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

CHAPTER 9.

ANTIOCHUS II (THEOS)
 

It was Antiochus II, now a young man of about twenty-four, who took up the Seleucid inheritance in 262.

In him, the grandson of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the sensual strain was more strongly pronounced than in his father. At least the scandal-mongers found him a richer theme. He was a hopeless drunkard; he slept off his morning bouts, only to begin again in the evening. Those admitted to his presence on official business rarely found him in anything but a shocking condition. Vile creatures ruled him by the most discreditable sort of influence, such as the Cypriot Aristus and his brother Themison. Themison assumed the name and insignia of Heracles and became the object of a regular cult. When he entered the lists at public games he was proclaimed as Themison a Macedonian, the Heracles of King Antiochus. When any person of distinction offered sacrifice on his altar, he condescended to reveal himself, disposed on a couch with a lion-skin thrown about him, a Scythian bow and club at his side. Two other persons who enjoyed high consideration at the court of Antiochus were Herodotus the buffoon and Archelaus the dancer. The face of Antiochus upon his coins, with its full protruding chin and gross jaw, betrays the sensual element in his character; but we should do well to accept the stories of the scandal-mongers with some reserve, or at any rate to remember that there was probably a great deal more that might have been said about Antiochus II. What sort of idea should we have of Philip of Macedon or Julius Caesar if all we knew about them were the stories on which gossip loved to dwell?
 

In Asia Minor the reign of the second Antiochus seems, from what we can see, to have been till the peace with Egypt merely a continuation of the reign of Antiochus the First. There were the same questions for the Seleucid court to deal with—the internal ones presented to it by the lesser principalities, Cappadocian, Bithynian, Pergamene, by the hill-tribes of the Taurus and by the Galatians, by the Greek cities, and the external ones constituted by the relations of the Seleucid court with Ptolemy and Antigonus. It is not possible to discover anywhere a change of policy consequent upon the new reign, except that the quarrel with Eumenes of Pergamos seems to have been dropped and a modus vivendi to have been discovered which allowed the ruler of Pergamos to hold his extended principality as a subordinate or ally of Antiochus. With the two dynasties in Cappadocia the relations of the Seleucid court continued friendly. To the house of Ariarathes indeed it gave its recognition in the way that was most impressive by uniting it with the Seleucid house in marriage. The Greek king recognized a brother in the barbarian prince. It was during the first four or five years of the reign of Antiochus II that Ariamnes began to be styled king. It was about the same time that his son, Ariarathes, whom he had associated with himself on the throne, married the daughter of Antiochus II, Stratonice. A passage of Strabo seems to indicate that the region of Cataonia was ceded by Antiochus to the new Cappadocian kingdom as his daughter's dowry. In the case of the dynasty of Pontic Cappadocia it is to be observed that after Mithridates the Founder, who was succeeded by his son Ariobarzanes in 266, the kings cease to coin in gold—an indication that they are willing to purchase the friendship of the Seleucid house by some formal recognition of its suzerainty.

Of the relations of Antiochus and Bithynia we are told nothing. About 250 Nicomedes died, and fresh family feuds distracted the princely house. He left a wife, Etazeta, and some infant sons, but besides these he had by an earlier wife, a Phrygian, Ditizele, a grown-up son called Ziaelas. Under the regime of Etazeta, Ziaelas had been discarded; he had even found his father's court no safe place for him and had vanished out of the land. Nicomedes left his kingdom to Etazeta’s children, placing them by his will under the protection of Ptolemy and Antigonus, of Byzantium, Heraclea, and Cius. But now Ziaelas, who had been living all this time with the king of the Armenians, suddenly reappeared in Bithynia at the head of a body of Galatians, Tolistoagii. A civil war at once raged over the country. The adherents of Etazeta were supported by troops from the states under whose protection her children had been placed. Ziaelas succeeded, however, in conquering first a part, and then the whole, of his father's realm. Heraclea, which had taken a prominent part in opposing him, was raided by his Galatians. We hear presently of a son of Nicomedes called Ziboetes as an exile in Macedonia; this is no doubt one of the sons of Etazeta who had taken refuge with his guardian, King Antigonus.

With the two other Macedonian kingdoms the relations of the Seleucid continued to be the same under Antiochus II as under Antiochus I—friendship with the house of Antigonus, a state of war with Ptolemy. The former was to be still more complicated with the house of Seleucus by another marriage. Demetrius, the son of Antigonus Gonatas and Phila, fetched in his turn a bride from the Seleucid court, Stratonice, the daughter of the elder Stratonice and Antiochus the First, a princess who—so involved were now the relations—was at once the half-sister and the niece of his mother and the niece of his father.

The war with Ptolemy was still, as far as Asia Minor was concerned, a war of which the Greek states of the coast and the neighboring islands were both the theatre and the prizes of victory. It continued to fluctuate without discoverable progress. In the latter years of Antiochus I, or early in his son's reign, Ephesus, the commercial centre of Asia Minor, passed from Seleucid to Ptolemaic possession. A son of King Ptolemy’s, himself called Ptolemy, commanded the garrison which held it—a garrison composed largely, we understand, of half-wild men from Thrace. This gain, however, to the Ptolemaic side was quickly overbalanced by losses. Miletus, which we saw lately obsequiously dedicating an image of Ptolemy’s sister, about this time fell away under a tyrant called Timarchus. It has been suggested that this man was the Aetolian condottiere who once descended on the coast of Asia and defeated a general of King Ptolemy’s. This is very probable, and if so, Timarchus must have seized Miletus by a coup de main. At any rate Timarchus the tyrant had no idea of being subordinate to either Ptolemy or Seleucid. It seemed possible at that moment that the rivalry of the two houses might allow petty princes to maintain their independence in the midst. At Ephesus the young Ptolemy abjured his allegiance to his father and set up for himself. He and the tyrant of Miletus made common cause. But they had miscalculated the forces with which they had to do. Miletus was recaptured by Antiochus II, and the demos now turned the stream of its flattery upon the Seleucid house. The surname of “God”, by which Antiochus II was afterwards distinguished, is said to have been first pronounced in Miletus. The rule of young Ptolemy at Ephesus also came to an abrupt end. His Thracian guards, knowing the weakness of his position, broke out in mutiny. Ptolemy fled with his mistress Irene to the great temple of Artemis. The Thracians, undaunted by its sanctities, followed him up and there slew him. Irene, holding with one hand to the knocker of the door, so as herself also to claim the protection of the goddess, with the other sprinkled her lover’s blood upon the holy things till she too was cut down. Ephesus passed once more to the Seleucid.

There are two isolated notices which our ignorance of the time does not allow us to bring into relation with each other or with contemporary events, but which seem to show that at some time under Antiochus II the activity of the Seleucid house extended to Europe. One of these is the statement abstracted from Memnon that at one moment hostilities were on the point of breaking out between Antiochus and Byzantium. The Northern League, which we saw combating Antiochus I, seems to have been still in existence. For at this juncture Heraclea sent a contingent of forty triremes to Byzantium, and the war “advanced as far as threats only”.

The other notice is one which shows us the Seleucid King in person on European soil. He is besieging or has taken the Thracian town of Cypsela. Numbers of the old Thracian nobility have rallied to his side. Antiochus had perhaps espoused the native cause against the new-come Galatians who had founded a separate kingdom in this region. He gave at any rate princely entertainment to the Thracian chiefs who joined him. When the Thracians of Cypsela see their countrymen walking about the Greek king, ablaze with ornaments of gold and silver arms, they declare themselves ready, not only to submit, but to fight under his banners. [Against whom? Byzantium? the Gauls of Tylis? Ptolemaic forces?]

We have no details as to the treatment of the Greek cities by Antiochus II except his liberation of Miletus. In that city a hundred years afterwards the day still lived in the imagination of the citizens when Hippomachus the son of Athenaeus, an Erythraean who had found favor at the Seleucid court, appeared clothed with the royal authority to restore freedom and democracy. When Rome had come to bear rule in Asia, the Ionian Greeks still spoke of Antiochus II as “the God”, and appealed to the decrees by which he had granted them constitutions, as if in fact he were the author of their liberties. Nevertheless, it is under Antiochus II that we find the most opulent and splendid of the Ionian cities, Ephesus, after it has been recovered from Ptolemy, subjected to direct control. It has been suggested that Laodice after her divorce maintained at Ephesus a separate court of her own. There appears at any rate at the time of Antiochus' death a royal official who is expressly spoken of as being set over Ephesus.

It is to the reign of Antiochus II that the important inscription found eighteen years ago (1884) at Durdurkar (near the ancient Eriza) belongs. It is the one document we possess which tells us something of the worship of the sovereign established by imperial authority in the realm. The cities, as we saw, already offered divine honors to Alexander and his successors of the first generation. And instances of such civic cults recur during our period. There was a priest of Antiochus I at Ilion before 277; the Ionian Body joined the worship of Antiochus I, his son and joint king Antiochus and Stratonice to that of “the god Alexander”; and games were celebrated by Erythrae in honor of Antiochus I after his death, in which he was worshipped by his divine name of Saviour. At Smyrna, Stratonice was worshipped as Aphrodite Stratonicis, and her son Antiochus II was in course of time joined with he; Miletus, as we saw, hailed Antiochus II as “God”. But all these were cults established by the cities; they were not organized by the imperial government.

We have no mention of an imperial cult of the King and Queen except in the inscription of Durdurkar, and hence it is often inferred to have been an innovation of Antiochus II. The accidental fact, however, that our one document belongs to his reign is not sufficient to establish such an inference; it may indeed have been so; on the other hand, such a cult may quite well have existed as early as the reign of the first Seleucus. The document in question is a rescript of Antiochus II to Anaximbrotus, presumably the satrap of Phrygia, which Anaximbrotus forwards with a covering letter to the district officer Dionytas. The King's rescript states that his worship is already established in the several satrapies of the realm, under a high-priest in each satrapy, by whom legal instruments are dated, and whose office is therefore probably annual. The King has now determined to institute a similar worship of the queen Laodice, for which each satrapy is to have a special high-priestess. For the satrapy of Anaximbrotus the highpriestess appointed is Berenice, the daughter of Ptolemy the son of Lysimachus, and in her grandfather we may perhaps see the great Lysimachus. Suddenly in the last years of Antiochus II we find a complete revolution in the relation of the powers. The dreary war between Seleucid and Ptolemy, which had seemed to have become a permanent feature of the world, ceased. It not only ceased, but was succeeded by close alliance. Things had not gone altogether well with the house of Ptolemy. Its successes had been in many cases evanescent. We have seen the case of Ephesus and Miletus. It had had another disappointment which touched it more nearly. The rebel viceroy of Cyrene, Magas, Ptolemy's half-brother, who had been the ally of Antiochus I, had been brought to a composition with the King of Egypt about 258. His daughter by Apama, Berenice, was betrothed to the young Ptolemy, the heir of the Egyptian throne—an arrangement by which the Egyptian and Cyrenian kingdoms would once more coalesce. Unfortunately for Ptolemy, Magas, after making this treaty, almost immediately died, and the Queen-Mother, Apama, coming thereby to power, immediately abjured the compact and fetched a husband for her daughter from the anti-Ptolemaic court of Macedonia, Demetrius the Fair, the brother of King Antigonus, came to reign in Cyrene. The influence of the Seleucid queen-mother continued paramount, for Demetrius, although nominally the husband of Berenice, formed a liaison with Apama herself Cyrene was still a thorn in the side of Egypt.

It is implied that Ptolemy took the initiative in proposing a peace to Antiochus. He seems to have made it worth the Seleucid King’s while. He offered the hand of his daughter, another Berenice, to Antiochus, who undertook on his part to repudiate in her favor his present queen, Laodice. The hand of Berenice was to bring with it large advantages; phernophoros, dowry-bringing, became her popular description.

What these advantages were one can only speculate. They may not improbably have included territorial concessions. By comparing the list which Theocritus gives of the countries under Ptolemaic influence with those which Ptolemy III states (in the description of Aduli) that he inherited from his father, it is observed that Cilicia and Pamphylia, which appear in the former, are absent from the latter. It is therefore likely that the Ptolemaic claims to these regions were abandoned in this treaty; Ptolemy indeed may have already been obliged to evacuate them.

An immediate change came over the Seleucid court. Laodice disappeared; a rival appeared to her sons, Seleucus and Antiochus, in a child whom Berenice bore to Antiochus. It may be that the residence of the court was now more regularly fixed at the Syrian Antioch, towards the Ptolemaic realm, instead of in Asia Minor, where Laodice was strong. Friendly offices between the houses became at any rate the order of the day. The physician, Cleombrotus of Ceos, sent possibly from the medical schools of Alexandria, was rewarded by Ptolemy with a hundred talents because he had treated Antiochus successfully. Casks of Nile water were carried systematically to Berenice in her new home; it has been pointed out that it had a great reputation for rendering fertile.

All seemed to go smoothly. But the divorced queen was not a woman to sit down tamely in her humiliation. She worked fiercely to be reinstated, and at last succeeded, for if policy bound Antiochus to Berenice, his heart, it is said, belonged to Laodice. In 246 Berenice was sitting solitary in Antioch, and the King was across the Taurus living once more with his former queen. Then he suddenly died at Ephesus. Laodice (or so it was believed) had cut short his life by poison, to prevent the succession of her children being anymore endangered by the fluctuations of his mood.

The peace of Asia, so recently secured, instantly vanished.