His was a strange blend. Various epochs met in him, and it is not surprising that many incongruities resulted from that fact. First of all he was in every sense a Macedonian despot. Macedonians had always been accustomed to the concentration of supreme power in the hands of a single individual. For four or five generations Antiochus’ immediate ancestors had wielded such power over a rabble of nations stretching from the Aegean to the frontiers of India.[[128]] The emotional reactions which the existence and the possession of this power must have, were present in him. One constant result of it, the absence of any real social life, is an especially fertile source of deterioration, but the worst effects are noticed chiefly in those born to the purple. Antiochus’ exile saved him from them. Yet nothing could save him from the consciousness that he might, if he chose, gratify every whim, and yield to every impulse, and his associates found quickly enough that his bonhomie and engaging simplicity were moods, which might be succeeded by bursts of quite incalculable and murderous rage.
There was the additional fact that the monarchy founded by Alexander was in legal contemplation the reign of a god made flesh. Seleucus, we may remember, entered almost at once into the titularies of Sumer and Akkad.[[129]] The second Antiochus was styled “the God,” Θεός, tout simple. Our Antiochus called himself Epiphanes—which, it need scarcely be said, is to be translated “the Manifest Deity,” and not “the Illustrious.”[[130]] And, at any rate at certain moments, the designation was doubtless a real one to him and not a conscious pose. Worship of the king, the foundation of the later Augustus-cult, was an apparent unifying element in the hopeless jumble of gods and rituals. For that purpose it might be encouraged even by hard-headed peasants like Vespasian, or philosophers like Marcus, who had no illusions about the character of their divinity. But that Alexander in all sincerity believed himself to be god can scarcely be questioned, and Epiphanes may often have similarly impressed himself.
Secondly, he was a Greek. Hellenism was to him a real and profound enthusiasm. His early life as a Roman hostage must have immensely stimulated this side of his character. At Rome his associates were the Scipionic circle, to whom Greek culture had come as a revelation. The distinguished Roman families with whom the young prince lived read Greek, spoke Greek, discussed Greek, and were eager to act as the interpreters of Hellenism to their slower-witted countrymen. In these surroundings anyone boasting not only Greek but regal blood must have found his racial self-esteem flattered to an extraordinary degree. Antiochus’ first act on his release was to betake himself to the intellectual capital of Greece, to Athens, in whose citizenry he eagerly enrolled himself. In fact, he was an Athenian magistrate—στρατηγὸς ἐπὶ τὰ ὅπλα[[131]]—when news came to him of the assassination of his brother Seleucus and of the opportunities waiting one who could act quickly.
When he was king, so much of his policy as did not look to the aggrandizement of his empire was directed to the rehabilitation of Greek cities and temples. Megalopolis, Tegea in Arcadia, Delos, Rhodes, were the beneficiaries of his Philhellenic enthusiasm. The truckling Samaritans—at least the Hellenizing party among them—knew that nothing would make a quicker appeal to him than to rename the sanctuary on Gerizim in honor of Zeus Hellenius.[[132]] He would probably have found it difficult to understand that anyone could seriously maintain the claims of any other culture against that of the Greeks, and no doubt received as a matter of course the representations of the Jewish Hellenizers that a little impetus would greatly expedite the Hellenizing process in Palestine.
When we find Antiochus, king of kings, Manifest God, soliciting the suffrages of the Antiochene burghers for the office of “market-commissioner,” or of “district mayor,”[[133]] we are not to regard it as an eccentricity of the same sort that set him wrangling in the public squares with Hob and Dick, or pouring priceless ointments on his fellow-bathers in the public baths.[[134]] The maintenance of the structure of the Greek polis was an expression of Hellenic pride in a characteristically Hellenic institution. No one, to be sure, was deceived by it into thinking that Citizen Antiochus could not incontinently change into an irresponsible master at will, but, comedy as it was, it had a real significance, which did not escape even the scoffers and, least of all, the king.
Finally there was an ultra-modern side in him. Antiochus was also a cultivated gentleman, to whom skepticism was an index of education and sacrilege a concrete instance of skepticism. He lived in a very unsettling age. As has been said before, the Greek culture that found its way into Rome after the Hannibalic wars was a sophisticated, disintegrating culture, to which the ancient institutions had at best a practical utility, and which acknowledged theoretically no binding principles in the physical or moral world. It was in this culture that the young Antiochus was reared. He was not alone in it. Many of the incidents of this period show a revolting cynicism on the part of the actors. One Greek commander erected altars to “Impiety and Illegality.” A Spartan brigand called himself “Hybristas,” “the Outrager.”[[135]]
Indeed it was as a wanton desecrater of shrines that Antiochus gained an unenviable notoriety. His pillaging of the temple at Jerusalem was only one of a series of similar acts. At Hierapolis, as well as at many other Syrian shrines, and finally at Elymaea, he coolly appropriated the temple treasures, which in most cases involved violence on his part. But it needed his outrageous “marriage” to Diana to set the seal upon his derisive attitude toward his fellow-gods. The sober Polybius attributes his death to his impiety, a conclusion which naturally is warmly supported by Josephus.[[136]]
It is idle to attempt to reconcile this sort of cynicism with the pretensions to actual divinity which he probably made in all seriousness. The two are of course quite irreconcilable, and represent merely the shifting moods of a complex and slightly abnormal personality. Under almost any king such an outbreak as the Hasmonean revolt might have taken place. Perhaps the conflict was inevitable. But the form the conflict took, the high degree of religious and national enthusiasm which it evoked, and the powerful aid that enthusiasm gave to the propaganda which was preparing itself, were directly consequent upon the character of Antiochus the God Manifest. The rigor and thoroughness with which he strove to suppress the Jewish cult were characteristic of him. His indifference to sacred traditions made his violation of the temple almost a casual act on his part, his Hellenism justified his plans, and his despotic nature, raging under the humiliating rebuff he had received from Rome, found an outlet in the punishment of a disobedient province.
The writer of I Maccabees places the responsibility for the persecution by Antiochus directly upon the Jews themselves. Many, he tells, were persuaded to identify themselves wholly with the Greeks.[[137]] The first offense to Jewish religious sentiment did not come from the king at all. The men who waited upon Antiochus, and obtained permission to set up a gymnasium at Jerusalem, acted quite of their own volition. Antiochus’ direct action in the matter begins with his return from Egypt. “Embittered and groaning,” Polybius says, he left Egypt and returned to Syria. Now, just what happened in Judea is not quite clear. First Maccabees tells of an unprovoked pillage of the temple and a massacre of the people. Second Maccabees reports a furious struggle between the two pretenders, Menelaus and Jason, upon a rumor of the king’s death. In all likelihood the fight ended with the discomfiture of Antiochus’ appointee, Menelaus, and the king immediately proceeded to rescue him. The sack of Jerusalem and a massacre followed. No doubt the massacre was no worse than befell any captured city, since of a special policy of extermination there can as yet have been no question.
Menelaus was restored, the temple treasures were surrendered to the king, and, either directly or after an interval of two years, the programme of forcible suppression of the Jewish cult was announced.