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

CHAPTER 8.

ANTIOCHUS I (SOTER)

1

The kingdom

The course of events in Asia Minor which followed the death of Seleucus is mainly hidden from us. We must not imagine that by the crime of Ptolemy Keraunos and the desertion of the army at Lysimachia the power of the house of Seleucus in the West was instantly annihilated. As the news of the catastrophe travelled from city to city, it would find in many places a population who still saw their best course at this juncture in holding by the King of the East, or a garrison which resolved to abide faithful to their old master’s son. Even in Europe, during the short time since Corupedion, the house of Seleucus had begun to make its supremacy effective. Silver coins are found bearing the name of King Seleucus, and stamped with the symbols of the city of Callatis (mod. Mangalia in Roumania). And after the death of Seleucus coins are struck for a time in parts of Europe with the name of King Antiochus, some of them showing the anchor in the centre of the Macedonian shield, a declaration that to the house of Seleucus the throne of Philip and Alexander now belongs. The news indeed of what had occurred must have left it quite uncertain in many places in whose hands the government of the world would now rest. It must have depended upon the way in which the authorities in each city, each condottiere who had a fortress in charge, each mountain chief, read the signs of the times, who of the various claimants was recognized in those confused days as master.

Ptolemy Keraunos, with the army and fleet gathered at Lysimachia, held indeed a point of vantage for striking at Macedonia. But he had leapt into a dangerous seat. His crime had raised all the moral feelings of the Greek world against him. Antiochus was bound by filial piety, as well as interest, to open war on him. His pretensions to Macedonia made both Antigonus Gonatas and Pyrrhus of Epirus his enemies. His brother of Egypt might now be alarmed for his own security and join his enemies. The last danger Keraunos succeeded in conjuring; he let the Court of Alexandria know that he definitely renounced all claims to Egypt and procured his brother's neutrality. But the attack of Antigonus and Antiochus he had to sustain. These two kings seem soon to have come to a mutual understanding. There were other things besides the common enmity to Keraunos to draw Antigonid and Seleucid together. The House of Antigonus had been lifted from its abasement after Ipsus by Seleucus; Demetrius in his captivity had found at any rate princely treatment and security for his life; Stratonice, the queen of Antiochus, was the sister of Antigonus Gonatas.

Antigonus was nearer the scene of action than his brother-in-law and could strike first. The tidings of events at Lysimachia brought him hurrying north with a land and naval force to occupy Macedonia before Keraunos. The fleet constituted by Lysimachus, and including a contingent from Heraclea, had passed to Keraunos with the army, and this he now opposed to the ships of Antigonus. The encounter was a victory for Keraunos—a result which the historian of Heraclea attributes mainly to the bravery of the Heracleots. After this reverse Antigonus withdrew again to Central Greece, and Macedonia was left exposed.

Any outposts of Seleucid power in Europe had been cut off from succour by the defection of the forces at Lysimachia. Ptolemy Keraunos succeeded in occupying Macedonia, although, if those numismatists are right who assign coins with the name of King Antiochus to a European origin, the process must have been a gradual one, and adherents of the house of Seleucus must have held out for a time here and there. What measures the Seleucid court took in the early days of Antiochus to safeguard its interests north of the Taurus, what form its hostilities against the new Macedonian king assumed, is unknown to us. Antiochus had, as has been said, hurried westward on the news of his father's murder, and a war of some sort between Ptolemy Keraunos and Antiochus came to pass. Antiochus himself did not yet cross the Taurus; he was delayed by the necessity of suppressing the revolt in Syria.

What took place in Asia Minor, in those cities which a few months before had hailed Seleucus as liberator, is unrecorded. From the few things told us we can conjecture that many declared themselves at that crisis adherents of the house of Seleucus, that its popularity stood it in good stead. The Athenian colonists in Lemnos erected temples to Antiochus as well as to his father. If the account of the Ilians a few years later can be trusted, they had immediately begun on the news of Antiochus' accession to offer sacrifices and prayers on his behalf. But the best evidence that the chances of the house of Seleucus seemed good in those days in Asia Minor is that Philetaerus of Pergamos now saw his profit in earning its good-will.

This man was a native of the little Greek town of Tios or Tieum. One account (possibly later court scandal) asserts that his mother was a Paphlagonian flute-girl. At some crowded funeral, to which he was carried as a baby, he had been crushed in his nurse's arms and rendered impotent. In spite of his condition his abilities secured him advancement. He had first mixed in the political game as a friend of that Docimus who had been prominent in the second rank of Macedonian chiefs, the lieutenant first of Perdiccas, then of Antigonus, and lastly of Lysimachus. Philetaerus had accompanied his friend in his passages from one camp to another. Lysimachus marked him out as a useful instrument. He was made warden of the treasure which Lysimachus had stored on the strong hill of Pergamos. In the dissensions of the family of Lysimachus, Philetaerus had sided with Agathocles, and after Agathocles’ murder he no longer felt himself safe from the vindictive hatred of the queen, Arsinoe. He was among those who invoked Seleucus; the assurance was conveyed to Antioch that the warden and the treasure of Pergamos were at the King's disposal. And now when a great blow had been dealt to the house of Seleucus in the moment of its triumph, Philetaerus, with a judicious eye for the winning side, still showed himself its friend. He begged the body of Seleucus from the murderer. Ptolemy put his price high, but Philetaerus knew when it was profitable to dip his hand into the treasure of Pergamos. He acquired the body, himself saw to its cremation, and sent the ashes to Antiochus. We may be sure that any party in which Philetaerus is found has many other adherents in Asia Minor.

We may indeed divine that the Seleucid cause in Asia Minor had at that moment to trust rather to the willing loyalty or the far-sighted fears of princes and peoples than to a display of force. Antiochus was probably obliged to gather all his strength to tight for existence in Syria. It was only “by many wars”, Memnon says, that he recovered “hardly and in a diminished form his father's Empire”. As soon, however, as it could be spared, a body of troops was sent to enforce the authority of the Seleucid king in the country beyond the Taurus. How near an interest is felt in this country is shown by the man who now appears there as the King's representative—Patrocles. Only for a moment does this distinguished figure appear in Asia Minor to vanish again in the darkness which wraps the period. The shifting light falls once more upon the Bithynian coast. A lieutenant of Patrocles, one Hermogenes of Aspendus, is here in command of a force with which he endeavours to bring again the revolted Greek cities into allegiance to the Seleucid house. Heraclea, since its rupture with Seleucus, had strengthened itself by allowing its exiles to make peace with the ruling faction and return home, but now, in presence of this instrument of compulsion, it thought best to temporize. By coming quickly to terms the city saved its fields. A more formidable foe of the Greek king was close at hand, the Bithynian chieftain, and against him Hermogenes now turned his arms. A fight between the King's forces and its ancient Bithynian enemy was an event which Heraclea was only too willing to bring about by promising Hermogenes its friendship.

The sight of Macedonian armies fleeing down the valleys before the tribesmen was almost familiar in Bithynia. It was seen once more ere Ziboetes, now an old man of over seventy, left the sphere of his triumphs. The Bithynians were upon Hermogenes when he least expected them; he saw that his reputation had gone the way of his predecessors. Disdaining to survive, he chose at least the death of a brave man. Ziboetes aspired to a greatness which went beyond mere victories of the spear. He had a comprehension of the value of the life which demanded a richer environment than the hill-side village: he wished to rival the Greek kings as a builder of cities. Before he died he had founded a Ziboetium under Mount Lypedrum.

The hostilities between the forces of Antiochus and Ptolemy Keraunos did not last long. Either king was too much threatened at home not to desire a modus vivendi. And one was found which must have marked some frontier between the sphere to be dominated from Macedonia and the sphere of Seleucid authority.

Perhaps there were fair hopes at that moment of a period of tranquillity opening for Seleucid Asia. The dangers which had compassed Antiochus at his accession seemed melting away. If the house of Seleucus could confine its ambitions to Asia, there was no reason why it should fear molestation from its rivals. Ptolemy Keraunos, to whom Macedonia had been abandoned, had his hands full in that country, crushing what remained of the house of Lysimachus, and defending himself against his barbarian neighbors; his brother in Egypt was not aggressive; Antigonus, although checked in Central Greece, served to right the balance of power against the house of Ptolemy; and lastly, Pyrrhus of Epirus had fortunately turned his thoughts westward and quitted the scene to plunge into adventures across the Adriatic. His brother kings, to get rid of him, were forward to give him help—ships, men, elephants; Antiochus, who required all the troops he had been able to raise since the defection of the grand army to hold his outspread provinces, sent money.

And now, at peace without, the house of Seleucus might address itself to the task, for which the Greek kings had never yet had leisure, the task of bringing into subjection the stubborn elements within. Now the strength of a great empire might be turned upon self-styled kings like Ziboetes and Mithridates, and restive cities taught the true meaning of autonomy.

Whether it was before or after the peace that Patrocles took over Asia Minor and the disaster to Hermogenes occurred we do not know. It was probably after it that Antiochus himself, accompanied by his queen, crossed the Taurus.

The presence of the King probably went far towards bringing to an end the anarchic state of things which had prevailed in Asia Minor since the death of Seleucus, and give his partisans in most places assured supremacy. To bring peace to the Hellenic cities and restore authority to his house was the double object which Antiochus gave the country to understand he set before him. To achieve it, he had to make sure of the allegiance of those troops who, in scattered garrisons, held the points of vantage, but whom maladroit treatment might easily cause to sell their swords to another master. Antiochus, if the expressions used by the Ilians in an honorific inscription have any truth, dealt ably and successfully with the situation. But his success did not extend to the most troublesome corner of his realm, Bithynia.

Antiochus had come into Asia Minor determined to avenge Hermogenes and make a supreme effort to vindicate the supremacy of Macedonian arms. Ziboetes, the redoubtable chieftain, had died full of years, and his house was shaken by discords. Nicomedes, his eldest son, had marked himself out as the “executioner” of his brothers. One of these brothers, however, called, like his father, Ziboetes, had contrived to escape massacre and make himself master of the Thynian part of his father’s dominion. It seemed a favorable opportunity for the Macedonian government to intervene. But Nicomedes, however barbarous, had inherited his father's strength of will and understanding. In his predicament he boldly reversed the policy of his house and proposed an alliance to Heraclea against the Seleucid king. Heraclea, who had already negotiated with one barbarian dynast, was not unwilling to listen to the overtures of the Bithynian. Nicomedes is now admitted to membership in the anti-Seleucid League, and even becomes its head.

To secure this end, Nicomedes had astutely ceded to Heraclea that region which was in his brother's possession. This, of course, at once brought the Heracleots into collision with Ziboetes, and a sanguinary battle was fought. The city gained all it wanted, Memnon says, but Ziboetes continues to appear in possession of a part of Bithynia.

Heraclea was using this moment, in which the Macedonian government was embarrassed and its Bithynian neighbors divided, to extend its power. It set about buying back the places which had once been annexed to it but were now alienated, Tios, Cierus, Amastris. Into whose hands these had fallen is not stated except in the case of the last, where a certain Eumenes appears as master. This man is generally taken to be the brother or nephew of Philetaerus of Pergamos, whose native place Tios was one of the cities which had been drawn into the synoikismos of Amastris. Tios had rapidly broken away again and renewed its separate existence. In whose possession Tios and Cierus now were, whether in those of tyrants of their own or of Nicomedes, we are not told—the latter is generally assumed. These towns at any rate Heraclea now succeeds in redeeming, but Eumenes, who seems to have had some special animus against Heraclea (perhaps he was an adherent like Philetaerus of the Seleucid house), refused to sell Amastris on any terms. When Heraclea tried force, he preferred to make the place over to Ariobarzanes, the son of King Mithridates.

Antiochus lost no time in opening war on the Northern League. The Seleucid fleet appeared in the neighborhood of the Bosphorus, but the Heracleot squadron manoeuvered against it and no decisive result was obtained. Now, however, fresh complications arose. An estrangement between Antiochus and Antigonus, his late ally against Ptolemy, came to open war. Antigonus at once joined forces with the Northern League. There was a good deal of fighting of which we have no account in North-Western Asia.

But this phase was not a long one. Antigonus presently made peace with his brother-in-law, and left the League to maintain the struggle by its own strength.

2

The Gauls

But already in Europe the game of politicians and kings had been confounded by a cataclysm, which swept across old landmarks and submerged old feuds and ambitions in a universal terror. Ancient Mediterranean civilization lived all its life on the edge of a great peril, which it forgot perhaps between the moments of visitation, but by which it ultimately perished. From time to time the forests and fens of Central Europe spilt upon it some of their chaotic, seething peoples. They passed—wild-eyed, jabbering strangers—over a land not theirs, which they saw only as a place to devour and destroy. Such a visitation the Greeks knew four centuries before, when Cimmerians and Treres had burst upon Asia Minor and left a memorial in the elegies of Callinus. Such a visitation again had come a century before to Italy, when the Gauls had almost stamped the infant city rising on the Tiber out of existence. They were hordes of Gauls, or, as the Greeks called them, Galatians, who now poured southward over the Balkans. Ptolemy Keraunos reaped his reward for seizing the Macedonian throne in having first to meet the shock of the invasion. Less than a year from the time of his deed of blood his head was waving on the point of a Gaulish spear (spring 280). That summer all the countryside of Macedonia was overrun. With winter the wave ebbed, leaving a tract of desolation behind it. The Greek world waited breathlessly for next year. Although not immediately threatened, the Seleucid king shared the general anxiety. Apart even from selfish motives the deliverance of Hellas was a cause in which it flattered the vanity of any Greek king to shine. Antiochus sent a contingent to take part in the defence. The invasion came with terrific force (279). The Greeks massed at Thermopylae. It was the road over Mount Oeta which the five hundred men of Antiochus were posted to hold. There in fact the Gauls at one moment directed their assault, and the contingent distinguished itself in repelling them, with the loss, however, of its commander, Telesarchus. Then the barbarians succeeded in turning the Greek position by the pass which Xerxes had traversed, and Central Greece was overwhelmed. But now the defence prevailed. At Delphi a Greek force inflicted a crushing defeat upon the horde, and the shattered remnants withdrew. Greece was delivered.

The Seleucid court had, no doubt, been following the struggle with anxiety. So far no Gauls had crossed the sea. But they were coming perilously near. A body under Leonnorius and Lutarius had broken off from the rest before the invasion of Greece and turned eastward. They traversed Thrace, levying blackmail as they went. They pushed on to the Bosphorus and harried the territory of Byzantium. Heraclea and the other allies of Byzantium sent help in vain. But the narrow strip of sea seemed to oppose an impassable barrier. They had no boats or skill to make them, and Byzantium refused to give them any assistance. The Gauls next tried the straits at the other end of the Propontis, the Hellespont. They seized Lysimachia by a ruse and overran the Chersonese. But here the Seleucid governor, Antipater, was watching them from the Asiatic shore, and would not give them unconditional passage. Then a great part of the horde returned to the Bosphorus under Leonnorius; a part remained with Lutarius opposite Antipater.

It was the moment when the Northern League was left by Antigonus still in grapple with Antiochus. To either side perhaps the thought occurred of hiring these terrible wild men against the other. Antipater had entered into some sort of negotiation with them, but had not been able to make a secure bargain. Nicomedes, when Leonnorius returned to the Bosphorus, was more successful. A treaty was agreed to by the Gaulish chief, in which he placed himself absolutely under Nicomedes' orders and made himself an instrument of the League. His bands were at once conveyed across the Bosphorus. Meanwhile, Lutarius also had seized some boats in which the agents of Antipater had come over. With these in a few days he got his following over the Hellespont, whether Antipater would or not, and turning northwards rejoined Leonnorius. The terrified inhabitants of Asia Minor soon learnt that the Galatians were in the land (278-277).

The League, with its redoubtable auxiliaries, first turned upon Ziboetes, who had probably an understanding with the Seleucid court. The Thynian country was given up to ravage and massacre. All that could be moved was carried off by the Galatians. But they had soon passed beyond Nicomedes' control and left the gutted Bithynian valleys far behind them. They knew neither master nor law outside their own horde, and turned to right or left wherever the sight of smiling lands and villages provoked their appetite. No men felt themselves secure or knew whether they might not any day see the frightful apparition of these strong men from the north in their familiar fields.

The figure of the Galatian, as the Greeks of Asia saw him, is given us in the descriptions and in the remains of their art. We are shown the great strapping bodies, sometimes naked, sometimes cased in a strange garb, shirts and trousers of many colours, plaids brooched on the shoulder, the necklets and bracelets of gold, the straw-colored hair stiffened with grease till it stood up on the head like the bristles of a Satyr, the huge shields which covered a man’s whole body, the swords as long as a Greek javelin, the pikes whose broad iron heads were longer than a Greek sword. We are told of their full-chested voices, their loud boastings and extravagant gestures, the unreasoning frenzy with which they flung themselves into battle, and which seemed to make them insensible of wounds, their unbridled love of wine, the nameless abominations of their camps.

In such guise did the children of the North introduce themselves twenty-two centuries ago to the civilized, that is to say the Hellenic, world. To the men of the Mediterranean they seemed the embodiment of brute and brainless force, which could by its bulk for a while overbear the higher qualities, but which the “firm, deliberate valor” and disciplined intelligence of the Hellenic character must in the end subdue or use as an instrument for its own ends. On the one side seemed mere volume of force, on the other the mind, by which alone force could be efficiently directed. But what if those Northern races of abounding physical vitality learnt some day of the Southern to think? That question it probably occurred to no one to ask twenty-two centuries ago.

The body of Galatians which had entered Asia numbered, we are told, only 20,000 men, and of these only half were combatants. But the terror of their name caused the heart of the people of the land to melt. Their mobility, their elusiveness, and the extent of their depredations made them seem like a swarm of hornets that filled the land. Of what the native peasantry suffered there is no record. Only a trace here and there—some words on a worn stone or a tale gathered long after from the lips of the people by writers curious of those things—preserves some memorial of the agonies of the Greek cities. An inscription shows us Erythrae paying blackmail to Leonnorius. At Miletus they had a legend of how the Galatians had caught the women of the city outside the walls on the feast of the Thesmophoria and carried off all who could not pay the required ransom, and how seven Milesian maidens had destroyed themselves to escape shame. Some lines of the poetess Anyta of Tegea are preserved which purport to be an epitaph on three Milesian maidens who had won glory by this act. At Ephesus they told the same story of an Ephesian girl which was told of Tarpeia at Rome. At Celaenae they told a story of how, when the Galatians had beset the city, its river-god Marsyas had risen in flood against them, while the air was filled with a mysterious sound of flutes, and the barbarians had been driven backward. At Themisonium the local story clung to a neighboring cavern. Heracles, Apollo and Hermes had appeared in a dream to the magistrates, and revealed this cavern to them as a hiding-place for the whole population from the Galatian terror. However much fiction may go to make up such legends, they show at least how the memory of those days of fear was burnt into the popular imagination.

The whole question of the Trans-Tauric country, as it lay before the house of Seleucus, was materially affected by the introduction of this new element. The entrance of the Galatians marks the beginning of a new phase. Hitherto we have seen Greek rule, as represented successively by Alexander, Antigonus, Lysimachus and the house of Seleucus, always promising to bring the country under effectual government, but defeated over and over again by some apparently accidental occurrence—the early death of Alexander, war after war between the Successors, changes of dynasty. There seemed no absolute impossibility that a Greek house should succeed in the task if it could only have a period of freedom from external complications. But now the task had become infinitely more difficult. For its achievement it was an indispensable condition that the Galatians should be not only defeated but exterminated or subdued. It was not so much that they hampered the paramount authority as an independent power; they formed indeed no state with a consistent policy of its own. They hampered it—as governments in the East are chiefly hampered by such unassimilated elements—by being always there to furnish material to any antagonist of the paramount power. All the opponents with whom the house of Seleucus had hitherto to deal, all future rebels, had now an unfailing source of strength on which to draw. It was not as a new state but as a great mass of mercenary soldiers encamped in the land that the Galatians—selling themselves now to one employer, now to another, one part of them to the Seleucid king, another to the King’s enemies—kept all the conflicting powers in Asia Minor in unstable balance and prevented the establishment of a single supreme lord.

To the Greek cities the result was twofold. On the one hand they had to suffer from the incursions of the barbarians or pay blackmail; on the other the power of the kings to curtail their autonomy was restricted. According as they looked at the matter from this side or that, they saw in the barbarians a danger and in the kings the saviors of Hellenism, or in the kings a danger and in the barbarians a safeguard. It would seem that at first it was the former aspect which presented itself; the early days of the Gallic invasion were probably the worst, before repeated blows had pushed the Galatians towards the interior; and the cities at that time may have sincerely regarded the kings as fighting in their cause against the barbarian. Then as the strokes told and the kings gained a certain advantage, the cities began to forget their sufferings and to look with pleasure on the Galatian adversary who made the King’s victory incomplete.

For Asia Minor did not contrive, like Greece, to throw off again the strange element which had entered its system. The Galatians came into Asia to stay. Probably from the first moment of their appearance Antiochus set what forces he could dispose of (for he was short of men) in action against them. There was also a certain power of resistance in the Greek cities. Meeting with these rebuffs, the Galatians were gradually obliged to put a limit to their vague wanderings and become more or less settled on definite territory of their own. Thence they might still indeed raid their neighbors, but they had made a step from a nomad towards a settled life. The inland regions of Phrygia, inhabited by a peasantry in scattered villages, long accustomed to bow to foreign masters, Persian and Macedonian, lay an easy conquest. And here the Galatians began to make themselves at home. Their bands had consisted of men of three tribes or nations, and each of these took to itself a special territory. They lay one beside another along the north of the central table-land, around the ancient Phrygian towns and the monuments of old Asiatic religions. The Trocmi came to possess the most easterly territory with its centre across the Halys at Tavium; the next tribe, the Tectosages, had their centre in Ancyra; the third, the Tolistoagii in Pessinus, where from time immemorial the Great Mother of the Phrygians was worshipped with fanatic rites. It was with the last, as the most westerly, that the Greeks had most to do.

We can no longer trace the process by which the Galatians were brought to settle down, nor say when or by what steps the organization sketched by Strabo took shape. When the Galatians first came to Asia, they were led, according to Memnon, by seventeen chiefs, of whom Leonnorius and Lutarius were the first in rank. In Strabo a much more regular organization appears. Each of the three tribes is subdivided into four tetrarchies; every tetrarchy has a chief of its own, and, under him, a judge, a marshal, and two under-marshals. The twelve tetrarchs are supreme as a body over the whole nation, and are associated with a Council of 300 men, who meet in a certain sacred place. The Council alone has jurisdiction in cases of murder; in all other cases, the tetrarchs and judges. The organization of the horde must have been much looser when it first overspread Asia Minor.

The house of Seleucus played an honorable part in these days as the champion of civilization against the Gauls. It was a role in which all the Greek kings were anxious to shine. Even Ptolemy II, when he contrived to make away with a mutinous contingent of Gallic mercenaries, was depicted by his court-poet as sharing with the Delphic god himself the glory of vanquishing these “late-born Titans from the utter West”. To such a glory Antiochus might have made out a better claim. It was indeed as Soter, the “Savior”, or even (if we may judge by his cult at Seleucia-in-Pieria) as Apollo Soter, that he was remembered. He was so called, says Appian, because "he drove out the Galatians who invaded Asia". This Antiochus did not do, but he did win one or more victories, which doubtless had an effect in stemming the Galatian raids on the coast and relieving certain districts. His Gallic War seems to have been sung in an epic by Simonides of Magnesia, but without thereby securing any immortal record. Only the story of one battle, in which the Galatians were scared by the sight of the King’s elephants, is preserved in its popular form by Lucian.

On the night before the battle (so it runs) the King dreamed a dream. He saw the great Alexander standing beside him, and then and there Alexander himself gave out the password for the coming day: “Health!”—the ordinary word at parting. Antiochus’ heart failed him as the battle drew on. The host of the Galatians counted forty thousand horse and a great array of chariots, eighty of them scythed, and against all this he had only a small body of troops to set, hastily collected and for the most part light-armed. But the tactician, Theodotas of Rhodes, bade him be of good cheer. The King had sixteen elephants, and Theodotas instructed him to set these in the forepart of the battle. The device answered. For when the elephants moved out, the Galatian horses became mad with fear and swerved backwards. The scythed chariots tore their own ranks. The Macedonians and Greeks followed up with an immense slaughter. Only a few of the Galatians escaped into the hills. The Macedonian army gathered about their King and crowned him victor, raising the shout of Kallinikos. But the eyes of Antiochus were full of bitter tears. “Shame, my men”, he broke out, “is all that we have got this day. Our deliverance we owe to these sixteen brutes. But for them, where should we have been?” And the King commanded that the trophy should bear nothing but the figure of an elephant.

Whether the action was quite as great an affair as it appears through this epic medium may be questionable. But we may believe that Antiochus did win a notable victory. Against such an enemy as the Galatians, however, one victory is not likely to have gone far, and what the success of Antiochus was in other parts of the war we can only divine from the reputation he left behind him. Whatever it may have been, it was anything but thorough. The Galatians continued to be a menace to the inhabitants of the sea-board, and, according to Livy not only the small communities, but even the Seleucid government was reduced at last to pay blackmail.

3.

Foreign Policy : Antigonus and Ptolemy

A connected narrative of the reign of Antiochus I after the Gallic invasion can hardly be pieced together out of our fragmentary materials, but the general lines of its policy may be discerned. As in Asia Minor, so in the neighboring realms the Gallic invasion marks the end of an epoch. The chaotic struggle between the five Macedonian houses is concluded. Two Macedonian kingdoms with firm outlines are now the principal foreign powers with which the house of Seleucus has to do. The houses of Antipater and Lysimachus are heard of no more after the confusion which follows the death of Ptolemy Keraunos in Macedonia (278-276), when Ptolemy, the son of Lysimachus, and Antipater, the grandson of the old Antipater, appear for a moment among the ephemeral kings. Then Antigonus Gonatas strikes in from Central Greece and gradually brings under all hostile elements in Macedonia—rival factions and Gallic swarms.

By 276 he stands before the world as acknowledged King in the Macedonian fatherland. The object for which the first Antigonus had vainly striven his grandson now finally attains. The house of Antipater disappears, except in so far as Antigonus may claim by virtue of his mother Phila to represent that also, or those kings of the Seleucid house who descend from Phila’s daughter Stratonice. The house of Lysimachus also disappears. It has been conjectured that the Ptolemy son of Lysimachus, whose daughter is appointed high-priestess of the Seleucid queen in Asia Minor about thirty years after, is the man who had once been for a few days King of Macedonia.

Henceforth the house of Antigonus takes root in Macedonia, as the house of Ptolemy has done in Egypt and the house of Seleucus in Asia. These are the three powers who play the leading part in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean during the rest of the third century before Christ, till all relations are changed by being drawn within the widening sphere of Rome.

If these powers grouped themselves in two opposing camps it meant that two of them must gravitate together against the third. We accordingly find a close understanding during all this period between the Seleucid and the Antigonid houses against the Ptolemaic, with which one or other of them, if not both together, is continually at war.

They were, as we have seen, already connected in the person of queen Stratonice. The beginning of this period of friendship is marked by another marriage. The daughter whom Stratonice, before being passed on to Antiochus, had borne to Seleucus was now of marriageable age. She was called Phila, after her maternal grandmother, the daughter of Antipater. Soon after her uncle Antigonus had established himself on the Macedonian throne she was sent over to Macedonia to become his wife. It was a wedding distinguished apparently by the illustrious throng of philosophers and poets whom the Stoic king called together, a company in which Aratus of Soli made a brilliant figure.

Ptolemy II Philadelphus occupied a strong position which both his brother-kings felt as a menace to themselves. He had in Egypt a territory which experience had shown to be fenced against all attack, and which by its natural wealth and its position on the world's highways, brought him an immense revenue, while its limited area allowed it to be held in the grip of a far more thorough centralization at a far less expense than the sprawling provinces of the Seleucid. But if his realm had been confined to Egypt the other courts might have regarded him as inoffensive. It was as the great naval power that he aroused their hostility. As a naval base for the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt under the conditions of those days was unmatched. It had in Alexandria one sufficient harbour, and the rest of its short coast protected by lagoons.

For the timber indeed necessary to ship-building, Egypt had to look without, but in the dependent island of Cyprus, the southern Lebanon, and the coasts of Asia Minor, Ptolemy possessed an ample supply. A power which created a sea-empire, spreading its influence over all the coasts and islands of the Levant, and interfering in the politics of Greece and Ionia, was not a power which either Seleucid or Antigonid could tranquilly behold.

It is no longer possible to trace the stages by which the house of Ptolemy acquired its possessions over-seas. A beginning had already been made by the first king. Ptolemy Soter had finally reannexed Cyprus about 294, and had brought under his protectorate the Confederation of the Cyclades. It was in war with Antiochus, doubtless, that Ptolemy II won many of the strong places along the coasts of Asia. The immediate origin of war between the two kingdoms is shrouded in obscurity. The relations between them at Antiochus’ accession were friendly and regulated by an express treaty made under Seleucus. It seems to have been on the side of Antiochus that the status quo was first disturbed.

One of his daughters, called after her Bactrian grandmother Apama, Antiochus had given in marriage to Magas, the half-brother of Ptolemy, who ruled the Cyrenaic province as viceroy. Some time after the Gallic invasion Magas declared himself independent and took up an attitude hostile to Egypt.

Antiochus soon after abjured his neutrality and drew his sword against Ptolemy in alliance with his son-in-law.

Such is the order of events in the sketch of Pausanias, but of their real connexion, the diplomatic to-and-fro which accompanied them, we can only guess. We do not know whether it was Antiochus or Magas to whom the initiative in the rupture with Egypt should be assigned. There were at any rate more selfish reasons to make Antiochus break with Ptolemy than sympathy with his daughter's husband, and it may well be that Apama carried with her to Cyrene the instigations to revolt.

The date of the beginning of hostilities between Antiochus and Ptolemy is fixed by Babylonian inscriptions to the year 38 of the Seleucid era (October 274-October 273 BC). Its effects were abundantly felt in the country beyond the Taurus, upon whose coasts Ptolemy was able, in virtue of his supremacy at sea, to throw his armies, or at any rate swarms of privateers. It was a war in which neither struck a vital part of his adversary, which dribbled on, with pauses and local variations, till it must have seemed the normal state of things.

To the house of Seleucus it meant a fresh complication in the Trans-Tauric problem. There was now an external foe pressing from without, to add to the rebellious elements within. It was such a complication as the house of Achaemenes had found in the attack of the European Greeks. That had compelled them for long periods to abandon the coasts which the Asiatic Greeks inhabited, and the house of Seleucus now found its hold on the coasts become exceedingly precarious and interrupted. Ptolemy, of course, could use the old cry of Hellenic autonomy against the master in possession.

To attempt a chronology of such a war—a multitude of local struggles, strong places wrested now by one side, now by the other, factions oscillating in the cities—would probably be difficult if we had all the facts. Under the circumstances all one can do is to indicate the traces of Ptolemaic rule along the coasts. Our chief literary authority is unfortunately a court-poet, whose phrases cannot be taken too severely. When Theocritus says that Ptolemy “gives the signal to all the Pamphylians and the spearmen of Cilicia, to the Lycians and the war-like Carians”, it need mean no more than that Ptolemaic garrisons were posted at strong points along the southern coast—places like Selinus and Coracesium—and that many of the cities of Lycia and Caria had been drawn into the Ptolemaic alliance.

To begin with the east, with Rough Cilicia—the end, as the ancients reckoned, of the Taurus barrier—the struggle between Seleucid and Ptolemy has here left its mark in the names of the coast towns. Near the river Lamus, after which, to the west, Rough Cilicia was held to begin, we hear of an Antioch. Then we have Seleucia on the Calycadnus (mod. Selefkeh), where there is still room between mountains and sea for a large city—founded, according to its legend, by Seleucus Nicator himself. Next come Ptolemaic towns, Berenice, called after the wife of the first or the third Ptolemy, and Arsinoe, called after Arsinoe Philadelphia, the sister-wife of Ptolemy II, the sometime wife of Lysimachus, or possibly after the sister-wife of Ptolemy IV. Then again we have a Seleucid foundation in Antioch-near-Cragus.

On passing to Pamphylia we are confronted at the entrance by a Ptolemais, and then again in the plain about the mouth of the Eurymedon comes a Seleucia.

In Lycia the Ptolemaic influence seems to have become especially consolidated. Patara, the harbor-town of Xanthus, was enlarged by Ptolemy II as another Arsinoe, though in this case, no less than when her former husband called Ephesus after her, the queen’s name had too famous a name to compete with ever to obtain currency. The possession of Patara probably implies authority over the whole Lycian Confederation. Caria is named by Jerome among the possessions of the second Ptolemy. The towns, more strictly Carian, lying inland, were, as we shall see, held by Antiochus, but we can prove Ptolemaic possession in the chief Greek towns of the coast and some of the adjoining islands. Caunus is found as the station of a Ptolemaic fleet at a moment soon after the marriage of Ptolemy and his sister Arsinoe. Cos, together with the shrine on the Triopian promontory, the religious centre of the Dorian Body, received special attention from Ptolemy, as befitted his birthplace. At Halicarnassus the Ptolemaic supremacy is evidenced by inscriptions.

The Ionian cities Antiochus I seems, as a whole, to have been able to retain. Samos, indeed, had been acquired by Ptolemy some time before 274, and gave the Egyptian fleets an important station in the Aegean, and even on the mainland Miletus, in spite of the favors which the house of Seleucus had showered upon it, had to yield to the superior force of the king of Egypt. The day came when it was the Ptolemaic house whom the obsequious demos honoured at Branchidae. At the neighbouring Heraclea also the ascendancy of the Ptolemaic house is indicated by an inscription assigned to the reign of the second Ptolemy. But north of the Latmian Bay evidences of Ptolemaic rule are not found till Antiochus II sits upon the Seleucid throne. In an inscription, which must be later than 269, the Ionian Body addresses itself to the Seleucid court.

This arrest of the Ptolemaic conquest at the Latmian Bay was no doubt due to the action of the Antigonid king. In 272, or soon after, Antigonus joined in the war, and his fleets proved themselves more than a match for the Ptolemaic. His great victory off Cos created a balance of power in the Aegean, where hitherto Ptolemy had been sole master. This diversion naturally weakened the pressure of the Ptolemaic forces in Asia Minor.

4.

Government of the first Seleucids in Asia Minor

We turn now from considering how Asia Minor was affected by the foreign relations of the Seleucid court to examine what can still be deciphered of the workings of Seleucid government within.

It is perhaps not merely due to the imperfection of our evidence, to the fact that the part of Seleucid history which affected the Greeks stood the best chance of being recorded, that Asia Minor rather than Syria or the East seems, till after Magnesia, the chief sphere of Seleucid activity. One may well believe that it was the part of their dominions to which the Seleucid kings attached the greatest value. It is never so inappropriate to speak of the dynasty as “Syrian” as in these earlier reigns. We cannot even perceive that Antioch on the Orontes held at that time any primacy over the capitals of the West and the East, over Sardis and the Babylonian Seleucia.

Sardis since the days of the Lydian kingdom had held the position of capital of the country north of the Taurus. It had always been the chief seat of the power ruling the interior, Persian or Macedonian, unless perhaps it was superseded by the Phrygian capital, Celaenae, under Antigonus. Under the house of Seleucus, Sardis enjoyed its old dignity. It was there that the government archives were kept. It had been transformed from a barbarian to a Hellenic city.

In the absence of the King, the governor of Lydia exercises a general authority over the whole Trans-Tauric domain.

Of the satrapies into which that domain was divided under the Seleucids we have no complete statement. According to the system which Alexander took over from the Persians, it would have formed six, Greater Phrygia, Hellespontine Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, Lycia, and Cappadocia. Of these only two can be proved by express mention under the Seleucids, Hellespontine Phrygia and Lydia. We have also a satrapy mentioned, which appears to be that of Greater Phrygia.

There is no reason to suppose that the Seleucids, while they continued to hold territory in Caria, Lycia, and Cappadocia, modified the system which they found existing.

While “satrapy” continued to be the official name for the province, the governor in official documents is called by the Greek title of strategos. In popular language he was still spoken of as satrap. He was the intermediary in all transactions between the central government and the province. It was to him that the King addressed his rescripts, which the strategos communicated in his turn to the subordinate officials who would be concerned with their execution.

What the lower officials were who made up the machine of government in Asia Minor under the Seleucids we are only imperfectly informed. Each satrapy seems to have had a special controller of the finances. An oikonomos is mentioned in an inscription recently published, where his duty is to pass on to a district officer an order received by the strategos from the King relating to the alienation of a piece of the royal domain. The same inscription gives the title of this district officer as hyparchos. This word, of course, in popular speech was quite a vague one, meaning any one who bore authority under any one else, and was even used as a translation of the Persian satrap. In the official language hyparchos meant the governor of one of those smaller districts, hyparchies, into which the satrapy was divided.

Such is about all we know of the framework of government. In what relation did the different elements which made up the population stand to the Seleucid power?

5.

The native Powers and Antiochus I

First we notice that the north of the peninsula has now been finally abandoned.

The native dynasties, the houses of Mithridates, of Ariarathes and of Ziboetes—these and the Galatian tribes are left in unchallenged possession of all that lies to the north of the central plateau.

Of the two principalities of Persian origin that of Mithridates soon showed itself the more important. Mithridates already assumed the name of king in 281 or 280, and coined in gold—a mark of absolute independence. Neither of these things did Ariarathes venture to do. The kingdom of Mithridates seems from the first to have admitted the lustre of Hellenism; his father indeed and grandfather in the fourth century had been ardently phil-Hellenic, and received the honorary franchise of Athens. The territory he now ruled had bordering upon it Greek cities like Trapezus and Sinope, and Mithridates was in diplomatic connexion with Heraclea.

The principality of Ariarathes, on the other hand, has an out-of-the world, antiquated air about it. Ariarathes II continues to stamp his money with an Aramaic legend. His court was a region which the vagrant literati of Greece, who were found everywhere else, did not explore. It must have seemed by contrast a strangely silent place. A primitive domesticity is the impression we gather from the family annals till Seleucid princesses come to trouble the house with the spirit of a less simple and kindly sphere. The only thing we know as to the part taken by the Cappadocian court in history for a hundred years is that it seems the place where a fugitive Seleucid prince can best efface himself from the sight of the world.

Whether Antiochus I, having recognized the impossibility of ejecting Mithridates and Ariamnes, who seems to have succeeded his father Ariarathes II about the same time that Antiochus succeeded to the Seleucid throne, adopted that policy of close friendship with the two Persian courts which was afterwards the tradition of the Seleucid house we are not told. From faint indications we may conjecture that the tradition goes back in its origin to his reign. The only piece of information we get as to the history of Mithridates I after the accession of Antiochus is that some Galatian bands, whom Mithridates and his son Ariobarzanes had taken into their service, drove a Ptolemaic force which had endeavoured to penetrate into the interior back to the sea, and took the anchors of the Egyptian ships. Whatever historical foundation the story may have, it goes to show the Mithridatic house as an ally of the Seleucid.

In the case of the South Cappadocian court it may show close relations with the house of Seleucus that Ariamnes begins to put a Greek instead of an Aramaic legend upon his coins.

In the hills between Bithynia and the valley of the Amnias the chiefs of the native tribes perhaps already began to assert their independence of any of their great neighbors. It was the country in which Mithridates had first grounded his power, but in the course of the century which succeeded his establishment as king farther east, Paphlagonia seems to have fallen back to the same condition as under the Persian Empire. In the earlier part of the second century before Christ a native chief, Morzias, has his seat at Gangra (mod. Changra).

The war between Antiochus and Nicomedes of Bithynia seems never to have been renewed after the Gallic invasion. That war was the last attempt made by a Macedonian ruler to humble the house of Dozdalsus. Under Nicomedes the Bithynian kingdom passes from a mere barbaric chiefship to a state of the approved Hellenistic pattern. Ziboetes had already founded a city; under Nicomedes the transformation of Bithynia was carried through. Nicomedes, the “executioner of his brothers”, had a heart as cruel as any barbarian sultan's, but an unregenerate heart has never prevented a barbarian, then or now, from assuming the externals, and even some of the tastes, of a higher civilization. The coins of Nicomedes—for now the Bithynian principality begins to have a coinage—show him a regular Greek king, with the smooth-shaven face which had become the vogue since Alexander, and the simple band of riband to show his royalty. In the great Hellenic centre, Olympia, his form figured in ivory.

In 264 Nicomedes founded the city which was to perpetuate his name. At the end of the most northern of the two inlets on the east side of the Propontis had stood the Greek city of Astacus. The situation was an important one, lying on the road between the Bosphorus and the interior of Bithynia, just as Nicaea, the city of Antigonus and Lysimachus, lay on the road between the Bosphorus and Phrygia. Astacus had been demolished by Lysimachus perhaps in the interests of Nicaea. Since then its citizens had been homeless. Now, near the vacant site, but on the opposite side of the inlet, enjoying the same advantages of situation as the old city, rose the new Nicomedia. The population of the old city, was settled in the new. In course of time Nicomedia came to be one of the great cities of the world.

But although hostilities between Nicomedes and Antiochus appear to have ceased, the war had left behind it a feeling of estrangement. It was probably believed at the Bithynian court that the house of Seleucus wanted only some accession of good fortune to become again its aggressive enemy. Antiochus on his part may have smarted under some sense of dishonor not wiped away. At any rate Nicomedes at his death committed his infant children to the protection, not of the Seleucid King, but of Antigonus, Ptolemy, and the neighbouring cities.

At Pergamos, during all the time that Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, was combating Ptolemaic and barbarian enemies in Asia Minor, the astute eunuch Philetaerus remained master of citadel and treasure. He seems to have seen his interest in maintaining to the end his policy of friendship with the house of Seleucus. The earliest coins of the Pergamene dynasty, those probably which were struck under the rule of Philetaerus, exhibit the head of the deified Seleucus. And Antiochus on his side probably thought it wise to purchase the adherence of Philetaerus by moderating his claims. So that all through the twenty years of his rule Philetaerus was able to go on quietly consolidating the power of his house. At the very beginning of the reign of Antiochus, when Pitane contracted a debt of 380 talents to the King, we find Philetaerus forward to advance them a portion of the sum, and thereby secure some influence over that city. An inscription just published (1902) records his gifts to the city of Cyzicus, to make good the losses it had suffered in some war (with the anti-Seleucid Northern League?) and from the ravages of the Galatians. And his family, drawing no doubt on his support, were meanwhile acquiring power in the country. The Eumenes who was in possession of Amastris about 280 was probably his brother, and by the time that Philetaerus came to be an old man of eighty, the son of this Eumenes, called also Eumenes, had established himself as dynast in the region adjacent to Pergamos. The other brother of Philetaerus, Attalus, contracted a marriage which must have advertised to the world the standing which the house of Philetaerus had attained. His wife was Antiochis, the daughter of Achaeus, a cousin of the Seleucid King.

In 263-262 Philetaerus died at the age of eighty, and Pergamos passed to his nephew Eumenes, who now united with it the principality of which he already stood possessed. This concentration of power in the hands of a younger ruler than the old eunuch was followed by a rupture with the house of Seleucus. It was probably inevitable that the Seleucid King should not suffer this new power to grow up without first testing his ability to prevent it. Eumenes, when hostilities had once been opened, struck straight for the Seleucid capital. A battle was fought in the neighborhood of Sardis, at which Antiochus would seem to have commanded in person. It issued in a decisive victory for the Pergamene forces. This happened only a short while before Antiochus I died.

Of the way in which Antiochus dealt with the free tribes of the Taurus, of any action of the Seleucid house in Lycia or Pamphylia, we know nothing except what can be inferred from the names which stamp some cities as Seleucid foundations.

6.

The Greek Cities and Antiochus I

The relation between the King and the Greek cities was still formally what it had been since Alexander. They did not in theory form a part of his dominion, but a series of independent states, with whom the King, the lord of the barbarian interior, had entered into alliance. The Empire was not in this view a monarchy, but a federation, of which the King and a number of free republics were members. It was unnecessary for official language to take account of the fact that one member of the federation was so immensely more powerful than the rest that his sole word was law. Still, as under Alexander, the King's territory was distinguished from the territory of the cities. Of the occupiers of his own land, the Phrygian and Lydian villagers, the King, as supreme proprietor, exacted regular tribute. He had no such rights over the territory of the Greek cities. The frontiers between these two spheres underwent continual modification. Of instances in which the King acquired or seized territory belonging to the cities there is no record; such an act there would be little motive to register. On the other hand, it was in the interest of the new possessors to have clear documents to point to in cases where the King alienated some parcel of his domain. Of these, therefore, some trace has survived. The alienation is seen taking place in two ways. Sometimes the King makes it an affair of business, raising money by a sale. At the very beginning of his reign Antiochus I sells a piece of ground to the city of Pitane for 380 talents; the transaction is engraved on stone, and records of it laid up in the temples of Ilion, Ephesus, and Delos.

Another instance of sale is that recorded in a recently published inscription. It was perhaps a somewhat abnormal case, for the purchaser is here not a Greek city or a citizen of one, but the sister-wife herself of King Antiochus II, Laodice. Whether it was usual for Seleucid queens to buy themselves appanages with money paid into the royal treasury, or whether the transaction in question sprang from the peculiar state of things, when Queen Laodice was living in divorce, we do not know. In this case also the sale was to be recorded not only in the government archives at Sardis, but by steles in the temples of Ilion, Samothrace, Ephesus, Branchidae, and Sardis.

At other times the kings alienate parcels of their territory by way of grants to individual Greeks. Such grants of land to reward good service were an old custom of the Macedonian monarchy. The hordes of adventurers from all corners of the Greek world who flocked to the Seleucid court had in view similar rewards among the rich fields of Asia. But any one who found himself in possession of land within the King’s realm would of course have to pay the tribute which was ordinarily paid by the barbarian cultivators. To do this would injure not only the pocket, but the dignity, of a Greek. In the cases, therefore, which we can examine of such alienations the territory is removed from the realm altogether. The new possessor is allowed to annex it to the domain of one or other of the allied cities, to hold it as a citizen or metoikos of that city, not as the subject of a king, and to pay money only indirectly into the royal treasury, in so far as he contributes to whatever the city is obliged, as an ally, to furnish. Both Laodice and Aristodicides of Assos—in the two cases under our observation—are allowed great latitude in choosing the city to which their property is to be attached. It need not necessarily be a city of the immediate neighbourhood. There are in fact known cases in which cities possessed lands altogether detached from their main territory, and surrounded by the possessions of other states.

To what extent the reality answered to the form by which the Greek cities took the rank of free states, we have not the means to determine. We find at any rate many of the cities still disposing of military and naval forces of their own. Two inscriptions from Erythrae contain honors voted to the civic strategoi for organizing the city's forces, and from one of them we learn that these forces consisted to some extinct, like all armies of the time, of mercenaries. An inscription of Priene seems to indicate a mercenary force maintained by the people in the citadel. Smyrna has troops in the middle of the third century with which it can garrison neighbouring towns. Alexandria Troas in 216 can launch a force of 4000 men against a Galatian horde. Calymna about the same time possesses a fleet.

With the means of levying war on their own account, the cities to some extent pursue an independent policy. In the disturbed times which immediately preceded the conquest of Asia Minor by Seleucus we hear of a petty war between Magnesia-on-the-Meander and Priene. There were probably various gradations of freedom, depending partly on geographical position, partly on the circumstances of the moment, between the complete liberty of great states like Heraclea or Rhodes and the subjection of a royal residence like Ephesus under Antiochus II.

In whatever cases the King was strong enough, if he chose, to demand tribute, to set a garrison, to meddle with the constitution, the city lived with an uneasy sense of holding all that it most valued on sufferance. The inscriptions which record the benefactions of the kings say nothing of the cases where he used his power to curtail liberty. But the effusion with which they acknowledge his moderation is significant. Priene, a story says, was “enslaved” by Antiochus I for a time, and liberated again through the influence of its citizen, Sostratus the dancer. Perhaps already the exaction of tribute, which under Alexander had been, as we have noted, only an exceptional punishment, was becoming common, as it appears to have been in the time of Antiochus III, or it may have been that the name of tribute began to be bluntly applied to the forced benevolences. For demanding such contributions the Seleucid kings had a good pretext in the Galatian peril; it was indeed only fair that the cities should pay their quota towards the cause which was theirs as well as the kings'; but the pretext may have been used immoderately; whether it was or not, the cities felt the demand a burden.

To judge, however, by the inscriptions, Antiochus I and Antiochus II were ready enough to meet the wishes of the Greeks. In a somewhat ambiguous phrase the envoys of the Ionian Body to Antiochus I are instructed to exhort the King “to take the Ionian cities under his most earnest care, in order that henceforth, enjoying free and popular government, they may at last be secure in the possession of those constitutions which their fathers have handed down to them; and the envoys are further to represent to the King that in so doing he will confer great benefits upon the cities and will also adhere to the policy of his ancestors”. It does not read as if a danger to the laws and liberties of the cities were apprehended from the King himself; it seems rather as if it were against external enemies that the Seleucid is entreated to become protector. One might guess that the occasion of the decree was some withdrawal of the Ptolemaic forces, or a defeat of the Galatians, or the suppression of some local tyrants. In the case of one of the Ionian cities, Erythrae, an inscription informs us that its freedom was respected by Antiochus I, as it had been by Alexander, Antigonus, and Seleucus; Antiochus even remitted the contribution to the Galatian war.

There were two ways by which the cities might bring influence to bear upon the King. There was firstly the direct method of diplomatic intercourse. Envoys were continually going to and fro between the several cities and the court. The royal embassies were given precedence of all others in the cities save the sacred ones. The kings, on their part, appear continually receiving embassies from the cities. The expenses of this intercourse formed a very serious item in the civic budgets. The ambassadors to court could not go empty-handed. Those, for instance, sent by Erythrae to Antiochus I have to carry a crown, presumably of gold, and gold for presents. The expenditure on such embassies ranked with that on theatres, temples, and great public works. The other, and probably more effectual, means of securing their ends the cities found in obtaining the advocacy of persons powerful at court. This advocacy had often without doubt to be purchased, and the presents to the King’s friends were perhaps as severe a drain on the city’s resources as the presents to the King himself. Sometimes, however, there was no necessity to pay for the services of an advocate. Civic patriotism was an unfeigned virtue among the Greeks, and those who won influence over the King no doubt thought in the first place of exercising it for the benefit of their native city. The case of Sostratus the dancer has been already mentioned. Demodamas, the explorer of the Far East for Seleucus and Antiochus I, did not cease to act as a citizen of Miletus.

It was specially as arbitrator in the quarrels between city and city, or faction and faction, that the King was appealed to. We find the Seleucid King intervening in the intestine feuds of Bargylia, and perhaps in the secular quarrel between Samos and Priene. It was of course not absolutely necessary that the King to whose empire cities at variance were attached should be the arbitrator chose; it might be a neutral city. The usual course seems to have been for the King, even when appealed to, not to adjudge the disputes himself but to nominate a neutral party, some friendly city, as arbitrator.

The relations, however, between the earlier Seleucids and the old Greek cities do not exhaust the relations of that house with Asiatic Hellenism. For Hellenism was spreading far beyond its original sphere. It was under these Greek kings—perhaps it was their greatest glory, though historians were far more interested in their battles, their vices and their amours—it was under them that the process went on by which Hellenism pushed its way far into the interior. Cities with Greek names, of Greek speech and life, rose one by one where before only ignoble Phrygian or Cappadocian towns had huddled round temples and bazaars.

Antiochus I has been described by a well-known authority as that “great city-builder who has almost faded out of our tradition”. A view of that work we shall never recover, except imperfectly. From time to time archaeology will fill in fresh details of that mighty plan by which the successors of Alexander, Greek and Roman, multiplied the centres of Hellenism in the land. It is part of the difficulty that even when we have ascertained the existence of a Greek or Macedonian colony in a particular place it remains in a large number of cases doubtful who planted it there, and when.

A certain mark of Seleucid foundation (or refoundation) is given by the names of some of the cities, Seleucia, Antioch, Laodicea, and so on. The cities so named are found to go mostly along the two main lines of communication between Syria and the Aegean, the water-way along the coast—where We have seen the Seleucid competing with Ptolemaic foundations—and the great high-road which ran from the Cilician Gates westward between the inner steppe and the Pisidian hills to Lydia and Ionia.

The Seleucid cities on this road are placed, as no doubt had been the native settlements before them, at the points of junction where other roads run in from either side.

First, going from the east, is the Laodicea called “the Burnt-up”, where a road comes in from Cappadocia, the realm of Ariarathes, and the Upper Euphrates. Then after turning the northern end of the mountain obstacle, Paroreia (now called Sultan Dagh), the highway ran on to the Phrygian capital, Apamea. Its predecessor was the Phrygian town of Celaenae, a strong mountain city of the old-world sort in whose very market-place the Marsyas rushed from a sacred cavern to join the Meander, that river also having its source in a neighbouring tarn. Here roads came in from all sides, from Northern Phrygia and from Pisidia; it was the central point of the interior. Here Antigonus had had his seat of government at a time when he aspired to rule Asia. Perhaps he had already begun the new Greco-Macedonian city lower down towards the foot of the hills, which from the time that Seleucus conquered Asia Minor was known as Apamea, a memorial of the Iranian queen. From Apamea the great high-road ran down the Lycus valley. Where that valley opens out before the junction of the Lycus and Meander, in the fat plains which nourished innumerable flocks and yielded the softest wool to the Greek market, two chief roads diverged. One ran north-west to the valley of the Hermus and the royal city of Sardis, the government centre of Asia Minor; the other led the trains of merchantmen down the Meander valley to the commercial centre, Ephesus.

Above the plains of the Lycus where these roads diverged we find the third great Seleucid city, Laodicea, rich and increased with goods from the traffic which passed through it and the exchange of its wool, looking on the one hand down the Meander to the Aegean, and on the other through the Syrian Gate down the long road that led ever eastwards. On the road between Laodicea and Sardis no certain trace of a Seleucid foundation has been discovered, though such there may have been. The traffic on the other road to Ephesus was no doubt much greater, and here the Seleucid foundations succeeded one another at short intervals. First came an Antioch, Antioch-on-Meander, a place that gave its name to a brand of dried figs, then a day’s journey brought one to Nysa, which was for a time renamed Antioch, and another day’s journey to Tralles, to which the same undiscriminating name as well as the other of Seleucia was attached. From Tralles Ephesus was only thirty-five miles by road.

Such were the cities with Seleucid names through which the main artery of commerce between the Ionian coast and the Farther East ran. It remains to enumerate those which commanded the side lines.

The main road, as we have seen, turned the north of the Paroreia (by Philomelium, Holmi, Chelidonia, and Metropolis; on the south side of the range was set an Antioch, from which a side-road ran into the main road at Apamea.

Whether at the time when this Antioch was founded there was an alternative road to the main road on the south of the Sultan Dagh, leaving the main road at Iconium and rejoining it at Apamea, or whether Antioch was rather the terminus of a road pushed out from Apamea, an outpost of the Seleucid power towards the Pisidian hills, we do not know. Antioch in Pisidia was one of those cities which succeeded an older religious centre of the Phrygians, in this case a sanctuary of the Moon god, endowed with a great property in lands and slaves. The new settlers, planted presumably by some Seleucid king to form the substance of his Greek city, were drawn from Magnesia-on-Meander. Another road came into Apamea from a Seleucia, surnamed "the Iron", planted on the western side of Lake Egirdir (its name still survives as Selef). This may also have been intended to keep a watch on Sagalassus and the Pisidian towns to the south. Still more to the west we find a city whose foundation is fixed by its name of Themisonium (mod. Kara-euyuk Bazar) to the reign of Antiochus II, accessible by a roughish pass from Laodicea on the Lycus, and looking across the valley of the Indus towards the mountain state of Cibyra. A station of guard-troops or constabulary and settlements of military colonists, probably Seleucid, is proved by an inscription to have existed in the valley below on the road to Cibyra, at Eriza (near Dere-Keui) and the neighbouring villages.

Going westward still, we find a road connecting Tralles-Antioch on the main road with the harbors of Southern Caria, Physcus, and Caunus. It was the further connection of these harbors with a great commercial state like Pthodes, which indeed came to possess them as dependencies, that the importance of this road across Caria lay. It passed through the old centres of Carian life, through Alabanda and by the temple of Zeus Chrysaoreus, the religious centre of the Carian people, in which the federal parliament assembled, composed of delegates from the various groups of villages.

In both places the Seleucid government made establishments. Alabanda for a time became Antioch. By the temple of Zeus Chrysaoreus arose a new Macedonian city, Stratonicea, founded no doubt by Antiochus I in honour of his wife. The Macedonian settlers took part in the national assemblies and cults at the neighboring temples.

To find the other colonies, which are certainly Seleucid, we must go northwards to those roads which bind the capital, Sardis, to the Troad—the highway, that is, between Sardis and Europe—and to the Propontis. Travelers to either destination would go in company till a place was reached some ten miles from the ridge which divides the waters of the Hermus from those of the Caicus. Thence the roads forked, one entering the Caicus valley and running down it to Pergamos, the other crossing the valley higher up and striking over the hills to Cyzicus. It was at this point that a colony of Macedonians took possession of the native town of Thyatira. These Macedonians claimed the great Seleucus as their founder, but the story they told of the city’s origin is discredited by modern etymology, and the real founder may have been Antiochus I.

The road from Thyatira down the Caicus valley was the thoroughfare between Sardis and Pergamos, continued beyond Pergamos in the coast road of the Troad. On this no Antiochs or Seleucias are to be found. In this region the earlier Seleucid kings were willing to tolerate the authority of the rulers of Pergamos. Already, in the reign of Antiochus I, there rose a Philetaeria under Ida and an Attalia.

A rupture between the courts of Sardis and Pergamos must have broken communication between the Seleucid government and the Hellespont by the natural way that followed the Caicus. Under such circumstances the road leading north from Thyatira to the district of the modern Balikisri, whence one can reach the Troad by striking off to the west, must have assumed great importance. It is on this road that we find a Stratonicea where it crosses the Caicus valley. It remains only to note that in the Troad itself the town of Cebrene is proved at one period by its coins to have entitled itself Antioch. It must have recovered an independent existence after Antigonus had transferred its population to Ilion, thanks possibly to the good-will of a Seleucid king.

The new cities of the Greek kings differed generally from the old native towns in being on lower ground. The old towns had been rather citadels than dwelling-places, fortresses perched on the edge of precipices, to which the cultivators of the neighboring fields might flee in stress of war. Considerations of commercial convenience and easier living made it a point to have the new cities accessible rather than inaccessible. The new cities seemed to have slid down from the heights to come into touch with the plains. It was still unusual to build them in an altogether exposed position, although in a country securely pacified like Lydia it might be done. Thyatira lay flat upon the marshes of the Lycus.

But the favorite position was the foot of some hill half plain and half slope, a compromise between convenience and security. This was notably the case with the colonies along the great eastern highway, Laodicea the Burnt-up in a bare “theatre-shaped recess in the outer skirt of the mountains”, Apamea below the old Celaenae, set on a foot-hill where the Marsyas breaks into the plain, Laodicea on the Lycus on the slopes which rise from the river to Mount Salbacus.

7.

The End of Antiochus I

Between July 262 and July 261 Antiochus Soter died, after having wrestled with the task bequeathed him by Seleucus for nineteen years. He was sixty-four years old.

We hear of six children, the two sons of Stratonice, Seleucus and Antiochus; the two daughters of Stratonice, Apama, who had married Magas of Cyrene, and Stratonice, who was still unmarried at her father’s death; and, lastly, we hear of a son and daughter of Antiochus by another (perhaps earlier) wife, Alexander and Laodice. This daughter was destined to play a prominent part in Asia Minor; she became the wife of her half-brother Antiochus.

Already in the reign of Antiochus I an evil had appeared in the Seleucid house, to which no less than to any over­mastering circumstances its ultimate ruin was due—the division of the house against itself. The elder son of Antiochus I, bearing the name of his grandfather Seleucus, had been designated the successor. From the earlier years of the reign of Antiochus till some time between 269 and 265 he had been associated with his father as joint-king, and had perhaps been given the government of Babylon and Iran. Then there came a dark suspicion between father and son. Antiochus gave command that the prince was to be put to death; and it was done. His younger brother Antiochus stepped into his place and was made partner in the throne.

It is hardly possible from our scanty materials to arrive at any idea of the personality of the first Antiochus, to penetrate to the real man whose work we have been attempting to follow. He seems indeed to be typical of his house, indefatigably busy in keeping the unwieldy empire together, hurrying from one end of it to the other, fighting almost incessantly. Nor was he a mere spectator in the battles fought under his conduct. At Ipsus, a young man of twenty-five, he had commanded the wing attacked by Demetrius Poliorcetes; and even as King he took his share of danger like the Macedonian and Iranian chiefs from whom he sprang. A stone found at Ilion contains a decree of that city conferring honors on the physician Metrodorus of Amphipolis because he had successfully treated King Antiochus for a wound in the neck, got in battle. He may also be credited with a prudent sense of the limits of his power, an honest recognition of facts, abandoning, for instance, a useless hostility to the Persian houses which had cut off for themselves provinces of the realm, and holding out to them instead the hand of friendship. His coins show us a homely face, practical, unideal, of a sort of wizen shrewdness, the eyes somewhat screwed up, the lips pursed together. The gossip that caught at any suggestion of irregular amours did not fail to detect a side of weaker sensuality in Antiochus; it dwelt on the story of his enervating passion for his step­mother, on the influence exerted upon him by the flute-player Sostratus. But there were not many princes of whom gossip did not find similar stories to tell.