of Asia. Under him probably the city received a considerable Greek colony, a theatre and gymnasium were built, Greek agones organized, and the new city granted a constitution and laws. From that time on we find there a strategos and an epistates. The same policy of restoration was adopted at Uruk. Many cuneiform documents mention people with double names, Greek and Babylonian, and speak of their dealings with the still wealthy temples, of the royal official who kept contracts, and of various imposts with Greek names paid by the population of the city, a salt monopoly like that in Palestine, a tax on sales and a tax on slaves. In the business documents reference is made to the king’s new laws, regulating business relations (a law about deposita) and royal currency: one of them is concerned with the affairs of a soldier-settler. But it is interesting to notice how fast the old tradition holds. The Greeks take Babylonian names; the forms of contracts even when the parties or one of them are Greek remain purely Babylonian; the old Babylonian banks survive. The temples go on playing the chief part in the economic, social and general life of the country: the language survives and the ancient cuneiform writing, though side by side with it Greek becomes the second official language for business.

Antiochus Epiphanes applied the same policy to the whole valley of the Euphrates and Tigris. We shall see below that the same policy dictates his treatment of Palestine. He has come down to us as a new Seleucus I or Antiochus I, a new city builder credited with fifteen foundations most of which received his name. But not one of them is really founded by him, or his creation. In some cities he strengthens the Greek element; but in most cases he tries to hellenize ancient oriental cities that had perhaps been left in peace by his predecessors. He is particularly fond of doing this in Babylonia: also in Cilicia and in such ancient oriental centres as Bambyce, Edessa, Nisibis and Ecbatana. This policy was forced upon him by necessity: the natural hellenization of the East had come to a standstill, the oriental element had begun to submerge the Greek, especially in the great and ancient centres of the East: the Hellenic empire of the Seleucids was threatened with collapse. Antiochus’ attempt was dictated by a desire to revive Hellenism by introducing into the chief strongholds of Orientalism a new and fresh Greek element. It was a counsel of despair. Epiphanes and Hellenism lacked the strength to put it into execution. His failure in Palestine was not exceptional. It is unlikely that he really hellenized Babylon. To stop the growth of Orientalism was beyond his strength.

The further we go eastwards the scantier becomes our information. At Susa de Morgan dug up a few inscriptions, but not all of them are published. Antioch in Persis with its purely Greek constitution and a number of other such cities in its neighbourhood (including Susa) are mentioned in an inscription from Magnesia on the Maeander, but further eastwards unbroken darkness reigns. Even the organization of Bactria, its cities and population, first under the rule of Seleucid satraps and then under local Greek kings, is absolutely unknown to us.

V.

 THE EMPIRE: PHOENICIA AND PALESTINE

For nearly a century the Ptolemies ruled almost uninterruptedly the coast of Phoenicia and Palestine: how far their authority extended into the interior behind the Phoenician coast we do not know, probably no farther than the territory of the cities they held. It went deeper into the country towards the south, certainly they held Judaea, Samaria, and Transjordania, and Egypt was probably acknowledged as suzerain by the tribes on the borders of these more or less civilized districts. All these possessions were lost to the Ptolemies after the victory of Antiochus III at Panion (200 BC) and the provinces that had been theirs passed for the next century or so to the Seleucids. These only retained effective dominion over them until the middle of the second century BC: after this begins the dissolution of this part of their empire. The cities of Phoenicia and the Palestine coast became almost independent, received freedom and asylia, and many of them fell into the hands of tyrants (Gaza, Dora, Turris Stratonis, Byblus, Tripolis, Tyre). The same thing happens in the interior, Judaea becomes independent, so too many of the tribes on its borders, in many of the hellenized towns arise dynasts and tyrants (Gamala, Philadelphia, Lysias in Lebanon, etc.). This was partly a reaction of Orientalism against Hellenism: partly the natural result of the political anarchy produced by the joint efforts of Rome and Parthia, unceasingly encouraging dynastic struggles between various members of the house of Seleucus.

In Phoenicia we must clearly distinguish between the district of Aradus and the districts of the more famous Phoenician cities, Tripolis, Byblus, Berytus, Sidon, Tyre and Ake-Ptolemais. Of the Phoenician cities the most powerful was Aradus with its large territory on the main land (Peraea) and several dependent cities. Aradus had succeeded not only in slipping out of the hands of the Ptolemies but in establishing its almost complete independence within the Seleucid empire as early as 259 BC and finally in 243.

The life of the Phoenician cities under the Ptolemies and Seleucids is little known to us. Zeno’s correspondence shows us how close was the intercourse with Egypt and what crowds of Egyptian Greeks there were in Phoenicia: we must remember that the Phoenicia of the late fourth and early third centuries BC was hellenized to a comparatively large extent. At that time Phoenicians were quite at home in Greece, in Athens, Rhodes and Corinth, and the Greeks at home in Phoenicia. We need but mention the Sidonian sarcophagi, the strong hellenization of Carthage, the Greek character of most of the Phoenician manufactures at this period. No doubt even in the fourth century there had existed in all the cities of Phoenicia strong and influential groups of Greek settlers and among the nobles it was the fashion to live as Greeks and have a Greek name. The best example of this is Philocles the well-known admiral who served first Demetrius and then Ptolemy Philadelphus. Under the Ptolemies this hellenization spread even farther and the cities probably adopted a more or less hellenized constitution which they subsequently retained under the Seleucids. Josephus speaks of the people, council and magistrates of Tyre and Sidon, and the same council and people reappear in the heading of a letter of Tyre to Delphi some time after 125 BC. We cannot tell whether these bodies only represented the Greeks living in the Phoenician cities (including hellenized Phoenicians) or the whole population of the city, but very probably some new Hellenic form of constitution was introduced under either the Ptolemies or the Seleucids.

The business life of the Phoenician cities naturally went on in its old forms. We know of the existence therein of long established firms, we know too that outside Phoenicia the merchants of the different cities acted at Athens, at Delos and in Italy as compact groups, regular guilds. It is no accident that at Delos the first appearance of these guilds is under the later Seleucids (merchants, shipowners and warehousemen from Berytus, Laodicea, merchants and shipowners from Tyre). This was the natural result, as we have noticed, of the Seleucids’ loss of Asia Minor and the freeing of the Phoenician cities from subordination to Alexandria: they were now its keen competitors.

Some interest attaches to the colonizing activity of the Phoenician cities, probably growing under the Ptolemies and producing its effects under the Seleucids. At Marissa in Palestine there certainly existed a colony of Sidonians, for the most part Greeks, with its own self-government and representatives. In the painted tombs of this city, dated about 200 BC, we have besides Phoenicians many Sidonians with Greek names and a certain Apollophanes who was archon ‘of the Sidonians in Marissa.’ We must bring this into relation with the well-known exchange of letters between Antiochus and the Sidonians at Shechem, in which these Sidonians point out the difference between themselves and the Jews and ask leave to convert the temple on Mount Gerizim into a sanctuary of Zeus. 

Such semi-Greeks from the Phoenician cities were probably scattered in groups throughout Judaea and Samaria and were (especially in Jerusalem) powerful advocates of Hellenism. The special part played by Sidon is explained by the importance of Sidon for the life of the whole coast in the fourth and third centuries BC, especially during the rule of Eshmunazar’s dynasty when Dora and Joppa belonged to Sidon and it probably had all the trade of Palestine.

As far back as the time of the Ptolemaic rule, Judaea, that is the city of Jerusalem, its territory and the adjacent district inhabited by the Jews, was surrounded by a ring of ‘Greek’ cities. Some of those were cities containing a fair number of Macedonian and Greek settlers, military and civilian, some of them ancient commercial cities of the Philistine coast which had developed along the same lines of gradual hellenization as the neighbouring cities of Phoenicia. The chief coast towns were to the south of Ake-Ptolemais: Apollonia, Joppa, Azotus, Ascalon, Anthedon, Gaza and Raphia. In Samaria the city of Samaria itself and Nysa Scythopolis had undoubtedly a considerable Greek population. In Transjordania side by side with the native sheikhs and their tribes, a group of towns with a mainly Greek population made up what was afterwards called the Decapolis. The names of Philadelphia (Rabbath-Ammon), Philoteria on Lake Gennesareth (perhaps the same as Gamala), Arsinoe in the valley of the Marsyas, reflect Ptolemaic foundations. On the other hand Pella, Dion, Gerasa (called Antioch in the reign of Antiochus III or IV), Gadara (Seleuceia), Abila (Seleuceia) and a third Seleuceia to the south-east of the waters of Merom are due to the various Seleucid kings.

We know little of the constitution of the coast towns and their relations to the Ptolemies and Seleucids: we cannot tell whether the council of five hundred at Gaza was an ancient institution or a new creation of Ptolemies or Seleucids. In the matter of tribute the coast towns were no doubt in the same position as those of Phoenicia and most of those in Asia Minor. We happen to know that at Ascalon in the time of Alexander Jannaeus (103-78 BC) a very prominent place in the town was taken by a tax-farmer; evidently tribute and taxes were farmed by auction (at first at Alexandria, then at Antioch and finally at Jerusalem) and the sum paid for them went to the state treasury.

Some light is cast on the peculiar arrangements of Transjordania by the correspondence of Zeno. Side by side with the flourishing Greek city of Philadelphia we find a native sheikh (an ethnarch or strategos in the later terminology—probably borrowed by the Romans from their Hellenistic predecessors), who is at the same time governor of the district and commander of a unit of Ptolemaic forces. This sheikh lives probably not in the city but in his castle (baris) and that of Tobias, Zeno’s correspondent, and of his descendants, who played a great part in the history of Palestine in the second half of the third century BC, has survived to our day in ruins.

In this circle of Greek towns Judaea was undoubtedly a survival of the past, one of those temple states of which there were so many in other parts of the Seleucid Empire. The structure of this temple state with its centre at Jerusalem is fairly well known: the High Priest at its head, his council consisting of the chiefs of the more distinguished clans, the whole set of persons occupied in the cult make up the government and aristocracy of the nation. The population living in Jerusalem and various villages, fortified or open, paid to the temple, that is to the god for the support of the temple, the High Priest, the other priests and the servants, various dues in money or in kind. In the name of his people the High Priest contributed to the treasury, first of the Persian kings, then to that of Alexander, his successors and finally the Ptolemies, a certain sum of tribute. This tribute, of course, was not paid out of the revenues of the temple and the priests, but was a separate exaction from the people. Towards paying the tribute went first of all the special land tax which the High Priest collected from the people for that purpose. Under the Seleucids the Jews paid one-third of the produce of cereals and half the fruits of trees, and there is no reason to think that this high rate of taxation was newly introduced by the Seleucids. It is quite possible that the High Priest paid a special sum to the suzerain for his investiture. For the state to sell priesthoods was usual in the Greek and Hellenistic world. Where the High Priests got the money from we do not know, but we need not doubt that, side by side with the temple treasury and its deposits acting as a state bank for the population, the High Priests had their own treasury too, supplied by taxes for their benefit paid by the population and by the commission that they certainly made as intermediaries between the people and the suzerain king.

Besides those imposts upon the land we have, however, in the letters of Antiochus III and of Demetrius and Alexander Jannaeus mention of several imperial imposts which were specially burdensome to the population. As Antiochus III has to deal with them it is likely that they were introduced by the Ptolemies. These imposts are well known to us; they form part of the royal economy in almost all Hellenistic states. There is the poll-tax, a special poll or income-tax called a wreath (stephanos), and finally the salt-tax known to us in Egypt and in Babylonia. This was connected with the king’s ownership of salt-mines which were a government monopoly, and took the form of a forced payment for a minimum of salt which was required by every person liable to the tax. These imposts may have been collected by the High Priest or else the state may have farmed them out; but the fact that Antiochus III and Demetrius and Alexander all speak of them separately and that they were particularly unpopular argues that they were probably farmed separately and collected by special contractors and their agents whom the people hated. The same arrangement probably applied to the frontier customs and to imposts upon sales as in Mesopotamia, Susiana, and Babylonia. To these imperial imposts the whole population was subject, including the privileged classes, hence the value which was attached to the grant of Antiochus III freeing from these ‘humiliating’ pagan imposts all persons connected with the Temple, and afterwards to its extension by Alexander Balas to the whole population of Judaea. But we may assume that later on, perhaps even before Roman times, these taxes were restored to their full former amount.

VI.

THE RESULTS OF THE SELEUCIDS’ WORK

We have seen that the guiding principle of the Seleucids throughout their dominions was to found cities and to spread Hellenism. To what degree did they really succeed in this aim ? Life in the cities of Asia Minor probably was purely Greek. Livy makes a Rhodian envoy say definitely that it was so in the time of Antiochus III. But he says as definitely that the Greek cities were Greek islands in the sea of a native population untouched by Hellenism. Still more true is this of Syria, Mesopotamia and Babylonia. Posidonius, himself a Syrian Greek, held no high opinion as to the purity of Hellenism among his compatriots. And this diluted Hellenism of the cities was not likely to penetrate very deeply into the thousands of villages with their Semitic population. How quickly the population was turning Aramaean in the late Seleucid period we see by Doura on the Euphrates. Its Greek and Macedonian settlers still keep their language, their names, their law, their city organization. But their life and religion are, through the women, becoming more and more Aramaean; and, but for the proportion of Greek names, we should not hesitate to see in the benefactors of the temple of Bel in the last century BC, as represented on its walls, Syrians as pure as are the priests of the goddess pictured side by side with them.

It does not seem that in the province of religion the Greeks exercised any influence at all on the native faith. The Greek names which the population gives to the native deities in Roman times and the semi-Greek forms in which the artisans of the time clothe them, do not in the least prove that Greek religious ideas had really penetrated the mass of the people. In the Greek towns there are of course purely Greek cults and purely Greek temples. But these do not play the chief parts, which fall to the superficially hellenized gods and temples of the natives, Phoenician, Syrian, Aramaean, Arabian. Certain cults in a hellenized form spread over the whole Greek world. The Seleucid Empire contributed to these mystic world-religions in the Hellenistic period the cult and mysteries of Adonis, and, in the Roman time, several hypostases of the one Sun-god, and the cult, partly Iranian, partly Anatolian, of Mithras. But fundamentally all these cults remain oriental and prove not that the East was hellenized but that the Greek world was orientalized. Into Babylonia for instance this external hellenization did not penetrate.

To what did the contribution made by Syrian, Seleucid, Hellenism to the treasure of Greek civilization amount? A few philosophers, born in Syria, one or two historians and geographers, a few men of science, mainly astronomers—Seleucus of Seleuceia who maintained that the sun was the centre of the universe—Meleager of Gadara with his subtle epigrams, Posidonius who spent all his life at Rhodes; this is the sum of what Seleucid Syria gave to the civilization of the world, if we do not count that doubtful contribution to the treasure of ancient learning, astrology. With the exception of Posidonius, who was as little a typical Syrian as the Stoic Zeno, all these Syrians belonged to the second if not to the third class. Equally second or third rate among the capitals of the Hellenistic world is the Seleucid capital Antioch as a centre of artistic, literary and scientific creativeness.

Yet we must not make too little of the part played by the Seleucid Empire in the history of civilization. Whatever we may say, it is only through the Seleucids that the contact between East and West which Alexander had begun lasted for some time, so that Hellenism had full opportunity to try and hellenize the East; and this contact did not merely orientalize the Greeks in the East, it brought many new elements into the development of the Semitic and Iranian East. These elements will make themselves specially manifest in the Roman period and will contribute to the creation of such important phenomena in the history of humanity as Sasanian Persia, early Christian Armenia and Syria, Arabia before Islam; but it was under the Seleucids that the sources of these influences upon the East were opened.

Rivulets of Greek influence spread and filtered a long way into the Middle and Far East: we know so little of the civilization of these parts in Hellenistic times that we can hardly speak of a Hellenistic streak in it; but careful archaeological study of Northern India has shown that the foundations of the hellenizing art of Gandhara must have been laid during the time when the Bactrian kingdom was independent. This is clearly exemplified by the ruins of Taxila now systematically excavated; here we have the ancient Persian influence that made itself so deeply felt in India, but side by side with it undoubted traces of Graeco-Syrian influence coming through Bactria from the Seleucid Empire1.

A more difficult question is whether there be any Hellenistic influence on the organization of political and economic life in India during the great empire of Chandragupta and his successors, but if there was, the influence was Egyptian not Seleucid. There is, however, good reason to think that the civilization of the Seleucid East was not without influence upon the renascence, coming precisely in the last two centuries BC, to which China awoke under the Han Dynasty. The rebuilding of the political and economic life of China at this time does not actually indicate any external influence except that of the military system of its Iranian neighbours upon that of China, but in the art of the Han period there are certain elements which can only be explained by the effect of the very lively commerce carried on by caravans through Bactria between Syria and China.

CHAPTER VI

MACEDONIA AND GREECE