In western Asia, Seleucus had emerged from the wars of the diadochoi as the strongest of the successor kings. Initially, the center of his empire had been at Babylon, which had also been the seat of Alexander’s reign in his last year. But in 310 BC, Seleucus founded on the river Tigris not far from Babylon a new capital, Seleucia, named after himself. It became the center of an empire that stretched all the way to Bactria and Sogdiana. After Antigonus, Seleucus too styled himself “king” (basileus). In an expedition to the east, he consolidated his hold on the Iranian regions while conceding to Chandragupta in the treaty already mentioned large tracts of land west of the Indus in exchange for 500 war elephants. These he used to good effect in the final battle against Antigonus in 301 BC, which made him the master of most of Asia Minor and rendered his position nearly unassailable. Syria became henceforth the core of his vast domains, and in 300 BC he founded again a new capital, Antioch, on the Orontes river, named after his son and chosen successor Antiochus. At the
Figure 28 Roman copy of the statue of the goddess Tyche as the city goddess of Antioch (originally c. 300 BC). This statue ofthe Tuche of Antioch again is a Roman copy ofalost original (see Figure 12). This copy in the Vatican Museum is considered one of the best. The goddess Tyche, Fate personified, was extremely popular in the Hellenistic period, and came to play a part as the city goddess of many communities, symbolizing the fate—that is, of course, the happy fate—of these cities. This all started in Antioch: shortly after the foundation of that city in 300 BC, Seleucus ordered the sculptor Eutychides to produce a statue of Tyche as the goddess of Antioch. Eutychides took several existing elements and combined them into a new concept: Tyche is seated on the mountain Silpios, and her foot rests upon the personified river Orontes; she wears the typical mural crown (a city wall with projecting towers), and in her left hand she carries some ears of wheat as a symbol of prosperity. Soon there would be hardly a place left without such a goddess personifying the city. The theme has remained a popular one to the present day. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons
Age of 80, in 181 BC, he led his army in the conquest of the rest of Asia Minor and even crossed over to Europe to annex Macedon, where, however, he was assassinated by a rival claimant for the Macedonian throne.
Whereas Alexander had aimed at a mixed Macedonian-Iranian elite, the ruling elite in the Seleucid Empire, civil as well as military, seems to have been purely Macedonian and Greek, and only at a lower level indigenous aristocrats will have been given some governing posts. This gave the Seleucid Empire in some ways the character of a “colonial” empire, in which the mass of the people was ruled by an ultimately foreign upper class The comparison does not hold completely, for this “colonial” empire had no “motherland,”
While the Greco-Macedonian elite was not completely closed to persons of Asian descent who had embraced Greek culture and spoke Greek. This meant that Hellenistic culture was not a matter of birth and the prerogative of a certain ethnic group, but could be acquired by learning and adapting. This was important, because the Greco-Macedonian elite would otherwise be too small to hold the vast empire together. Especially, the army would in the course of time increasingly recruit from among the indigenous populations, retaining, however, its Macedonian and Greek character in language, weaponry, and military tactics. The highest echelons in the army as well as in the rest of the government remained, as far as we can tell, in the hands of Greeks and Macedonians and their descendents.
The army of the Seleucids was made up of professional soldiers, initially practically all Greeks and Macedonians, but slowly adopting more and more indigenous recruits who were or would become Hellenized. Whereas the Persian Empire had been sustained by a small standing army of professional soldiers that in time of war could be enlarged by provincial militias, the power of the Seleucids rested solely on their standing army. The gulf between a disarmed population and the royal troops that had existed already in western Asia for a long time became even more marked by the fact that the soldiers now spoke Greek.
The army was concentrated in cities and in large, often fortified, villages. The soldiers there received a house and a piece of land and served as permanent garrisons; sons would follow in their fathers’ footsteps when the latter would retire—that at least was the theory to which reality would in varying degrees more or less conform. Such settlements were military strongholds that at the same time functioned as focuses of Hellenistic culture. They were founded by the Seleucid kings at many places. Often, already existing towns or settlements were re-founded as Greek cities with Greek institutions, but also completely new cities were built. Many of them bore the names of kings and queens and were called Seleucia, Antiochia, and so forth. The settlements were from the beginning or after some transitional period organized as Greek poleis with a council, magistrates, and assembly of the people, often equipped with a theater, a gumnasion, an agora, and other amenities of a Greek polis. In the case of new foundations, the layout of the city was in the chessboard pattern that differed so markedly from the irregular street plans of western Asian and Indian cities. Indigenous population groups often received a separate legal status apart from the Greek citizenry. This also applied to the Jews, who could be found in many cities in Mesopotamia and Syria and soon in Asia Minor, where they often formed their own communities next to those of the cities they dwelt in. Despite the local autonomy that these cities usually enjoyed, they were not “city-states” such as many of the classical Greek poleis had been. But as centers of Hellenistic culture, they were a great success and in the course of time it happened more and more that the ruling elites of long-existing cities, such as for instance in Phoenicia, adopted so much of Hellenistic civilization that they too chose to re-organize their cities as Greek poleis.
In order to administer his vast empire, Seleucus entrusted his governors, who bore the Greek title of strategoi, on the whole with more authority than the Persian satraps had possessed. As a result, the structure of the empire became rather loose, for the king had to trust the loyalty of his powerful strategoi. The enormous distances seemed to justify such a system. It worked well for some time until the problems grew too large, and it became clear that this organization would not be adequate to hold the empire together, apart from the
Fact that the loyalty of the governors was not always beyond doubt. It was mainly because of the wars that the Seleucids had to wage in the west that they were unable to pay much attention to developments in the east, where first Bactria and then Iran would be lost. Seleucus and his successors had to fight competitors in Asia Minor and the Ptolemies in southern Syria and Judea, areas that the first Ptolemy had seized but were claimed by the Seleucids. Despite several wars fought over them, they would remain in Egyptian hands until the end of the 3rd century. In Asia Minor, soon after the invasion of the Celts, Pergamon emerged as an independent power that would gradually absorb most of western Asia Minor. Shortly after the middle of the 3rd century, there followed the secession of Bactria and the foundation of a Parthian kingdom in northern Iran that cut off the direct link between Seleucid Mesopotamia and the eastern provinces.
In the reign of Antiochus III the Great toward the end of the 3rd century BC, the empire enjoyed a last revival. The king undertook an expedition right through Iran and the Parthian regions to Bactria, as a result of which both the Parthian and the Bactrian kings could retain their royal titles but had to swear allegiance to Antiochus. As a second Alexander—and as the third Macedonian king after Alexander and Seleucus—he then crossed the Hindu Kush and descended into the Kabul valley where he concluded an alliance with an Indian ruler who presented him with more than 100 war elephants. It was an impressive campaign that yielded much prestige, but except for the elephants not much real gains, for the Parthians and the Bactrians hardly paid attention to Antiochus as soon as he had returned to the west. More consequential, on the other hand, was his victory over the army of the Ptolemies in 200 BC, and his subsequent annexation of Judea and southern Syria. After that, it seems that success made him reckless. In 196 BC, he crossed over to Thrace with an army, for his ambitions now seemed aimed at restoring the empire of Alexander including Macedon and Greece. He allowed himself to be invited by the Aetolian League to take the lead in a war of “liberation” of the Greeks against the Macedonians and by implication against the Romans too, for his plans disturbed the peace settlement imposed by Rome in 196 BC. In 192 BC, the king issued a proclamation declaring the Greek cities “free,” but one year later the Roman legions landed in Greece, and the Seleucid king was defeated. He withdrew to Asia Minor, where the Romans defeated him again, decisively, in 190 BC. Two years later, peace was signed: Antiochus had to give up his fleet, pay an enormous war indemnity, and recognize the independence of new kingdoms in Asia Minor. It was a turning point in history: the ruler of western Asia was forced to conform to the wishes of a new power in Europe.
A year after the peace treaty with Rome, Antiochus III died, and immediately the areas east of Media fell away from the empire. The Parthians extended their kingdom over practically all of Iran, and at the same time the Greeks of Bactria embarked upon their conquests south of the Hindu Kush and in northwestern India. Then, under king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (which meant the god manifest, an embellishment of the royal name that perfectly suited the ideology of divine kingship inaugurated by Alexander), the Seleucid Empire undertook to settle matters once and for all with its arch enemy Egypt. In 168 BC, Antiochus invaded the country and advanced up to the walls of Alexandria. But again it was Rome that dictated the further course of events. A Roman ambassador appeared in the camp of Antiochus and commanded the divine ruler to withdraw from Egypt at once. That
Same year in the battle of Pydna, the last king of Macedon had been thoroughly defeated by the Romans, and Antiochus also remembered the defeat of his father in 290 BC. He climbed down and returned to Syria, where a few years later he would be confronted with a rebellion of the Jews.
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