Antiochus the Great has been late in coming into his due.[103] The mere fact that Hannibal, whom the undying hatred of Rome had driven into his service, worked out for him a plan of campaign against the Romans which he rejected, and that he put the greatest general of his age in charge of a new squadron of his extemporized fleet, have sufficed to rule out of court in advance any apology for his defeat. The issue showed that the view taken by Hannibal of the power of Rome was right. It is true that it could have been checked only by a great combination of all the Mediterranean states. But it is equally true that such a combination was impracticable. Antiochus had to deal with the situation as he found it. He risked too much for a few frontier districts and a possible hegemony in Greece. But he seems to have greatly underestimated the power of Rome, and to have credited the Senate with far less energy and tenacity of purpose than it actually possessed. Once his vanguard was thrown out of Greece by the incomparable Roman legions, his main hope of defending Asia Minor did actually rest with his fleet. Hannibal was, accordingly, in the right place. But the fleet was too new and too weak as well as too scattered to hold the Romans in Europe; and, once the veterans of the Second Punic War were across the Hellespont, no army in Asia could have resisted them.
The Seleucids learned a terrible lesson on the battle-fields of Thermopylæ and Magnesia: the fatality was that all the peoples in Asia learned it also. That Antiochus the Great consented to surrender all his possessions in Asia Minor and to pay to the Romans an indemnity of one thousand talents a year for twelve years; to hand over his battleships and to limit his fleet to ten decked vessels and a few small craft; to give up all his war elephants and to keep no others in the future; to take no Italians into his service as mercenaries, and to throw open his empire to the merchants and traders from Rhodes, proclaimed only too clearly to the Orientals that the days of the lordship of the Macedonians in the world were past.
It was not, however, till after the untimely death of his son, Antiochus IV, surnamed Epiphanes, or the "God Manifest," in 164 B.C. that the storm broke in all its fury. The forces then set in motion for the destruction of the Seleucid empire were of two kinds, external and internal. Of the external forces we have already considered one—the advance of the Roman power toward the East. The Roman Senate had at this time only one concern in its dealings with Syria, namely, to make the Seleucids harmless. This it accomplished in a variety of ways. Immediately after the death of Antiochus IV, it sent commissioners into Syria who executed an unenforced article of the treaty struck after the battle of Magnesia: they burnt the Seleucid battleships found in the cities of Phœnicia and hamstrung the war elephants which they discovered in the royal arsenals. By jealously restricting the military establishment of the Seleucids the Senate broke their power in all respects. Not content, however, with binding the feet of its victim, the Senate held out an encouraging hand to all rebels against his authority. A case in point is that of the Jews. Again and again, between 164 and 120 B.C., Judas and Jonathan Maccabæus and Hyrcanus I sought and obtained Roman recognition in their struggle against their overlords. They had national causes for their repeated outbreaks and religious stimuli to resist desperately, but it is doubtful whether they could have carried their war of independence to a successful termination without the assurance that Rome sympathized with their enterprise. The Senate helped on the disruption of the Seleucid realm by still another unfriendly act: it joined with Pergamum and Egypt in lighting the fire of dynastic war in Syria in 153 B.C. and in adding fuel to it from time to time thereafter, with the result that the realm was devastated by civil war almost continuously from that date till the end of the dynasty, ninety years later. Then, the blackened hulk, manned by a mutinous crew, lay helpless in a sea infested with pirates, when Pompey picked it up and towed it into a Roman harbor.
The other external force which contributed to this inglorious end of a voyage begun with such fair promise was set in motion from the Farthest East. I do not reckon it in this account that the Parthians again rebelled and in 140 B.C. advanced their western frontier to the Euphrates, thus forming the philhellen kingdom of west Iran which grew behind the breastwork of the Seleucid empire to such power that later it disputed with some success Rome's claim to suzerainty in Asia. Nor do I enter it here that Armenia established its complete independence, and under Tigranes the Great annexed for a time (83-69 B.C.) all of the Seleucid realm then remaining. For these are internal movements analogous to the insurrection of the Jews. It was from the banks of the Hoang-Ho that an advance toward the west occurred in the early part of the second century B.C. which may be paralleled with the simultaneous advance eastward of the Roman power from the banks of the Tiber.[104] The oncoming Eastern assailant was the conglomerate of Indo-European peoples whom the Chinese call the Yue Tchi. They came along the edges of the great desert of shifting sand in Eastern Turkestan down which flows the mouthless Tarim River, not with the élan of conquerors, but retreating slowly before the superior strength of the Huns (Hioung Nou), their former subjects, with whom they had recently fought an unsuccessful war for the possession of North China. It was against their conquerors, we may remark in passing, that the Chinese emperors, Chi-Houang-ti and Wou-ti of the Ts'in and Han Dynasties respectively, constructed in the third and second centuries B.C., to the south of the Desert of Gobi, the great Chinese Limes, or Wall. In 159 B.C. the Yue Tchi occupied Sogdiana. Twenty years later (139 B.C.) they crushed the Greek kingdom of Bactria; so that in this general region it was only in India, in the vast district drained by the Indus River, that Greek kingdoms existed thereafter. Somewhere near the opening of the Christian era these, too, succumbed to the Yue Tchi, now properly designated Indo-Scythians by the Greeks. For several centuries the Indo-Scythians, like the Huns who followed them in the fifth century of our era, and the Turks who followed the Huns in the sixth, kept open the trade routes along which they had themselves advanced when driven westward from the Hoang-Ho. Their successors transmitted to the frontiers of China Manichæism, the cosmopolitan religion of Iran: they did a greater work. They not only forwarded Buddhism to the Chinese; but before it, and with it, the pure as well as the debased art of Greece. Among the priceless treasures which Dr. Stein has brought back from the desert cities of Cathay, none are more remarkable than certain clay seals attached to documents of the third century of our era, found at Niya in a district then under Chinese control;[105] for one of them might have been made for Diodotus, the first Greek king of Bactria, while on others appears Athena Alcis, the haughty, helmeted, promachus Athena, hurling the thunderbolt, whom the Antigonid kings of Macedon and the Greek kings of India had put on their coins.[106] Not without some reason, therefore, is the view now being advanced that the art of China and Japan is derived, like that of Europe and America, from Greek sources.[107] It is an amazing spectacle to observe how Hellenistic civilization flowed simultaneously back the channels to the springs in Italy and China whence came the floods which overwhelmed the Seleucid empire.
After this rapid survey of the political history of the Seleucids, I wish to devote the remainder of this chapter to considering the domestic policy of the dynasty. I shall point out that Seleucus and his successors continued Alexander the Great's work of founding city-states in Asia, and that, having to deal with priestly communities and feudal lords as well as with the occupants of the widespread royal domains, they refused to exempt from their direct control any lands not placed under the jurisdiction of a city-state. I shall discuss briefly the internal structure of the city-states and more at length their relation in theory and fact to the monarch. This will finally bring up for examination the policy of Antiochus IV, in whose reign the internal as well as the external development of the Seleucid empire culminated.
Seleucus had been advanced to high position in Alexander's service after Alexander had disclosed his purpose of fusing the Macedonians, Greeks, and Iranians into a new cosmopolitan race. The promotion obtained by him during the course of the bitter struggle which this policy occasioned suggests that he made Alexander's point of view his own. This surmise as to the attitude of Seleucus is confirmed by the fact that he took his place, after Alexander's death, with those who upheld the cause of Alexander's family, and left it for his Babylonian satrapy only when it became clear that to remain meant to perish without accomplishing anything.
Seleucus was the only one of the great Macedonian captains who did not take Alexander's death as a license to discard their Iranian wives. The Bactrian maiden assigned to him at the great Susian marriage—Apama, daughter of Spitamenes—became his queen and the mother of his heir, Antiochus. The Seleucid dynasty was, accordingly, half Iranian from the start; and for the policy which it inherited from Antigonus and Alexander, and which it prosecuted vigorously till the death of Antiochus IV in 164 B.C., namely, the Hellenization of Asia, it had as warrant the practice of its idealized founder.