According to Jewish tradition a pupil of Antigonus of Socho, José ben Joëzer, was a member of this sect of “saints.”[[125]] And it is significant that, although he is represented as especially rigorous in all religious requirements that had a separatist tendency, he was strikingly liberal in all matters of what might be called internal religious practice. It is likely enough that the tradition is accurate and the “saints” were not at all precisians or fanatics, but that their cohering bond was simply opposition to Hellenism. As has been said, it was against the Hellenizing Jews more than the Greeks that their attack was directed. These latter had on their side the advantages of wealth and social position, but they lacked just that which made their opponents strong, a compact organization. There was no συναγωγὴ Ἑλλήνων, no congregation or fraternity of Philhellenes. They included all shades of Greek sympathizers, from out and out apostates to parvenus, to whom speaking Greek was a mark of fashion. No doubt the feeling between the two groups ran high, and neither side spared bitter abuse and invective.

The conflict was finally precipitated by an act that was one of the commonest occurrences of ancient political struggles. The party defeated, or in danger of defeat, does not scruple to invite foreign intervention. In this case the irreconcilable Hellenists, evidently losing ground in face of the rapid growth of Hasidic conventicles, appeal to the Greek king, whose policies their own efforts were furthering, and of whose sympathy they were assured. That king happened to be the bizarre Antiochus Epiphanes.

CHAPTER X
ANTIOCHUS THE MANIFEST GOD

“And there arose from them [the companions of Alexander] a root of sin, to wit, Antiochus Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus, he who had been hostage in Rome.” That to the writer of I Maccabees is a complete characterization of the king whose reign was to be of fateful consequences to the Jews, a ῥίζα ἁμαρτωλός, an ill sapling of a noble tree. Perhaps the writer had in mind the שרש פרה ראש ולענה (Deut. xxix. 17), “a root bearing gall and wormwood.” And he had been a hostage in Rome; a man, that is, of no usual character and no usual career.

Except in this general way, he can scarcely be said to have a personality at all to the writers of the Books of Maccabees. He is merely the type of tyrant, proud and presumptuous, unduly exalting himself above God because of his vain and transitory successes, and dying in agony, after an edifying deathbed repentance. No more than the Nebuchadnezzar of the Book of Daniel, is he anything other than an instrument of the wrath of God. It is hard to believe that there was any real feeling on the writer’s part.

But Antiochus had a real personality and an especially interesting one. Both in modern and in ancient times characterization of this strange figure has been attempted, and the verdicts have been so widely different that the summary may be given in Livy’s words: Uti nec sibi nec aliis, quinam homo esset, satis constaret, “So that neither he himself nor anyone else could clearly state what manner of man he was.”

The freakish outbursts, which amazed and scandalized his contemporaries, amply justified the common parody of his title Epiphanes by Epimanes, “the madman.”[[126]] Some there were—perhaps his royal nephew and biographer, Ptolemy of Egypt, among them—who regarded him as unqualifiedly demented.[[127]] It is likely enough, if the stories about him are even partly true, that he had periods of real derangement. But it seems evident that he was a right royal personage, of unusual charm of manner, of undoubted military capacity, quick and decisive in action, fostering a dream of empire whose rude shattering must have been an important contributing cause to his death.

ANTIOCHUS (IV) EPIPHANES
AFTER A COIN
(From a drawing by Ralph Iligan)