Greek Imperialism

by William Scott Ferguson

THE SELEUCID EMPIRE

The main portion of the conquests made by Alexander the Great lay in the continent of Asia. On the establishment of the regency this vast district had been divided among over twenty satraps. Ten years afterwards, in the fall of 313 B.C., one of these, Antigonus, known in history as Monophthalmus, or the "One-eyed," had now held for two years all the territory that lay between the fan-shaped offshoots of the Himalaya Mountains and the sea. The whole Asiatic coast of the Mediterranean from the Hellespont to Gaza on the Egyptian frontier was in his possession. His fleet ruled the sea.

The spring of 312 B.C. was one of the most critical moments in ancient history. In Antigonus the man seemed come with the will, ability, and power to take the place of Alexander. By his side stood a son of remarkable attractiveness and brilliancy, Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, or "Taker-of-Cities"; so that a dynasty seemed assured.

The work to be done was plainly indicated and preparations for its accomplishment were already completed. After having stirred up an insurrection in Greece in the preceding year, the fleet of Antigonus had joined his main army which was massed at the Hellespont in readiness to cross into Europe for the conquest of Thrace and Macedon. In this district Antigonus conducted operations in person. His son Demetrius was stationed with a minor army in Palestine with instructions to avoid an engagement, and simply to keep Ptolemy cooped up in Egypt till the European campaign was ended. If beaten in his attack on Thrace and Macedon, Antigonus had nothing serious to fear so long as he was master of the sea; if victorious, he could then fall with irresistible force upon Egypt and complete the unification of Alexander's empire. The whole campaign was admirably planned and the troops well distributed for its successful execution.[101]

That it did not even get started was partly due to Ptolemy, who, impelled by the magnitude of his danger, took the desperate step of adding many natives to his army; and partly due to Demetrius, who, despite his numerical inferiority, his instructions, and the judgment of his staff officers, risked a pitched battle at Gaza, and was decisively defeated. That the project could never again be renewed on similarly advantageous terms was due to Seleucus, the son of Antiochus. For taking a thousand men with him this accomplished officer, old in service though still young in years, set out straightway after the battle of Gaza for Babylon, his own satrapy, whence he had fled to Egypt for fear of Antigonus four years earlier. Ten years afterwards, in 302 B.C., when Antigonus again proceeded to conquer Macedon and Thrace, after having beaten Ptolemy back into Egypt, his great aim was frustrated, not only because the king of Thrace, Lysimachus, outmanœuvred him by getting an army across into Asia Minor, but also because Seleucus, now master of all the territory in the rear of Antigonus between the Euphrates and the frontiers of India, threw the decisive weight of his new army into the scale, and joined Lysimachus in crushing their common enemy at the great battle of Ipsus in 301 B.C.

Thereby Seleucus advanced his western frontier from the Euphrates to the edge of the Mediterranean, shifted his capital from Babylon to newly founded Antioch, and brought his empire into immediate proximity with the districts whence alone Greek and Macedonian immigrants could come. The Seleucids dated the founding of their dynasty from the return of Seleucus to Babylon in 312 B.C. There is, however, much to be said for the view that their empire was first established after the battle of Ipsus.

For the next twenty years (301-281 B.C.) Seleucus had the great good fortune to remain in secure possession of the vast territory which called him king; and while he failed to pass on to his descendants all the fruits of his crowning victory over Lysimachus at Corupedion in 282 B.C., he left to his son Antiochus I, surnamed Soter, or the Savior, and he in turn about twenty years later, to his son Antiochus II, surnamed Theos, or the God, the fabric of their dominions, somewhat tattered at the edges, to be sure, but otherwise whole.

The evil genius of the Seleucid empire during the century when it was a great power was a woman—Laodice, the wife of Antiochus II and mother of his successor, Seleucus II, surnamed Callinicus, or the Glorious Victor (246-226 B.C.). Her power as queen is attested by other evidences, and also by the fact that she was associated with the king in the worship accorded by the satrapies of the realm to their rulers, every satrapy being required by Theos to establish a chief-priesthood in her especial honor.[102] None the less, she had to yield her place to Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy Philadelphus, when that crafty monarch seduced her husband from his alliance with Macedon by giving to him along with his daughter a prodigious dowry and extensive territorial concessions (249 B.C.). She retired to Asia Minor, where she owned large estates secured in earlier days at the expense of the royal domain, and where she could live in almost regal state. For the death of her former husband, which occurred three years later, she was probably not responsible,—though rumor held her guilty,—since Theos had already, on his deathbed apparently, and for reasons of sound dynastic policy, designated her oldest son, then a "youth nearing manhood," as his successor, to the exclusion of the boy with whom his Egyptian queen had recently presented him. Nor is she to be condemned harshly for having had her rival and her son's rival put out of the way; for she acted not only in self-defense, but also to save the Seleucid empire from becoming simply an appanage of Egypt during the long minority of Berenice's child. For conducting to a successful termination, despite initial disasters, the campaign against Ptolemy III, by which she put her son in possession of his throne, she is deserving of high credit. It was when this was accomplished, and her son was king, that her ambition led her into maternal and political crime; for, in order to retain the government, which her oldest son, now arrived at years of discretion, threatened to take from her, she set up against him her younger son Antiochus, surnamed the Hawk, for whom she got the administration of Asia Minor. The Seleucids became thereby divided against themselves, and for twenty years (242-223 B.C.) they were so weakened by a dynastic feud that they not only neglected vital questions of foreign policy, but had to permit the total loss of certain frontier satrapies and the rebellion of almost all the rest. Antiochus III, surnamed the Great, opened his reign with an error—the attempt to deal with the foreign situation before he had put his house in order; and he ended it with a great disaster—his irreparable defeat by the Romans at Magnesia in 190 B.C.; but in between he restored his authority over what Bevan in his House of Seleucus calls "the essential body of the Empire" and his suzerainty over its "outside sphere." The latter he accomplished by an impressive campaign, in Armenia (where ruled Xerxes, betrayed by his name as an Iranian), in Parthia (where Arsaces, the third king of a barbarian line from the Turanian desert, which had mastered that country a little less than forty years before, had just come to the throne), in Bactria (where Euthydemus, a Greek from Magnesia, had recently founded a new Hellenic dynasty in the place of an old one established nearly fifty years earlier by Diodotus, "lord of the thousand Bactrian cities," as he is called), and in India, where a certain Sophragasenus, following the examples of Arsaces and Euthydemus, recognized the superior power of the Seleucid.

On his return to Antioch after five years of marching and fighting in the Far East (210-205 B.C.), Antiochus wrested Palestine from the now feeble grasp of the Ptolemies. This exploit gave him the long-desired, long-lacked, and long-fought-for access to the sea; and for the first time in the history of the realm an opportunity was secured for the construction of a great fleet. Simultaneously, Philip of Macedon fell before the Romans at Cynocephalæ (197 B.C.); whereupon Antiochus went vigorously to work dislodging all "foreigners" from the Mediterranean seaboard of Asia Minor. This led in 192 B.C. to conflict with Rome.