cristoraul.org

THE SELEUCID EMPIRE. 358-251 BC. HOUSE OF SELEUCUS

CHAPTER 7

THE PROBLEMS OF ASIA MINOR

1.      

The Accession of Antiochus I

The murder of Seleucus fulfilled the hopes of Ptolemy Keraunos and brought back chaos. Once more the Empire, on the point of regaining its unity, found itself headless. Seleucus indeed, unlike Alexander, left a grown-up heir, but by the time that the couriers, flying post across Asia, had told the tidings in Babylon, other hands had already clutched the inheritance. The army was lost. When Ptolemy suddenly appeared in the camp at Lysimachia wearing the diadem and attended by a royal guard, the mass of the army was taken completely by surprise. Ptolemy had prepared his ground well. He had already tampered with many of the officers. The army, bewildered and without direction, acquiesced in the fait accompli. It put itself at the disposal of the murderer.

Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, found that, instead of succeeding quietly to the great heritage, it was only by a stiff fight he might hope to piece together a kingdom from the fragments. The prince upon whom this task fell had some things in his favor. In the first place, his hold upon the eastern provinces was firm. His mother, it must be remembered, was of Iranian race, and those peoples might naturally cleave to a king who, by half his blood, was one of themselves. Through his mother many perhaps of the grandees of Iran were his kindred. He had actually resided, as joint-king, for the last twelve years (298-281) in the East; and this must not only have confirmed the influence which he owed to his birth, but have made him specially acquainted with the local conditions. It had also trained him in the practice of government. Again, he was not without experience of war. In the battle of Ipsus he, a youth of little over twenty, had measured himself with Demetrius the Besieger; nor can he have been for twelve years ruler of Iran without having to do with the unruly tribes who made the mountain and desert dangerous for travelers. Then he held Babylonia, the richest province of the Empire. He would probably take into the conflict a longer purse than that of any prince, save perhaps the Egyptian Ptolemy.

These were his advantages in the East, but he had some in the West as well. To the Greek states of the coast Seleucus had come as a deliverer from the tyranny of Lysimachus; their hearts were given to his house. At any rate they might be inclined to look more favorably on a rule which was still prospective than on those whose burden they had learned to know. We shall soon examine, so far as can be known, how at this juncture they acted.

All these circumstances would tell on the side of Antiochus in the long run, but they did not counterbalance the immediate inconveniences of his position. In the first place, he was surprised far from the scene of action, embarrassed at the start; in the second place, the defection of a great part of the imperial army left him for the time being terribly short of men. However, he strikes in rapidly, hurrying westward, and the first of all those wars for the restoration of the Empire of Seleucus begins.

For us a great cloud conies down upon the contest. History has mainly forgotten it. We can only see dim glints of armies that sweep over Western Asia, and are conscious of an imbroglio of involved wars. But we can understand the stupendous nature of that task which the house of Seleucus set itself to do—to hold together under one scepter, against all the forces which battered it from without, forces stronger than any by which the Achaemenian Empire had ever been assailed till the coining of Alexander, against all the elements of disruption which sapped it within, the huge fabric built up by Seleucus Nicator. It was a labor of Sisyphus. The Empire, a magnificent tour de force, had no natural vitality. Its history from the moment it misses the founder’s hand is one of decline. It was a “sick man” from its birth. Its construction occupied the few glorious years of Seleucus Nicator, its dis­solution the succeeding two and a quarter centuries. Partially restored again and again, it lapses almost immediately into new ruin. The restorations become less and less complete. But it does a great work in propagating and defending Hellenism in the East till the advent of Rome.

The natural clefts of the Empire, the fissures which were so apt at any weakening of the central authority to gape, followed geographical barriers. From Northern Syria the western provinces were cut off by the line of the Taurus; on the east the desert separated it from the seats of Assyrio-Babylonian civilization, and beyond that again the mountain-wall of Zagrus fenced Iran. To hold these geographically detached members from a single base is the standing problem. The long struggle for each one has a more or less separate history. In the following chapters it is proposed to follow that of the struggle for Asia Minor—the Trans-Tauric Question, if one may use the modern phrase—till the accession of the third Antiochus, the king under whom it was finally settled (281-223).

2.

Asia Minor

It is convenient to speak of the region in question as Asia Minor, although that term for it did not come into use till long after the Seleucids had passed away. To them it was always “the country beyond the Taurus,” or “on this side of the Taurus,” according to the speaker’s standpoint. An oblong peninsula, washed by the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Sea of Cyprus, it formed one of the main divisions of the ancient world, with a physical character, an ethnology, and a history of its own. In feature it is a sort of miniature Iran. Both are plateaus connected on the east and west respectively with the mountain complex of Armenia. In both a central desert is surrounded by a hill country, the nurse of rivers. But there is one great difference. At its opposite extremity to Armenia the Iranian plateau is shut in by the inhospitable world of Central Asia, whilst Asia Minor, at its western end, sinks in a series of warm, moist valleys and rich alluvial plains to the friendly Aegean. In size it bore no proportion to Iran; but, insignificant as on the map it appears by the side of its huge neighbor, this corner of their Empire called out the interest of Hellenic kings in ways in which Iran could not. In the first place, it formed the bridge between Asia and their motherland; their hearts always turned west­ward. In the second place, it was to a Greek full of historical associations; it was the Asia which his fathers had known when Iran was an undiscovered world; its names were familiar to him since his childhood; Ilion, Sardis, Gordium, such places figured large in his traditions as the seats of old- world barbaric princedoms, the theatre of heroic wars. Lastly, Hellenism had already taken firm root there; Greek influence had reached its more civilized races, Carians and Lycians; its western coast was as Greek as the Peloponnesus, occupied by a line of Greek cities which stood little behind Athens in riches, in culture, and in old renown.

During the long history of which it had been an important part, Asia Minor had never had either national or political unity. There was no people of Asia Minor. Since dim antiquity wandering races from every quarter had streamed into it, making the confusion of its motley tribe worse con­founded. It has furnished ethnologists, ancient and modern, with a puzzle which has the charm of never being able to be found out. Its predominant languages seem to have belonged to the Aryan family; and there is good ground for believing that the races in its north-western region, Phrygians, Mysians, and Bithynians, were of one stock with the Thracians on the European shore. There had never been a kingdom or empire of Asia, as there had been an Egyptian, an Assyrian, and an Iranian. Perhaps if the Mermnad dynasty in Lydia had had time it might have created such an empire. But it came into collision prematurely with the rising power of Persia and was shattered (547-546 B.C.). Thenceforward over the whole of Asia. Minor, with its farrago of peoples, languages, and religions, was drawn the prevalence of one alien race, of an Iranian Great King.

3.

Persian Rule

(a)         The Native Races

Persian rule in Asia Minor, however, had ado to maintain itself. It was beset by three great difficulties. One of these was presented by the native races. As a matter of fact, the Persian subjugation of Asia Minor was very incomplete, according to our standard in such things. As in the rest of the Empire, the arm of the central government never reached far from the great highroads. The mountain people went on with their old life and obeyed their hereditary chiefs with the occasional necessity of supplying men or tribute to the Great King. Their independence fluctuated according to the circum­stances of the moment, the energy of a neighboring satrap, their own power of resistance. Sometimes the government could save its face and its pocket by recognizing the native chief as imperial satrap in return for a due payment of tribute. But such a state of things has been the normal one, as was said before, in Asiatic empires.

The eastern and northern part of the country beyond the Taurus was known to the Persians as Katpatuka, a name which the Greeks transformed into Cappadocia. The region designated embraced the eastern tract of the bare central uplands and the belt of mountain country, forest-clad, seamed with rivers, which comes between those uplands and the Black Sea. Its native inhabitants belonged to all sorts of different breeds. In old Assyrian days the two great races here had been the Meshech and Tubal of our Bibles, and the remains of them still held on in the land among later comers, and were known as Moschi and Tibareni to the Greeks. Under Persian rule a foreign Iranian aristocracy, priestly and lay, had settled down upon the nearer part, at any rate, of Cappadocia, great barons and prelates, living in castles and burgs, among the subject peoples, like the Normans in England. To these incomers the old inhabitants stood as serfs, tilling their estates, hewing their wood and drawing their water generation after generation. We never hear of any revolt among the Cappadocian peasants. In fact, all communication of the court with the Aegean sea-board by way of the Cilician Gates must go through the Cappadocian plateau, and one or other of the roads that ran through it was always one of the main arteries of the Empire. But in the more outlying parts of the province, among the mountains and along the northern coast, a very different state of things prevailed. Here the King’s govern­ment was a mere shadow, or less. Even in that part of the Taurus which overlooked Cilicia, in the Cataonian highlands, there were clans which knew no law except their own. Along the Black Sea coast, again, Greek writers give us a catalogue of independent tribes. When Xenophon went that way in 400 he found himself quite outside the sphere of Persian rule. Towards the mouth of the Halys the coast population became more predominantly Paphlagonian, and west of the Halys the Paphlagonian country proper extended to the Parthenius.

The Paphlagonians were barbarians of the same stamp as their neighbors, but they had made a step in the direction of national unity. East of the Halys there was in 400 only a chaos of petty tribes, following each its own will, but strong men had arisen among the Paphlagonians who had hammered them together into some consistency. As a military power even, the Paphlagonian principality was not to be despised; they furnished a fine type of barbaric cavalry. Their chief, Corylas, openly flouted the Great King’s ban. Officially, he was by the usual device styled the King’s satrap ;it was explained at court that the Paphlagonians had no Persian satrap over them by the King’s favor, because they had joined Cyrus of their own accord.

Otys, the successor of Corylas, was equally contumacious (393). Some fifteen years later (about 378) the Paphlagonian prince, Thuys, was captured by the unusually able satrap of Cappadocia, Datames, and for a spell the King’s word was of force in Paphlagonia. The importance of this country to the Persian government was derived largely from the trade-route which found its outlet to the Black Sea in the Greek city of Sinope, the great mart of the northern coast. An independent Paphlagonia cut off the government from this gate of the kingdom. And after the capture of Thuys the country seems to have remained to some extent at any rate in the hand of Persian satraps. Datames laid siege to Sinope itself about 369 and got possession of Amisus. Coins are found of the Sinopean type which bear his name in Greek.⁷Others, of the same type, but apparently somewhat later, bear in the official Aramaic script a name which seems to be Abd-susin. These, it is thought, were struck by a successor of Datames, perhaps by his son, whom Nepos calls Sysinas. Others, still Sinopean, have the name Ariorath (Ariarathes). This last is, no doubt, the same Ariarathes who, at the coming of Alexander, was established in the northern and mountainous part of the Cappadocian province farther east. His castle seems to have been at Gaziura in the valley of the Iris, and he strikes money with the figure and name of the local Baal (Ba'al-Gazir). In what degree of dependence Ariarathes stood to the central government may be questionable; he was at any rate an Iranian lord, and his presence in Paphlagonia and Northern Cappadocia shows that these regions had been penetrated in the last days of the Achaemenian Empire, if not by the authority of the Great King, at any rate by Persian influence. The Paphlagonians do not appear to have been politically under Ariarathes in 336. They had again ceased to pay tribute, and they send, as an independent nation, ambassadors to Alexander.

Beyond Paphlagonia, at the north-western corner of the peninsula, the dark pine forests and mountain pastures which lay above the entrance of the Black Sea were tenanted by two kindred tribes whom the Greeks knew as Thynians and Bithynians. Sometimes they spoke of them by the latter name as a single people. They were Thracian immigrants from the opposite shore, and had the same characteristics as their European cousins, savage hardihood, wild abandonment to the frenzy of religion and of war. The terror of them kept the Greeks from making any settlement along their coast, from Chalcedon to Heraclea, and woe betide the mariner driven to land there! The Greeks on their side took, when they could, fearful reprisals. In 416 the Calcedonians procured the help of Byzantium, enrolled Thracian mercenaries to meet the Bithynians at their own game, and made a raid into their country which was long remembered for the atrocities which marked it.

The Bithynians, like the Paphlagonians, found leaders able to draw together under one head the elemental forces which exist in rude and unbroken races. During the latter part of the fifth century a chief called Doedalsus appears to hold in Bithynia the same sort of position as Corylas in Paphlagonia. In 435 the town of Astacus in the Propontis was refounded as an Athenian colony. It was well fitted by its situation to take a leading part in the coast traffic, but up to this time its advantages had been neutralized by the chronic warfare it had to maintain with the neighboring Bithynians. It had sunk lower and lower. From its new foundation, however, it rapidly rose to new prosperity. And this was in large part due, we are given to understand, to the rational policy of Doedalsus, who about that time got his wild countrymen into hand, and saw his profit in protecting the Greek cities of the coast. Bithynia was beginning to become conscious as a new-born state and learn the uses of the world. How far the success of Doedalsus in bringing the Bithynians under, his single sway went we do not know,  in 409 there is an indication of disunion among the tribes. But Doedalsus established a dynasty which served at all events as the nucleus of a national kingdom. And his house had better fortune than the neighboring Paphlagonian. The power of that the Persian overlord succeeded in breaking, but Doedalsus and his successors were too much for him. The Bithynians were a thorn in the side of the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, to whose government they nominally belonged. Although Pharnabazus might com­bine with them in opposition to a common foe, like Xeno­phon’s Ten Thousand, he normally regarded their domain as hostile territory, which he was glad enough to see ravaged.⁴ The dynasty of Doedalsus survived all the onsets of the Achaemenian Empire; it outlasted that Empire itself, and in the closing century before Christ, when all the face of the world was changed, and powers that Doedalsus never knew possessed it, his line still reigned, the relic of an older day, beside the Bosphorus.

We have seen that all the mountain country along the north of Asia Minor, from the Phasis to the Bosphorus, was a region from which the authority of the Great King was excluded. It was only now and then that, thanks to the exertions of a Datames, Persian rule could break through this wall at some point to the Black Sea. But the case was just as bad in the south of the peninsula. Here, too, Persian rule was shut off from the sea by a long stretch of mountains which it could never subdue, the mountains lying on the left hand of the road which ran from the Cilician Gates west­ward. They were inhabited by hardy marauding tribes, whose ethnology indeed may be obscure, but whose general character and manner of life were like that of the other highlanders of Asia Minor. They not only held their country against the imperial armies, but made the King’s highroad insecure. The Lycaonians, who lived in that part of the mountains nearest the Cilician Gates, had even descended into the central plain in 401 and made something like a regular occupation of the country. The names which Greek writers apply to these mountain tribes and their several territories are as shifting and uncertain as the relations of the tribes themselves and their frontiers. In the fourth century a name, unknown to Herodotus, embracing all the mountaineers between the coast peoples and the inner plateau, comes into use, that of Pisidians (Xenophon, Ephorus, Theopompus). The name by which Herodotus had indicated the inhabitants of this region, Milyes, was now restricted to those of the most westerly part of it, the Hinterland of Lycia, the region Milyas, regarded sometimes as identical with, sometimes as including, another familiar to Herodotus, that of Cabalis. The people again in the country along the coast between Rough Cilicia and Lycia, where the mountains leave only a strip of level land a few miles broad between themselves and the sea, a people whom the Greeks had always known as Pamphylians, were in reality simply Pisidians somewhat civilized by contact with the outside world and the Hellenes.

West of the Pamphylians the mountains gather into a mass, which bulges in a semicircular projection, 180 miles across, into the sea. The uplands of this promontory—the region, that is, which the Greeks called Milyas—are shrouded from our knowledge in the times before Alexander by barbarian darkness. Their contours merged in the Pisidian hills, and the hard-faring mountaineers who ranged over them, the Solymi, lived and died, no doubt, in the same sort of way as their Pisidian and Pamphylian neighbors. But along the sea-board of the promontory, and in the three river valleys, those of the Xanthus, the Myras, and the Limyrus, which run up from the coast, dwelt the ancient people of the Lycianss. In them we have a very different type from the rude highlanders with whom we have hitherto had to deal. The Lycians, from whatever dim origins they sprang, stood in character near to the Hellenes. It would be straying from our path to discuss the part they play in the heroic age of Greek legend—those mysterious people who seemed to the simple fathers of the Hellenes a race of wizards, able to make enormous stones dance together into magic palaces, whom yet the light of the historic age shows so primitive, that they still reckoned descent by the mother. In the time of the Persian Empire the Lycians did not yet form the developed federal republic which we find described in Strabo. They were distributed under the rule of a number of petty princes, whose names we still read on their coins. Such a state of things must have meant a good deal of internal friction. And we find, in fact, essays on the part of a single dynast to oust the others and make himself chief of the whole nation. Such an attempt was made by the son of Harpagus (his name is obliterated), who put up the stele in Xanthus; he “took many citadels by the help of Athene, the sacker of cities, and gave a portion of his kingdom to his kin.”

King Pericles, who captured Telmessus (about 370?), seems to have almost succeeded for a time. But these efforts failed in the end before internal resistance or foreign attack. At the same time, in spite of the divisions, there appears to have existed among the Lycians some rudimentary recognition of national unity. The symbol which is thought to be connected with the Apollo of Xanthus occurs on all sorts of Lycian coins, and is held to show some kind of sacred Amphictyony formed about a central shrine of the Sun-god.

Two main external influences were at work upon the inner life of Lycia during the Persian period, the Iranian and the Hellenic. It is, of course, impossible to gauge either from the few traces we can now discover. The Iranian influence is shown in the dress of the Lycian princes, as they appear on the monuments and in the names (Harpagus, Artembases, Mithrapatas) which some of them bear. The Hellenic influence, on the other hand, is shown by the name of King Pericles and by the witness of the monuments, some, like the Nereid monument, the very work of Attic masters, and others exhibiting a style in which native elements and Greek are combined.

Between the conquest of Asia Minor by the Persians and the coming of Alexander we can make out four phases in Lycian history. The first is one of subjection to the Achaemenian power. Their resistance at the beginning had been forlornly heroic—one desperate battle against overwhelming numbers, and then the self-immolation of the whole people of Xanthus, except eighty households, who happened at the time to be away. After that they had to pay tribute into the Great King’s treasury and give their youth for his armies. The second phase is introduced by the operations of Cimon in Asia Minor (466?), whereby the Persian power in these regions is crippled. Lycia now throws off the Persian yoke to enter the League over which Athens presides. How long this phase lasted is uncertain. In 446 the Lycians are still paying tribute to Athens; in 430 a third phase has begun, the Lycians are raided as an unfriendly nation by the Athenian admiral Melesander. How far the Lycians in this third phase fell again under Persian influence, how far they attained an independence both of Persia and Athens, is impossible to determine. In 380 the orator Isocrates declares with some inaccuracy that Lycia has never had a Persian master. It is during this period that we have the attempts of the son of Harpagus and of King Pericles to consolidate Lycia under their own rule. This third phase is closed by the Lycians (under Pericles, perhaps) taking part with the satraps in the great revolt against the house of Achaemenes. Maussollus, the Carian dynast who betrayed the confedera­tion, is authorized by the Persian King to add Lycia to his dominions. This he succeeds in doing, and the fourth phase is one of annexation to Caria.

The Carians in the fourth century are in a state of semi dependence upon the Persian King. They are governed by a dynasty of native princes, who are, however, recognized as satraps of the Empire. The loyalty of these princes to the Achaemenian King fluctuates; Maussollus first joins in the rebellion of the satraps and then deserts it in 362. But the Carians are now no longer the race of barbarian fighting men who might be distinguished by their large crests alongside of the Greek mercenaries two or three centuries before. It is on their coasts that some of the illustrious Greek cities stand—Miletus and Halicarnassus,—and the old Carian towns inland have more or less taken on the character of Greek cities themselves. They formed, not improbably, a federation, with the temple of Zeus Chrysaoreus for its religious centre. And these Carian cities seem to have cherished all the Hellenic aspirations after autonomy; the yoke of their princes they found very grievous, and Maussollus lived in a web of conspiracies. But prince and people alike were open to the influences of Hellenism. The decrees of the city of Mylasa are in Greek; Maussollus, who had extended his power over the Greek cities of the coast and made Halicarnassus his capital, was buried in the “Mausoleum,” designed and decorated by Scopas and others of the greatest Greek sculptors.

Cut off thus by barbarian peoples from both the northern and the southern coast of Asia Minor, the King’s government was confined to a strip of country running through the interior. The Cappadocian plateau, the two Phrygian provinces and Lydia, it was only here that mandates from Babylon ran, and even here there were districts, like the Mysian hills, which their authority could not penetrate.² Besides the Cappadocian serfs, it was only the Lydians and Phrygians, now a race of patient husbandmen dispersed in poor villages, though their name had once been greatest among the peoples of the land— it was only these who were beaten flat by the Achaemenian conquest. But though the King’s arm reached over Lydia, his hold on the western coast also was vexatiously restricted. His rule here encountered, not barbarian races, but an obstacle in some ways more formidable still.

(b) The Asiatic Greeks

The second difficulty which beset Persian rule in Asia Minor consisted in the occupation of a great part of the coasts by Greek cities. Here was something which in itself created a problem for any power aspiring to rule Asia. Under any circumstances these Hellenes, with their inbred abhorrence of everything which restricted the sovereign autonomy of each city-state, with their inveterate assumption of a higher culture, were bound to form an indigestible element in an Asiatic monarchy. But, left to themselves, they might be held down by an arm as long and as mighty as the King’s. Here, however, came in the circumstance which so dangerously complicated the problem. On the other side of the sea and in the intermediate islands, the free Greeks were established in their sea-faring republics. So that, while on the one hand the Asiatic Greeks had kinsmen at their back whom they might call in, on the other hand the free Greeks found the door held open for them whenever they might attack. To hold the coast against a combination of the Greeks who inhabited it and the Greeks who came in from beyond—fighting men better than any the Asiatic monarch could command—was obviously impossible. There was some method in the madness of Xerxes when he set out to trample down European Greece; it was a measure of self-defense. This was shown by what followed the great failure. During the days of Athenian power in the fifth century the Persian king had even to acquiesce in the humiliation of not being allowed to send any troops within a prescribed distance of his own coast, or ships of war west of the Bosphorus or the Chelidonian promontory.

Then the wars of Athens and Sparta suggested to him a better way of isolating the Asiatic Greeks—the policy of playing off one Greek state against another. And this design the brutal egoism of Sparta made at last successful. By the Peace of Antalcidas (387-386) the Persians regained possession of the western coast of Asia Minor and held it unchallenged by the states of Greece till the coming of Alexander.

We are very imperfectly informed as to the condition of the Greek states under Achaemenian rule, how far the normal functioning of each body politic was interfered with by the paramount power. Generally speaking, the cities were probably no worse off under Persian than under Spartan, or even Athenian, supremacy. In all these cases the two chief burdens were the same—the necessity of paying tribute and the occupation by a foreign garrison. The weight with which the King’s hand pressed must have differed greatly from city to city, or even in the same city at different moments. Some, like Cyzicus, seem to have maintained their independence unimpaired by the Peace of Antalcidas. Others from time to time threw off the yoke for longer or shorter periods. Where a city was held by a military force, the garrison was composed probably in most cases, not of Orientals, but of Greek mercenaries. Here and there we have indications of the King's authority reaching the internal administration. Iasus in conferring ateleia has to limit its grant to those dues over which the city has control. At Mylasa it looks as if the right of inflicting the punishment of death was reserved to the King. But both Mylasa and Iasus were under the Carian dynast who acted as the King’s satrap. Often, no doubt, the Persian government thought it enough to maintain in power tyrants and oligarchies, leaving them a free hand in internal administration so long as they sent in the tribute. When we ask whether the cities were generally prosperous or not in the days before Alexander, we have conflicting evidence. Isocrates paints their condition in the blackest colors. “It is not enough that they should be subjected to tribute, that they should see their citadels in the occupation of their foes, but besides these public miseries they must yield their persons to worse usage than the bondmen which we buy and sell meet with among us. No one of us puts injuries upon his slaves so bad as the punishments they (i.e. the Persians) mete out to free men”. Such a description, coming from Isocrates, is not to be taken too literally; but so much we may gather from it, that the Persian rule provoked a certain amount of discontent. On the other side we have testimonies to the increasing wealth and fullness of life in the Greek cities of Asia given us by their coins, their literary and artistic activity, and the great works whose beginning goes back to this period.

(c)    The Provincial Nobility

The mountain tribes and the Greek cities circumscribed Persian rule in Asia Minor; there was a third element there which threatened, not the supremacy of the Iranian race, but the supremacy of the house of Achaemenes. This element was the disaffection of the Iranian nobility in Asia Minor towards their overlord. It had been hard from the early days of Persian rule for the court in Babylon to keep a perfect control over its own satraps in Asia Minor. The satraps had almost the station of petty kings. To remove a powerful governor was a matter in which the government had to proceed delicately, as the story of Orestes shows. Tissaphernes had to be surprised and assassinated. They raised mercenary troops and made war on their own account, sometimes against each other; they issued coins in their own name.

Beside the provincial satraps there were a number of Iranian families settled down on estates, not only in Cappadocia but in the western sea-board. We hear, for instance, in Xenophon of the Persian Asidates, who has a castle in the neighborhood of Pergamum, and the Itabelius who comes to his assistance is probably another Persian lord established hard by. The family of Pharnabazus stands in close con­nection with Hellespontine Phrygia; to this house all the satraps of the country belong, and the son of Ariobarzanes (satrap from 387 to 362), Mithridates, who does not himself ever become satrap, appears to have ruled a small principality which included the Greek city of Cius. How dangerous to the King this provincial aristocracy might be the repeated revolts are enough to show.

4.

The Macedonian Conquest

These, then—the native races, the Greek cities and the Iranian nobility—were the three elements making up the problem of Asia Minor when the house of Achaemenes was in the ascendant. But by the time that Asia Minor fell to the house of Seleucus to be dealt with, the conditions had been in one circumstance significantly modified. Fifty years before that date Iranian had given place to Greek overlords. By this change the relation of the different elements to the supreme government had been variously affected. One immediate result was that the resident Iranian nobility, as a class distinct at once from the imperial house and the native tribes, disappeared. Some of them joined the train of one or other of the Macedonian chiefs, as Mithridates, the dynast of Cius, did that of Antigomis; others, like the son of this Mithridates, sought to evade the foreign yoke by taking to the hill countries and forming principalities among the native tribes, of the same category as the principalities we have seen in Bithynia and Paphlagonia, only with this feature, that at their courts in remote valleys a distinctly Iranian tradition lived on. When, therefore, one speaks of the problem of the native races under Greek overlords, there are included in the term the dynasties of Iranian as well as those of more strictly native origin.

There were still, however, three elements constituting the Trans-Tauric problem, for the difficulty felt by the Achaemenian court in maintaining a due control over its Iranian subordinates was no greater than the difficulty of a Greco-Macedonian court in controlling from a distant center its Greek subordinates. We have now to consider how up to the time when the house of Seleucus entered into possession these three elements had been dealt with by the new rulers of the world.

(a) The Native Races

The native races, as we have seen, had some of them been completely subjugated by the Persians, others imperfectly, and others not at all. In what measure the first of these, the Lydians, Phrygians, and Southern Cappadocians, were affected by the change of masters we have hardly any means of determining. The Phrygians of the north-west were ordered by Alexander to “pay the same tribute as they had paid to Darius.” Under Antigonus they seem to have found them­selves exceptionally well off, or perhaps it was only that they looked back to his days as a reign of gold from the troublous times which ensued. The Carians were left under their native dynasty, represented by the Princess Ada—perhaps only temporarily, as the dynasty has disappeared by Alex­ander’s death. The unsubjugated races, on the other hand, had cause to feel that a different hand held the reins. A Greek ruler could not tolerate the old slipshod methods, the indolent compromises, which mark the monarchies of Asia. Alexander seems to have made up his mind at once to put an end to the turbulent independence of the highlanders which rendered the King’s highway insecure. In his passage through Asia Minor he found time, although intent on greater things, to make a winter expedition into the hills behind Lycia, the Milyas region, to destroy a fort of the Pisidians which vexed Phaselis, and push his way through the heart of the Pisidian country, storming Sagalassus. A year later he had crossed the Taurus never to return. But the subjugation of Asia Minor was to be methodically pursued by his generals. They do not seem to have been particularly successful. Galas, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, marched an elaborately equipped force into the Bithynian country, but was over­powered by Bas, the grandson of Doedalsus. Balacrus, the satrap of Cilicia, perished in the attempt to reduce the Pisidian strongholds, Laranda and Isaura.

At the death of Alexander in 323 a good part of Asia Minor had still to be registered as unsubdued. The northern regions had been hardly touched by the Macedonian arms, Alexander in 333, hastening on to meet Darius, had been forced to be content with the formal expressions of homage brought him at Gordium by a deputation from the Paphlagonian chiefs. How far from complete their submission had been was shown by the fact that they expressly stipulated that none of the imperial troops should cross their borders. Farther east, in the valley of the Iris, the Iranian prince, Ariarathes, continued unmolested to form a great power out of the materials supplied him by the hardy mountain races. He had by 323 at his disposal an army of 30,000 foot and 15,000 horse.

To the south the tribes of the Taurus were as independent as ever, unless some permanent occupation of the route opened by Alexander by way of Sagalassus had been maintained. Termessus, the great fortress of Western Pisidia, commanding the road between Perga and the interior, remained, as Alexander had left it, unhumbled. Selge, the rival Pisidian town, had made indeed a treaty with Alexander, but with the express declaration that it was as a friend, not as a subject, that it was prepared to comply with the rescripts. Still farther west, the hills behind Lycia, the regions called Milyas and Cabalis, lay, as far as we can tell, beyond the reach of Macedonian arms. Cibyra, with a population of mixed origins, Lydian and Pisidian, was probably already a strong mountain state under native chiefs. A century and a half later its villages stretched from the Rhodian Peraea and the Lycian valleys to the confines of Termessus, and it could put an army of 30,000 foot and 2000 horse in the field.

East of Selge, the hills as far as the Cilician Gates were, as far as we know, untouched ground. In fact it is impossible to trace any progress in the subjugation of Asia Minor from the date of Alexander’s passage to the date of his death. Occupied in distant expeditions, he had hardly time to begin the work of consolidating. The abandonment of schemes of further conquest after his death gave the Regent Perdiccas scope for dealing with the omissions in Alexander’s rapid work. In the year after Alexander died, Perdiccas was with the lungs in Asia Minor to support Eumenes, on whom, as satrap of Cappadocia and Paphlagonia, the task of subduing Ariarathes and any other native dynasties had been laid. Together Perdiccas and Eumenes, with the imperial army, advanced into northern Cappadocia. Ariarathes threw his native levies before them in vain. He lost two battles, and found himself and his house in the Macedonians’ hands. Perdiccas treated him with the same cruel rigor which Asiatic kings had made the rule in the case of rebels. The old prince, now eighty-two, was crucified and his family destroyed. Eumenes immediately took measures to organize the province.

From dealing with the northern part of Asia Minor, the Regent immediately went on to deal with the highlanders of the south. Laranda was stormed and its population exter­minated. Siege was next laid to Isaura. Then the fierce tribesmen who held it acted with the same spirit which was displayed on other occasions by the peoples of the Taurus; they themselves set fire to the town and perished with their old men, their women and children, in one conflagration.

At this point the new rulers seemed to le really in a fair way to carry their empire in Asia Minor to a logical completion, satisfactory to a Greek mind. That this would have been done had the Greek Empire remained a unity can hardly be doubted, just as it was done later on by Rome. But with the death of Perdiccas there ceased to be a single Greco-Macedonian power. The energies of the conquering aristocracy were almost entirely taken up with fighting each other. Asia Minor, it is true, fell, as a whole, under the dominion of a single chief, Antigonus; it was there even that the seat of his government was established; after the reconquest of Babylon and Iran by Seleucus it looked as if a separate kingdom of Asia Minor, under the house of Antigonus, might emerge from the confusion, like the kingdom of Egypt under the house of Ptolemy. But even though Asia Minor formed the peculiar possession of Antigonus, he was too much occupied with his Macedonian rivals to extend, or even to maintain, Greek rule internally.

In the south the conquest of the Pisidian country appears to have been suspended with the death of Perdiccas. Antigonus was drawn thither in 319-318, but it was not to subjugate the Pisidians that he came. It has been remarked that the inconvenience to Asiatic monarchies of unsubdued tracts within their confines arises not only from the depredations of the free tribes, but from the fact that any one opposed to the central government has these standing enemies of the central government to fall back upon for shelter and support. The partisans of Perdiccas, finding themselves after his death a weak minority, had made common cause with the disruptive elements within the realm of Antigonus. Alcetas, the Regent’s brother, had long set himself, in view of contingencies, to gain popularity among the Pisidians. The young men who had been drawn from the hills to join the Macedonian armies  returned home to report how good a friend they had found in this great chief. And now in the day of his adversity the Pisidians received Alcetas and his companions with open arms. It was to track down his Macedonian rivals that Antigonus pushed with a great force into the Pisidian hills. When Alcetas had been delivered up to him by the old men of Termessus behind the back of the young men, who stood by their friend to the last, Antigonus withdrew satisfied. He did not attempt to reduce Termessus itself or effect anything like a permanent settlement of the country. All his energies were required for the great war.

In the north his measures with regard to the native tribes were equally inconclusive. The heritage of Doedalsus was still in strong hands; Ziboetes, the son and successor of that Bas who had beaten back Alexander’s general, himself profited by the troubled times to descend from the Bithynian hills upon the Greek cities. In 315 he was besieging Astacus and Calchedon. Polemaeus, the general of Antigonus, passing that way, compelled him indeed to give up the attempt. But it was no time for reducing Bithynia. Polemaeus was obliged to make some bargain with the Bithynian chieftain, which was embodied in an alliance. The policy of compromise with regard to the non-Hellenic elements in Asia which marks the rule of Antigonus is seen in another instance—that of Mithridates. This Persian nobleman, whom the Achaemenian government had rewarded for betraying his father in 362-361 by making him dynast of Cius, had been dispossessed by Alexander. Mithridates became, after Alexander’s death, a hanger-on of any Macedonian chief whose star seemed to be in the ascendant. At one time he fought under Eumenes. Antigonus, rewarding probably his infidelity to Eumenes, re­instates him in his old lordship of Cius in 309-308; he actually replaces a Greek city under a barbarian despot. The son of the old intriguer, a younger Mithridates, became a bosom friend of Demetrius. Antigonus was nourishing a breed destined to play a chief part in reclaiming Asia Minor for the Iranian from the European, in sustaining the last fight which the barbarian fought in Asia Minor against Rome for seven hundred years.

As soon as the cause of Antigonus began to look bad Mithridates was at his old game of treason. Antigonus caught him making overtures to Cassander. He determined then to crush the serpent’s brood, to make away with father and son together. The old Mithridates was put to death on his own domain, but the younger got a hint from Demetrius and fled. He plunged into the mountains of Paphlagonia, and established himself at Cimiata under the Olgassys (mod. Ulgaz Dagh). Thence he began fighting his way eastwards along the valley of the Amnias (mod. Gyuk Irmak), across the Halys, along the valley of the Iris (mod, Yeshil Irmak), drawing the hill peoples under him.

About the same time Macedonian rule was driven back at another point. Ariarathes, the son or nephew of the old prince whom Perdiccas had crucified in 322, had taken refuge with Ardoates, a petty king in Armenia. He now (302 or 301) appeared upon the scene with a band of Armenians and attacked Amyntas, the general of Antigonus in Cappadocia. Ariarathes was possibly acting in concert with Seleucus and other allied kings, who were drawing their forces together around Antigonus. Amyntas was killed and the Macedonian garrisons expelled. The northern part of Cappadocia, the valley of the Iris, where the old Ariarathes had been strong, the younger either did not occupy or soon abandoned, since it passed within a few years, as we have seen, under the dominion of Mithridates. The principality which Ariarathes II carved out for himself lay more to the south, within the province indeed that the old Ariarathes, according to Diodorus, claimed as his, but covering how much of the later Cappadocian kingdom we do not know.

All this country, which now fell to the two Persians, had been organized twenty years before by Eumenes as a Macedonian province. But after the rapid Macedonian conquest of the East the tide had already turned; in the reconquest of this territory by barbarians the long ebb of two and a half centuries had already begun.

With the partition after Ipsus (301) Asia Minor ceases to form part of a single kingdom. Now for the first time Seleucus is brought into contact with the problem of its native races. The Bithynians indeed of the north-west, in so far more redoubtable than the two newly-founded principalities in Cappadocia that they had already sustained the shock of Macedonian arms, fell to the share of Lysimachus between the battles of Ipsus (301) and Corupedion (281). Lysimachus was to have his turn in tackling them before they engaged the attention of Seleucus or his house. He was not blind to the importance of reducing this turbulent corner to submission; he took in hand the task with earnestness of purpose. Bithynia was still destined to be the grave of reputations; Ziboetes led the tribesmen as ably as his grandfather Bas. Only the outline of events is given us in the few words extracted from Memnon. Lysimachus sends a body of troops; it is defeated and the commander killed. He sends another force; this Ziboetes “chases far away from his own territory.” Then Lysimachus leads an army against him in person; he is worsted. That is all we know. Whether Lysimachus after his repulse acquiesced in the independence of the Bithynians, or whether he was preparing to renew the attack when his reign ended, we do not know. In 297 it appears that Ziboetes assumed the title of king. He had certainly won the right to do so. The dynasty which had proved its ability to hold its own against Persian and Macedonian for a hundred years seems entitled to assume the marks of sovereignty.

Whether the country to the north now being conquered by Mithridates fell within the sphere of Lysimachus or of Seleucus, as the kings drew the map after Ipsus, there is nothing to show. Perhaps it matters little how the official map in this case was drawn, since neither king had apparently any leisure to send troops into those outlying parts or inter­fere with Mithridates in his work. It was in Southern Cappadocia that Seleucus found himself by the partition with unsubjugated tracts on his hands. Two scanty notices point to his activity in this direction. One is a passage of Pliny, in which he quotes Isidorus as saying that King Seleucus exter­minated the fierce tribes (ferocissimas gentes) of Arienei and Capreatae, in the region “between Cilicia, Cappadocia, Cataonia, and Armenia,” where he founded in memory of their quelling the city of Apamea Damea. This region geographers have not yet been able to identify. The other passage speaks of some forces of Seleucus under Diodorus being lost, apparently after Corupedion, in Cappadocia. Whether the victorious enemy was Ariarathes, or indeed what the relations of Seleucus and Ariarathes were, we are not told. Only the fact stands out that the house of Ariarathes was left in secure possession of part of Cappadocia, and that the part which Seleucus was able to occupy was now distinctly described as Cappadocia Seleucis, to mark it out from the regions held by the two Persian princes.

After the destruction of Lysimachus the whole of Asia Minor is once more brought (by the theory at least of the Macedonian courts) under a single sovereignty. Seleucus has now to determine his relations to the most western of the three native principalities, the Bithynian. He has to recognize King Ziboetes or declare him an enemy of the realm and take measures accordingly. He chooses the latter alternative, as indeed any one aspiring to complete the Macedonian conquest of Asia was bound to do.⁴ Of the hostilities which ensued, the historian of Heraclea mentions only a raid made by Ziboetes upon that city as an ally of Seleucus—a raid in which the historian boasts that he got as good as he gave. With Mithridates too Seleucus would have had soon to deal had his life been longer. At the moment when he dies, Mithridates has already begun to be recognized by the world as a power antagonistic to the Greek king of Asia. The Heracleots open negotiations with him after their rupture with Seleucus. On neither Ziboetes nor Mithridates has Seleucus the Conqueror brought his power to hear when all his designs are cut short by the hand of the assassin.

The result, then, of fifty years of Macedonian rule in Asia Minor had not been, as one might have expected, to bring it all under a single strong and systematic government. No noticeable advance in this direction heed been made on the state of things prevailing under the Persian Empire. The Greek kings had, indeed, brought with them better ideals; Alexander and Perdiccas had begun to level old barriers, hut since the break-up of the Empire those ideals had been unrealized and the work of Alexander had been suspended in consequence of the long intestine struggle of the Macedonian princes. So that now in 281 B.C. the Bithynians and Pisidians still defied external control, the old unsubdued tracts on either side of the great high-roads were unsubdued still, and the northern races of the Black Sea regions were not only still free, but were growing into formidable powers under Iranian leaders. Greek rule had never yet had a chance; first it had been checked by Alexander’s premature death, then by the long fight between the rivals, then, when at last the Empire seemed to have become a unity again under Seleucus, once more the fabric had collapsed, and the problem of the barbarian peoples of Asia Minor confronted in its old shape anyone who now aspired to take up the burden of Empire.

(b) The Greek Cities

We go on now to examine how the change of régime from Persian to Macedonian affected the Greek cities. They obviously were in the highest degree interested in a turn of things which substituted a Hellenic for a barbarian King. The rosiest dreams of Panhellenic enthusiasts, like Isocrates, seemed to have become fact. In truth, however, there was something radically false and incongruous from the start in the position in which the new rulers now found themselves. They claimed to be the champions of Hellenism; they were determined to be paramount kings. The two characters were absolutely irreconcilable. The great crucial question of Hellenic politics—the independence of the several cities— could not be honestly met. The “autonomy of the Hellenes”—it had become already a cant phrase of the market-place; as an absolute principle, no Greek could impeach it with a good conscience; even those who violated it in practice were ready to invoke it, as something sacrosanct, against their opponents—Spartans against Athenians, and Athenians against Spartans; the Persians themselves had been induced to promulgate it in the Peace of Antalcidas. The autonomy of the Asiatic Greeks, understood in the sense of their being freed from the barbarian yoke, had been the ostensible cause in which Alexander drew his sword against Darius. But once lord of Asia, a Hellenic no less than a Persian king wanted to be master in his own house.

We must remember, in order to realize the difficulty of the situation, how genuine and earnest the desire of Alexander and his successors was to secure the good word of the Greeks. Many considerations would move them. There were firstly those of material advantage. The city-states, although none singly could cope in the long run with such powers as were wielded by the great Macedonian chiefs, had by no means become cyphers. There were still civic forces, land and naval, which they could put in action. There were still moneys in the city treasuries which could procure mercenaries. It was of real importance into what scale Cyzicus or Rhodes threw its weight. Cities like these were capable, even singly, of making a good fight. And their importance was, of course, immensely increased by the division of the Macedonian Empire. Even a small accession of power to one or other of the rival chiefs now told. A good name among the Hellenes, which should make the cities willing allies, was worth striving for.

And it was not the cities only as political bodies which it was necessary to win. Princes who no longer had authority in the Macedonian fatherland, and could no longer call up fresh levies of Macedonian countrymen to make good the wear and tear of war, rulers like Antigonus and Ptolemy and Seleucus, came to depend far more upon attracting to their standards the floating class of adventurers who swarmed, over the Greek world and sold their swords to whom they would. It was of immense consequence to be well spoken of among the Greeks.

But besides these considerations of material gain, a good reputation among the Greeks seemed to the Macedonian rulers a thing to be prized for its own sake. They really cared for Greek public opinion. Yes, practical, ambitious, and hard as they appear, they were still not inaccessible to some senti­mental motions. They desired fame. And fame meant—to be spoken of at Athens! The only letters with which they had been imbued were Greek. The great men of the past, the classical examples of human glory, were the men about whom they had learnt when boys in their Greek lesson-books. The achievements of the Macedonian sword seemed to lose half their halo unless they were canonized by the Greek pen. And so the strange spectacle was seen, of the Greeks, after the power of their republics had shrunk and their ancient spirit had departed, mesmerizing the new rulers of the world, as later on they mesmerized the Romans, by virtue of the literature, the culture, and the names which they inherited from their incomparable past. The adulation which the Greeks of those days yielded with such facile prodigality still had a value for their conquerors. The wielders of material power rendered indirect homage to the finer activities of brain.

The interest and the pride of a Macedonian dynast lay no less in his being a champion of Hellenism than in his being a great king. But to be both together—there was the crux! A king could do a great deal for Hellenism; he could shield the Greeks from barbarian oppression; he could make splendid presents to Greek cities and Greek temples; he could maintain eminent men, philosophers, captains, literati, at his court; he could patronize science and poetry and art, but really to allow Greek cities within his dominions to be separate bodies with a will independent of the central power was, of course, impossible. Frankly to acknowledge this impossibility would not have been in accordance with the practice of politicians at any period of history. To cheat the world—to cheat them­selves perhaps—with half-measures and imposing professions was the easy course. They could go on talking about the autonomy of the Hellenes, and interpret the phrase in the way prescribed by the example of Athens and Sparta. It was an uncomfortable thing for a man of Greek education to feel himself the “enslaver” of Greek cities. What the Macedonian rulers would have liked would have been the voluntary acceptance of their dictation as permanent allies by the Greek cities. That was the ideal. And because it was not capable of being realized in fact, the natural course of politicians was, not to discard it boldly, but to pretend that what they desired was true, to preserve the outward forms, to be magnanimous in phrases. Philip and Alexander always veiled the brutal fact of their conquest of European Greece by representing themselves as captains-general elected by the federated Hellenic states. The relation of Hellenic states (European and Asiatic) to the Macedonian king was always, in the official view, one of alliance, not of subjection.

The opening campaign of 334 puts Alexander in the place of the Great King in the regions tenanted by the Asiatic Greeks. It is now to be seen how their autonomy takes sub­stance. There is, at any rate, one measure of interference in the internal affairs of the cities which seems to be demanded in the interests of autonomy itself. The control of foreign powers, Hellenic and barbarian, had not in the past, as we have seen, taken the shape of external pressure only. It had worked by placing the party within the city favorable to itself in the saddle. The destruction of the foreign power did not therefore immediately and ipso facto liberate the oppressed faction. The tyrants and oligarchies established in the cities by the Persian government were left standing when the hand of the Great King was withdrawn. It is therefore the first business of the liberator to overthrow the existing government in the several cities and establish democracies in their place. In doing this he might justly argue that he was acting for, not against, the sacred principle of autonomy. At the same time, in view of actual instances of this change of constitution wrought by an outside power which are furnished us by the history of the times before and after Alexander, one can see how the practice lent itself to hypocrisy—how easily a ruler could use the very measure by which he pretended to assure the autonomy of a city in order to attach it more securely to himself. Every Greek city was divided against itself; “not one but two states, that of the poor and that of the rich, living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.” The autonomy might, indeed, be held to con­sist in the supremacy of the demos rather than of the oligarchs; but in practice it was merely one faction against another, a clique of men whose influence was derived from their ability to catch the popular vote, another of men whose influence was derived from family or riches. Inevitably if one of these parties lent on the aid of an outside power, the opposite party sided with that power’s enemies. It was open to any foreign power to represent the party favorable to itself as the true soul of the city. It is no wonder, with so useful an applica­tion, that the autonomy of the Hellenes was a phrase often in the mouths, not only of the city politicians, but of foreign potentates.

The Greek cities of Asia Minor, as Alexander finds them, are held by tyrants and oligarchs in the interests of Persia. His first step, therefore, is to establish democracies every­where. He is careful to keep his hand upon the new con­stitutions. In a letter to Chios he ordains that the city is to choose nomographoi to draw up the amended code, but their work is to be submitted to the King for his sanction. And now in what relation does the renovated city stand to the ruler of Asia? There were three main ways, according to Greek ideas, in which the autonomy of a city could be violated—by the exaction of tribute, by the imposition of a garrison and by the commands of a superior power meddling with the con­stitution or administration. How far in each of these respects does the autonomy of the Greek cities of Asia hold good under Alexander and his first successors?

First as to the payment of tribute. Alexander is specially said to have remitted in a number of cases the tribute which the city had been paying to the Persian King. To do this he considered apparently an essential part of the work of liberation. At Ephesus he directs that the tribute which had been paid to the barbarians should be paid thenceforth into the treasury of the local Artemis. Aspendus, on the other hand, is ordered to pay tribute to the Macedonians. But the case of Aspendus was exceptional; it was to be specially punished. And even here it is said that the imposition of tribute was not to be permanent, but for a certain number of years only. It is clearly an exception proving a rule.

But we should be too simple if we inferred from the remission of tribute that no money was demanded of the cities. A showy act of magnanimity has not seldom in history covered the old grievance under a new form. A city no longer obliged to pay tribute as a subject might be called upon to make a handsome contribution as an ally. How far this was actually the case under Alexander and his successors eludes our observation. It was, in the case of Aspendus, apparently a requisition of this sort, a demand for fifty talents and the horses maintained by the city for the Persian court, which provoked the quarrel with Alexander. The liberated Chios is commanded to furnish at the expense of the city a contingent of twenty triremes ready manned to the imperial fleet and to provide for the maintenance of the temporary garrison. A rescript of Alexander dealing with Priene specially remits the “contribution”. The money contributed by Mitylene is returned by Alexander as an extraordinary mark of favour. So, too, after the death of Alexander we find Antipater requiring the cities to contribute to the war, and the order is felt by the cities as an unwelcome burden. Antigonus speaks of the heavy expenses of his allies in his war against Cassander and Ptolemy.

The second of the three modes mentioned in which a city’s autonomy might be violated was the imposition of a garrison. That indeed reduced at once the forms of a free state to a comedy. It was the most odious embodiment of brute force. We may well believe that Alexander was unwilling to stultify his own action as liberator in so open a manner. It is only as a temporary measure, or where his hold on an important point is threatened by external enemies, or there has been some mark of hostility on the part of the population, that Alexander permits himself to introduce a Macedonian garrison into a Hellenic city. At Mitylene, for instance, while the Persian fleet still holds the Aegean in 333, we find a con­tingent of mercenaries sent from Alexander “in fulfillment of the alliance.” At Chios the new democratic régime, includ­ing the return of exiles, is carried out under the eyes of a garrison. Till the settlement is complete the garrison is to remain in the city. And we may suppose that the case of Chios was typical, and that the revolutions carried through by Alexander in the Greek states involved in other places also such a temporary occupation by imperial troops. At Priene, for instance, an incidental notice shows a garrison. Rhodes is saddled with a garrison at Alexander’s death.

But even if a city enjoyed immunity from tribute and was unburdened by a garrison, it was impossible that its affairs should not attract the attention of the rulers of the land, or that, attracting it, they should go uncontrolled. Under Alexander, indeed, the representatives of the royal authority in the provinces of the realm, the satraps, do not seem to have been given any regular authority over the Greek cities except in such cases as that of Aspendus. But the King himself was constantly called to interfere; the “royal rescripts” had to break in, as rude realities, upon the dream of independence. Even at the very institution of liberty and democracy in Ephesus (334), Alexander had directed how the money formerly raised as tribute to the court was to be applied, and he had been compelled to restrain by his intervention the furious excesses of the restored democrats, showing at the outset to any who had eyes to see how hollow a pretense under the circumstances of the time autonomy must be. Before the end of his reign he had published the celebrated edict at the Olympic games, commanding the cities of the Greek world everywhere to receive back their exiles. This was to push his interference into the vitals of every state, to override the competence of the city government in a most intimate particular, to set at naught in the eyes of the whole world the principle of autonomy. The real fact of the Macedonian sovereignty, which had been cloaked in so many decent political fictions, is here brutally unveiled.

In spite, however, of these discrepancies with the perfect ideal of autonomy, the Greek cities of Asia spring, with the removal of the Persian yoke, into a richer and more vigorous life. The King himself was a zealous patron in all ways that did not compromise his authority, and public works began to be set on foot, of a larger scale than the resources of the individual cities could have compassed. At Clazomenae, the island to which the citizens had transferred their town, out of fear of the Persians, Alexander connects with the mainland by a causeway a quarter of a mile long. The neighboring promontory, Mimas, on the other hand, with the city of Erythrae, he designs to make an island—an operation which would have put Erythrae in a better position for the coast traffic; unfortunately, the work, after being begun, proved impracticable. The temper of Alexander was such as to make him peculiarly sensitive to historic or legendary associa­tions, and turn his special interest to places glorified by a great past. In Asia Minor he does not stud barbarian regions with new Greek cities, as he does in the farther East, but he pays great attention to the old cities of the Greek sea-board. Above all, his imagination is fired with the project of making the Homeric Ilion once more great and splendid. He found already upon a mound near the coast (mod. Hissarlik) an old temple of Athena, with a little town or village of Greek speech clustering round it. This village asserted its claim to be the very Troy of story. There the ingenuous traveler could inspect the altar of Zeus Herkeios, at whose foot Priam was slain, and shields battered in the Trojan war which were hanging on the temple walls. With such a legend the temple had long been of high prestige among the Greeks. Xerxes, when he passed that way, had sacrificed there with great circumstance. Greek generals had followed his example. The temple, according to Strabo, was small and mean in outward aspect; a statue of the philhellenic Ariobarzanes lay prostrate before it. Alexander could not fail to visit this historic spot and offer sacrifices there the moment that he set foot in Asia. After Granicus he visits it again, and enriches the shrine with some new dedications. He pronounces that Ilion is now a village no longer, but a Hellenic city of full rights; and in order to make fact conform to this fiat, he instructs the royal officials to create the shell of a city by throwing up buildings of a suitable scale. Again, after the destruction of the Persian power, Alexander writes to Ilion fresh promises of what he means to do for city and temple. His sudden death leaves him time for little more than magnificent intentions. Among the official documents made public at his death is the project of making the temple of Athena at Ilion outdo the wonders of Egypt and Babylon.

To extend the privileges of the Greek temples, to make contributions to their enlargement, their adornment, and maintenance, to fill their treasuries with costly vessels, all this not only showed piety, but was the easiest way in which a king, who had more resources than any private person, could demonstrate his usefulness to the Greek cities without pre­judice to his crown. It was not the pride only, but the pocket of the citizens which was touched by the honor of the city shrine. The prestige and splendor of the city shrine were the things which brought worshippers and visitors, which made the festivals well thronged, quickened trade, and brought money into the city. Every motive would impel Alexander to devote himself to the glorification of the Hellenic temples and to press his action upon the attention of the Greeks. According to the story in Strabo (from Artemidorus) Alexander offered the Ephesians to bear the whole expenses of the restoration of the temple, past and current (it had been burnt down on the day of Alexander’s birth), if he might inscribe his name as the dedicator of the new edifice—a condition which the Ephesians would none of. An inscription found at Priene is evidence both of Alexander's liberality to the temple of Athena Polias in that city, and of a greater complaisance on the part of the citizens than had been shown at Ephesus, for Alexander appears as sole dedicator.

Under the sun of the favor of the new Great King, with the increase of commerce following the Macedonian conquest, the Hellenic cities of Asia expand into new bloom. The festivals, which formed so important a part in the life of a Greek citizen, and reflected his material well-being, are cele­brated with new zest. The great religious union of the twelve Ionian cities had, in the days of Persian rule, shrunk to a union of only nine cities, and had been obliged to transfer its assembly and festival from the Panionion on the headland of Mycale to the safer resort of Ephesus. Under Alexander the old order is restored. The famous shrine of the Didymaean Apollo at Branchidae in the domain of Miletus, silent and neglected under the Persian domination, is restored to its former honor, and once more utters oracles to glorify the Hellenic King. The light in which Alexander was regarded is shown in the worship of him maintained by the Ionian Body till Roman times.

The break-up of the Empire is not an unmixed good to the cities. If, on the one hand, it opens the way to liberty, if Rhodes can now expel its garrison and Cyzicus defy the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, on the other hand it entangles the Greek states in chronic war, and renders them liable to be seized by one or other of the rival chiefs. They are no longer in face of the irresistible might of a united empire, but the inferior powers, in the exigencies of the struggle, are far less able to study their sensibilities than an omnipotent and paternal sovereign. The signal in Asia Minor of a new state of things is the attempt made in 319 by Arrhidaeus, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, to force a garrison upon Cyzicus. It is now for the first time that a Macedonian chief makes it a part of his policy to introduce garrisons into Greek cities without any preceding quarrel. But the menace from Antigonus seems to Arrhidaeus to leave him no choice. About the same time Clitus follows suit in Lydia, and the Greek cities, from which the Persian garrisons had been driven fifteen years before by the Macedonian liberator, now find Macedonian garrisons taking their place.

This step on the part of the two satraps, even if dictated by strategic reasons, gives a great political advantage to the satrap of Phrygia. He had indeed determined to be supreme lord in Asia Minor, and he is now able to pursue his ambi­tion as the champion of Hellenic autonomy. Antigonus immediately adopts this role before the world, and is careful from this time forward to distinguish his policy by this luminous mark from that of his opponents. Clitus has hardly seized the Ionian cities before Antigonus appears as the deliverer, ejects the garrisons, and wrests the great city of Ephesus from those who hold it. The satrap of Lydia had already abandoned his province and withdrawn to Macedonia. Antigonus acts in like manner with regard to Arrhidaeus. He had immediately on the siege of Cyzicus sent an embassy to read him a lecture on the rights of Hellenic cities, and he soon brings force to bear. By the following year (318) he has himself invaded the satrapy and pinned Arrhidaeus to the town of Cius. The Greek cities of the Propontis—Byzantium, Calchedon, Cyzicus—see in him a friend, and are ready with their help. His naval victory over Clitus in the Bosphorus secures him in possession of the Hellespontine province. What became of Arrhidaeus we do not hear.

The Greek cities over whom Antigonus now throws his shield, as lord of Asia, are, however, exposed to attack by his enemies from the sea. Asander, the satrap of Caria, with whom Antigonus had not yet had time to reckon, has by 315, when Antigonus returns from the East, thrown troops into Northern Cappadocia and laid siege to Amisus. Then when the great war between Antigonus and the other chiefs begins, the Greek cities all along the coast of Asia Minor have to bear the brunt of the hostile forces. That the sympathies of the Hellenes of Asia are generally with Antigonus at this moment is shown in the permission given him by Rhodes to build ships in its harbors. But they are in a perilous case. The forces of Antigonus have to move rapidly about the coasts and islands to drive off the enemies who sweep down upon them. Amisus and Erythrae are relieved in 315, Lemnos in 314. Even the Greek cities of the European coast of the Black Sea are embraced in the purview of Antigonus. In 313 he attempts to send a force to the help of Callatis, which has expelled the garrison of Lysimachus and “laid hold of autonomy” in the same year Antigonus presses home his attack on the satrap of Caria. Asander, like Arrhidaeus and Clitus, has occupied the Greek cities of his province with garrisons. Their deliver­ance is written large in the manifestoes of Antigonus. His generals appear before Miletus, call the citizens to liberty, and drive the garrison out of the citadel. Tralles, whether garri­soned or simply ruled by the partizans of Asander, is taken. Caunus is taken, although the garrison hold out in one of the two citadels. Iasus is compelled to give its adherence to the cause of Antigonus. Cnidus appears soon after as a friendly state.

Rhodes is at this time rapidly rising to the position of a first-class power, marked out by its character as Hellenic republic to be a champion of Greek liberty, and Rhodes now formally recognizes Antigonus as the paladin of the sacred cause, and makes an alliance, under which it furnishes him with ten ships “for the liberation of the Hellenes! When the great war comes to a temporary pause in 311, a special clause in the terms of the Peace provides that the Hellenes shall be autonomous. To the principle indeed all the Macedonian dynasts now formally declare their adherence; it was still possible to interpret the principle in a way which would not hamper, but would further, their egoistic designs.

The letter, or a great part of it, has been recently dis­covered, in which Antigonus announces to the city of Scepsis, as one of his allies, the conclusion of the Peace. It is his chief concern to show how all through the negotiations he had made the freedom of the Greeks his first consideration. To secure the adhesion of Cassander and Ptolemy to the principle, he had waived important interests of his own. He wished nothing to stand in the way of a settlement which would put the liberty of the Greeks upon a lasting foundation. The Greeks, we observe, are carefully treated as allies; each state is expected to take for itself the oath in which the Macedonian chiefs, as heads of each federation, have sworn to the principle of Hellenic autonomy and the other terms of the Peace. The comment which history writes to state documents is often an ironic one. Before ten years were out, the people of Scepsis were being driven from their homes by the decree of Antigonus to be merged in the new city he created for his own glory.

Antigonus himself is not able to avoid garrisoning some of the cities. At Caunus, for instance, after he has succeeded in reducing the hostile garrison, he feels it necessary to place in both the citadels garrisons of his own. The consequence, of course, is to give his enemies just the same sort of handle as had been given him by Arrhidaeus and Clitus. Ptolemy now (309) appears on the coast of Asia Minor in the guise of liberator. Phaselis and Caunus are wrested from Antigonus. Siege is laid to Halicarnassus, but this city Demetrius comes up in time to secure. Next year (308) Myndus and Cos appear in Ptolemy’s possession, and, passing through the islands, he drives a garrison of Antigonus out of Andros.

A growing coolness between Antigonus and Rhodes is marked by the refusal of Rhodes in 306 to compromise its neutrality by supporting Demetrius in his attack on Ptolemy. Next year (305) comes the attack on Rhodes itself, in which Antigonus openly throws to the winds all the professions he has been making for years. The magnificent defense of Rhodes secures a peace in which it is expressly stipulated that the city shall be autonomous, free from a garrison, and sovereign over its own revenues.

The correspondence of Antigonus with Teos towards the year 304-303, preserved for us in stone, throws an interesting light upon his action with regard to the Greek cities. The matter in hand is the synoikismos of Lebedus and Teos. The times were against a large number of small cities, and the lesser ones tended to coalesce or be absorbed by the greater. This process, which might take place spontaneously, as in the case of Rhodes, Antigonus began deliberately to further, as we shall see in the Troad. Lebedus was a case where a migration of the inhabitants might seem appropriate. Lying between Ephesus and Teos, the little town had failed to hold its own. A transference of the population to Teos might appear an advantage both to them and to the city which received the accession. Such a step, however, involved a number of practical difficulties. Should the new-comers build new houses adjacent to the existing city of Teos, or now that the population as a whole was grown greater, should the city be rebuilt more towards the peninsula? How in the meantime should the people of Lebedus be housed? What would become of the public obligations contracted by Lebedus? How should the outstanding suits between the two cities be settled? Each city having hitherto had its own laws, under what code should the combined peoples now live? On these and similar questions Antigonus pronounces a decision. But there is little in the document to show whether the synoikismos is taking place at his command, whether, that is to say, he gives his verdict as the sovereign, or whether he is merely deciding as arbitrator on questions voluntarily submitted to himself by the cities. It was quite in accordance with the practice of the time for the Greek states to refer their disputes to the arbitration of a neutral power. They might naturally choose the Greek king, on whose confines they dwelt, without implying his possession of any sovereign rights over them. His interference with their internal affairs, as voluntarily chosen arbitrator, would be of an utterly different character from the interference of a high-handed over-lord. Antigonus, in the document before us, says little to imply sovereignty. Only once the ugly fact looks through. Alexander had ordered the Chians to submit their new constitution to him for ratification (p. 106). Antigonus thinks it well to exercise the same sort of control. “ You are further to send to us” he writes, “the laws upon which you have agreed, and indicate those which were introduced by the nomothetai and those which were framed by other citizens, in order that, if any persons are shown to be bringing in laws which are not desirable but the reverse, we may visit them with our censure and punishment”. It is no mere arbitrator that speaks there!

Such were the relations, as far as we can now trace them, between Antigonus and the old Greek cities of Asia Minor. But by the side of the old cities there begin under Antigonus to rise the new Greek cities which were called into being by Hellenistic kings. We have no proof of any foundation of a new Greek city in the country north of the Taurus before the time when Antigonus brought it under his sovereignty. Two cities, illustrious in a later age, called Antigonus their founder. One of these rose in the fertile plain at the eastern extremity of the Ascanian Lake, on the high-road between Phrygia, the seat of government, and the Bosphorus. It declared itself, by its very form, a city of the new age, an exact square, each face of the boundary wall four stades long with a gate in the middle, the thoroughfares intersecting at nice angles, and so strictly ruled that from a stone in the central gymnasium every one of the four gates was visible. The other city was designed to become the seaport of the Troad. It was a case of synoikismos. The population of the small towns of the neighbourhood were dragged into the new foundation; Larissa, Colonae, Chrysa, Hamaxitus, Cebrene, Neandria, and Scepsis were absorbed. These were the two cities which owed their existence to Antigonus the One-eyed. To both he gave, with unimaginative egoism, the same name of Antigonia; but it was under another name that each was destined to become famous.

A third city laid out by Antigonus purported rather to be a revival than a new creation. The name of Smyrna had ceased four hundred years before to denote a living city; only a group of villages marked the site of what had once been the seaport of that coast. Its importance had drawn upon it early the attack of the Lydian kings. When the Persians came, all that was left of Smyrna were some old temples, like that of the Nemeses, and the straggling villages. But the fame of the old Smyrna lived on in the songs of the Greeks, and now under Antigonus a new Smyrna began to rise two miles from the old site on the southern side of the bay, built after the admired pattern, with regular streets intersecting each other at exact right angles. Thus Smyrna began a second existence, destined to be a long one. By the irony of fate that city, which seemed earliest to have perished, has survived all its rivals and, still bearing its old name, dominates a coast where Ephesus and Miletus are forgotten.

Two years after the raising of the siege of Rhodes the dominion of Antigonus in Asia Minor begins to break up (302). Over the Greek cities is thrown the shadow of a new personality. Lysimachus, satrap of Thrace since 323, now, like the other dynasts, styling himself King, crosses into Asia. His reception differs in the case of different cities. Of those that hold by Antigonus, it is impossible to say in each instance whether the city’s action is determined by a garrison, or by fear, or by real loyalty. Lysimachus, indeed, himself does not spend much time over the Greek cities; his object is to strike at the seat of his adversary’s power in Phrygia; he presses on into the interior, leaving it to his lieutenant Prepelaus to deal with the cities. In person he only summons those which lie on his road, Lampsacus and Parium, which voluntarily join him, Sigeum, which he has to reduce by force, and Abydos, the siege of which he begins but does not prosecute. Into Sigeum he introduces a garrison. Of the Greek cities approached by Prepelaus, Adramyttium is overpowered in passing, Ephesus is intimidated into submission, Teos and Colophon give in their adherence, apparently from a sense of weakness, Erythrae and Clazomenae, into which the generals of Antigonus throw forces by sea, hold out. In Ephesus, at any rate, Prepelaus puts a garrison. This garrison is expelled within a few months by Demetrius, who introduces one of his own. When Demetrius goes on to the Hellespont, Lampsacus and Parium again change sides. Meantime Lysimachus has retired northwards and attaches Heraclea to his person by marrying Amestris, who is ruling the city as widow of the late tyrant.³ Heraclea has all these years constituted a singular case among the Greek cities of Asia. Here the old dynasty of tyrants, a relic of Achaemenian days, still survived. This was due to the tyrant Dionysius, who had the good sense to fortify himself with the goodwill of his subjects, and contrived by admirable diplomacy to keep on friendly terms with successive Macedonian rulers. His alliance with Antigonus had been peculiarly close, cemented by a marriage between their two families. At his death, which took place while Antigonus was still ruling Asia, that chief continued to protect his widow, who now ruled Heraclea as regent for his infant sons.

Amestris was a remarkable woman, whose person still connected the present with a vanished past. She was the niece of the last Persian Great King, and had spent her early life in a royal harem. After the Persian Empire had been swept away by Alexander, she became the wife of the Macedonian chief Craterus. Craterus, after Alexander’s death, passed her on to Dionysius. Now, after ruling for some time over a Greek city, she gets a third husband in Lysimachus.

The partition after Ipsus confirms Lysimachus in possession of Western Asia Minor. Some of the Greek cities indeed remain for a time in the hands of Demetrius, notably Ephesus, the most important of all. An inscription records the arrival in that city of an ambassador sent by Demetrius and Seleucus jointly, to notify their reconciliation (about 299). Ephesus appears, of course, in this official document as a sovereign state receiving the envoy of external powers. Not a word to show that a garrison, composed largely of pirates, was all this while determining the city's policy, as appears to have been the case. By 294, however, all or most of these cities have been acquired by Lysimachus; at Ephesus his general Lycus bought over the pirate captain Andron.³ Demetrius in 287­286 is received at Miletus by Eurydice, the repudiated queen of Ptolemy. It is not clear by whose forces, those of Demetrius or Ptolemy, Miletus is at this time held. Other cities perhaps passed after Ipsus into the hand of Ptolemy.

The appearance of Demetrius in Asia Minor in 287-286 leads to his regaining possession of a number of cities, “some joining him voluntarily, and some yielding to force.” Which cities these were is not said, but next year Caunus is still held by his forces, and had therefore either never been lost or was recaptured now. This is, of course, a merely temporary disturbance in the domination of Lysimachus, the cities being soon compelled to return to their former “alliance”

There are indications that the hand of Lysimachus weighed more heavily upon the Greeks than that of Antigonus. It is perhaps not mere chance that an inscription shows us now for the first time a governor set by a Macedonian king over the cities of Ionia. In a letter to Priene, Lysimachus speaks of having “sent an order to the city that it should obey his strategos.” At Lemnos we are told that the Athenian colonists found Lysimachus play the master in a particularly disagree­able way. We have instances of his autocratic dealing. The city of Astacus he wiped out of existence. Ephesus he determined to replace by a new city, Arsinoea, called after his latest wife, Ptolemy’s daughter, on a somewhat more con­venient site nearer the sea. When the citizens objected to being haled from their old homes at his pleasure, Lysimachus blocked the drains on a stormy day and flooded the city. This induced the citizens to move. To swell the new city, Lebedus and Colophon were emptied of their population and reduced to villages. The Colophonians, with pathetic audacity, gave battle to the forces of the King, and their feelings found lasting voice in the lament of the native poet Phoenix. The new city of Lysimachus prospered, but it was still Ephesus, never really Arsinoe. The Scepsians, on the other hand, who had been swept by Antigonus into the new city of the Troad, Lysimachus allowed to return to their former seat.

At Heraclea his action was conspicuously capricious. Amestris, after living with him happily for some time, when she found him contemplating the new marriage with Arsinoe, chose to leave him at Sardis and go back to govern Heraclea. When her sons Clearchus and Oxathres reached an age to assume the reins, her adventurous life came to a tragical end by her putting to sea in a boat which they had specially prepared in order to drown her. Being not only wicked but stupid, they alienated the citizens by tyrannic behavior, and thus lost the advantage of Dionysius in regard to the Macedonian rulers. Lysimachus now intervened amid popular plaudits, put the two wretched criminals to death, and restored the long-desired democracy. The city congratulated itself on having won at this late date its freedom. But it rejoiced too soon, for Lysimachus, the liberator, soon followed the custom of old Persian days in making it over as an appanage to the queen Arsinoe. So the Heracleots now found the former tyrants simply replaced by the queen’s agent, Heraclides—a change hardly for the better.

The activity of Lysimachus as a builder of cities left a durable mark upon the country of the Asiatic Greeks. The case of Ephesus has been already described. For foundations, indeed, which were altogether new, Lysimachus did not find room, but where others had begun Lysimachus carried to completion. There were the three new cities of Antigonus, the two Antigonias and Smyrna. To all of these Lysimachus set his hand. The name of the two first, designed to perpetuate the glory of Antigonus, was altered. Lysimachus, having already created a Lysimachia in the Chersonese, did not happily think it necessary to go on giving the same name with dull monotony to all his cities. The Antigonia on the Ascanian lake received the name of his earlier wife, Nicaea the daughter of Antipater; it was the Nicaea or Nice which was to give its title to the Nicene creed. The other Antigonia was renamed Alexandria in honor of his old master and known as Alexandria Troas (or Troas simply) to distinguish it from all the other Alexandrias. The old name of Smyrna was left unchanged. In the case of Ilion also, Lysimachus was at pains to realize some of the good intentions of Alexander. It was now that the city received a temple worthier of its fame, if not quite what Alexander had contemplated, and a wall of forty stades. Its population was increased by a synoikismos of the surrounding villages. The new Ilion became in the third century before Christ a place of considerable importance, not indeed as a political power, but as the center of a religious union.

The murder of Agathocles brings the disaffection of the Greek cities towards Lysimachus to a head; they begin openly to invoke the intervention of Seleucus. There is thus an immense advantage secured to the house of Seleucus, in that its first appearance to the Greek cities is in the guise of liberator. It starts with the flowing tide. As the great power of the East, it had indeed already shown its sympathy with the interests of the Hellenic world, especially with the cult of Apollo, from whom it professed to descend. The temple of Apollo at Branchidae was among the great shrines of Pan-Hellenic regard, such as Delphi or Delos. The work of restoration after the Persian tyranny was now going forward. A good Hellene, king or private man, might feel it claim his contributions and offerings. Seleucus, long before he had any political connection with Miletus, had shown himself a zealous benefactor both of the city and the temple connected with it. On becoming master of Iran he had sent back to Branchidae from Ecbatana the bronze image of Apollo by Canachus, which had been carried off by the Persians A Milesian inscription represents Antiochus, during his father’s lifetime, as promising to build a stoa in the city, from the lease of which a permanent revenue may be drawn to be devoted to the expenses of the temple. Miletus, we saw, was still outside Lysimachus’ sphere of power in 287-286, and may never have been acquired by him.

The Delian Apollo was also honored by the house of Seleucus. Stratonice especially seems to have shown herself a munificent votaress of this god. The temple registers show presents from both herself and Seleucus.

To Seleucus himself only seven months are allowed, from the battle of Corupedion to his death, in which to deal with all the questions involved in the relations between the Greek cities of the Asiatic sea-board and the power ruling the interior. In seven months he has time to do little but inform himself of the situation, and of even that little almost all record has perished. He seems at any rate to have addressed himself promptly to the question of the Greek cities, and to have sent out “regulators” to the various districts to report. Such at least is what the historian of Heraclea represents him as doing in the case of the northern cities. It is only by what he tells us that light is flashed upon a single spot in the darkness of these seven months. The commissioner appointed to visit the cities of Hellespontine Phrygia and the northern coast is a certain Aphrodisius. He comes in due course to Heraclea. In this city, as we may suppose in most others, the fall of Lysimachus has previously aroused a ferment favorable to the cause of Seleucus. As soon as the news of Corupedion reached Heraclea, the people rose to shake off the hated yoke of the queen. A deputation waited on the agent Heraclides, informed him that the people were bent on recovering their freedom, and offered to treat him handsomely if he would quietly leave. Heraclides, misreading the situation, flew into a passion, and began ordering people off to execution. There was still a garrison to hold the people down. But the garrison unfortunately had been stinted of pay, and saw their profit in coming to an agreement with the townspeople, by which they were to acquire the franchise of the city and the arrears due to them. Heraclides accordingly found himself lodged under guard. The walls of the fortress by which the city had been coerced so long were leveled with the ground. A leader of the people was chosen and an embassy sent to Seleucus. This embassy has already left when Aphrodisius appears in the city. All seems to promise excellent relations between Heraclea and the King, especially since they are already fighting the battle of the central government against Ziboetes the Bithynian. For some unexplained reason, Aphrodisius falls out with the Heracleots. He returns to Seleucus with a report unfavorable to Heraclea alone of all the cities he has visited. The Heracleot envoys are still with the King, and as a result of the commissioner’s report an interview takes place in which an unhappy breach is made between the city and the house of Seleucus. The King begins with high words. Provoked by these, a sturdy citizen breaks out with the retort: “Heracles is the stronger, Seleucus.” His Doric is so broad that the King does not understand, stares angrily, and then turns away his face.

The news of the King’s averted countenance, carried to Heraclea, brings about a reversal of policy. A league now comes into being, antagonistic to the ruling house. It includes Heraclea, its sister-states, Byzantium and Calchedon, and, more ominously, the Persian prince Mithridates. The enmity between Greek and barbarian was one of the circumstances most to the advantage of a Greek house, desiring to hold these coast regions where the two elements came into contact. Maladdress in handling the Greek cities might, it is seen, con­vert the enmity into alliance. The cities of this League form, however, in the present case an exception. With the other northern ones Aphrodisius, as we saw, had no fault to find, and the Greeks of Asia Minor generally seem to regard the house of Seleucus at this moment with feelings of gratitude and hope.

Looking, then, at the history of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, as a whole, from the fall of the Persian Empire to the time when Antiochus is called to take up his inheritance, we must admit that the result of the Iranian, giving place to a Hellenic, power has hardly come up to the forecast of Isocrates. Those whose memories went back to the visions and assurances of an earlier period, whose youth had been fed by the Panegyricus and Letter to Philip, must have felt a certain dis­illusionment now that nearly half a century had gone by since the morning of Granicus. After all, then, Hellenic civilization was to end In monarchy? The autonomy of the cities seemed as little secure from princes like Lysimachus as from an Artaxerxes or Darius. To “obey the King’s governor” was still a hard word that the cities were compelled to hear. That the cities had to do with kings whose brute strength exceeded their own, that the course of the world was governed, not by the legalities of theorists, but by force majeure, that what the city counted its rights were only held on sufferance, that the sovereignty of the kings over the cities not being recognized in political theory, the action of the kings was not restrained by any constitutional forms but solely by their own discretion—all these were facts which must have been present to anyone who looked below the surface.

On the other hand, it would be untrue to deny that the Greeks had profited enormously by the Macedonian conquest. If the rule under which they had passed was not less autocratic than the Persian, it was far more sympathetic. If the chains were not taken off, they were at any rate charmingly gilded, and to a sensitive people like the Greeks the sparing of their amour propre removed half the injury. If some facts were unpleasant to contemplate, the King’s government would help everyone to cloak them over; it would call the cities its “allies” and the money it exacted a “contribution.” The moral and sentimental grievance which the old barbarian rule had entailed was thus mitigated; in the material sphere the cities had gained more unquestionably. We may perhaps dis­tinguish three main ways in which the rule of the Macedonian chiefs was a benefit. Firstly, they had shown themselves, as has been seen, ready enough to use their riches for the good of the cities, for embellishing the shrines and furthering public works. In the second place, they were the natural protectors of the cities against the barbarians, and the barbarians, as we have seen, were still a danger in many parts of Asia Minor. Lastly, if the quarrels of the different Macedonian house's drew in the cities to some extent as allies of one or the other, the establishment of a dominion prevented within its sphere the desolating feuds between city and city. There was one over­shadowing authority by whose judgment the relations between the cities were regulated. In compensation then for hurt done to the self-respect and the ambitions of the cities by their subjection, they were given a measure of peace and enlarged resources.

With such advantages balanced against such drawbacks the rule of the Macedonian houses must have given rise to very mixed feelings among the Greeks; the constitution of the individual citizen, the circumstances of the moment, must have made it appear in different colors, according as light was thrown upon its useful or its unpleasant side. There were numbers of well-to-do people whose material interests prospered, who were little troubled by ideal grievances, and whose main concern was the maintenance of an established order. There were others whose heads were heated by the phrases of orators, and whom nothing could console for the curtailment of their city’s sovereignty. One must take account of this vein of feeling as always there, ready, as soon as it is reinforced by any tangible grievance or any general discontent, to break out in the old blind struggle for liberty. As a rule, however, the question before the cities was not between Macedonian rule in the abstract and unqualified independence, but between one Macedonian ruler and another. A diplomatic prince might reap all the profit of another’s odium, and to escape from a yoke that bruised them, the Greek cities might willingly accept one more considerately adjusted. They were, at any rate, effusive enough in their professions of loyalty to many of their masters. How much sincerity lay in these professions we can only divine by weighing the circum­stances of each case.

It is in this period that a practice begins to become general in the Greek world which forms a prominent feature in the last stage of classical heathenism—the rendering of distinctively divine honors to eminent men even during their lifetime. Alexander had already before his death received from many of the Greek states honors which marked him as divine, and the cities were ready to act in like manner toward his successors. The usual externals of worship—temenos and altar, image, sacrifice, and games—were decreed by Scepsis to Antigonus in 310, and honors no less elaborate were tendered Antigonus and Demetrius by Athens in 307. Lysimachus was worshipped during his lifetime by the cities within his sphere of power. Ptolemy and Seleucus were worshipped both before and after their death.

(c) The Provincial Authorities

We have now considered how two of the difficulties which the old Persian rule had encountered in Asia Minor, the difficulty of the native races and the difficulty of the Greek cities, presented themselves in 281 to Antiochus when he found himself called to assert the authority of his house in the country north of the Taurus. A third difficulty which the house of Achaemenes had experienced, that of controlling its own officers, the house of Seleucus also, should it aspire to rule Asia Minor from a seat of government outside it, was likely to experience in its turn. Alexander, had his life been longer—his house, had he left issue under whom the Empire held together—would doubtless have encountered this difficulty in course of time; we may indeed say that the break-up of the Empire after Alexander’s death was nothing else but this difficulty destroying the central government altogether. In 281 Antiochus, the grandson of a Macedonian captain and an Iranian grandee, put his hand to the task which had proved too hard for the King of kings.