Part 21

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.

Of the Greek cities which Seleucus planted in his realm, fifty-nine are named by Appian. They lay especially in Syria, in the district between the Euphrates and the sea which he sought to make a second Macedonia. His son Antiochus, to whom he gave the administration of the eastern satrapies in 293 B.C., was particularly active in developing cities on the Greek model in that region; and to him and his son Antiochus Theos belongs the honor of establishing the urban habits of Hellenic life in the interior of Asia Minor. In the arm of their realm which reached through this peninsula to the rear of the Greek strip on the Anatolian coast, new cities sprang up under their auspices by the score. Nor did the movement come to an end with the reign of the second Antiochus in 246 B.C., though it probably weakened at that time. Over two generations later, in the reign of Antiochus IV, it was again resumed actively and directed especially into Palestine, which had been newly added to the realm.

The most striking feature in the internal policy of the Seleucids is the attempted transfer into Asia of the urban form of life theretofore characteristic of Hellas. Evidently, these monarchs believed with Aristotle, Alexander, and, we may add, Polybius, and, indeed, all Greeks, that men who did not live in cities were uncivilized men. Evidently, too, they thought it wise and possible to civilize their dominions.

It is not easy to form a definite impression of the political situation in the Seleucid realm when the Macedonians first took possession, but cities in the Greek sense seem to have been entirely absent. This does not mean that towns were lacking altogether, since, even if we disregard administrative centres like Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, Persepolis, we may use the term "town" properly of places like Bambyce in Syria, fourteen miles west of the Euphrates. There, in a fertile, well-watered valley, stood a famous temple of Atargatis, the Syrian goddess. It was a wonderful establishment, as readers of Lucian know, with its wide approaches, its obelisk-like phalli, its sacred fish-pond, its shocking rites. At its head were emasculated priests, who not only conducted the ceremonies and directed a far-reaching proselytism, but also governed the community of temple slaves (hieroduli) who tilled the land of the neighborhood for their own support and that of the church. This clerical form of local organization had been carefully fostered by the Persians. We all know how in reorganizing Judæa they put the common people, who were there simply to pay tithes, under the control of the high priest, elders, and Levites, and made the so-called law of Moses the civil law of the land. They proceeded in similar fashion throughout Asia Minor. There Seleucus found scores of towns, big and little, to which the description, given by Strabo of the sacred city of Ma at Comana in Cappadocia, is applicable: "In itself it is," he says, "a notable city, but most of its inhabitants are god-possessed, or temple slaves. They are all of Cataonian stock and are subject generally to the authority of the king, but are under the immediate control of the priest. He is lord at once of the temple and of the temple slaves, of whom there were more than six thousand, including men and women, at the time of my visit. Attached to the temple is much land, of which the priest enjoys the revenues, and there is no one in Cappadocia of higher dignity than he except the king." Similar to this was the temple of Zeus at Venasa with its three thousand temple slaves and its land which yielded to its priest an annual income of twenty thousand dollars (fifteen talents); the temple of Zeus Asbamæus near Tyana, of Apollo in Cataonia, Mater Zizimene near Iconium, and Artemis Perasia in Castabala. Similar, too, was the temple of Ma in Pontic Comana with its swarming mart, its wide acres, and its six thousand temple slaves, of whom the young women, here as elsewhere, were sacred prostitutes; the temple of Anaitis in Zela, of Men in Cabira, of Selene in Iberia, of the Great Mother at Pessinus, of Zeus at Olba, and of other gods in other places scattered through Phrygia, Pisidia, and Lydia, as well as Palestine, Syria, and Babylonia. The Seleucids must have found the body of their empire thickly studded with religious communities, each subject to its own code of divine law, each dominated by a masterful and long-petted theocracy. Under this baleful rule the whole country had settled gradually down during the Persian time in progressive political and economic stagnation.

Apart from the mountains and the deserts, where tribal and nomadic liberty reigned,--a constant menace to central government,--the peoples of Asia lived in villages when the Macedonians came. Many of these villages, villagers and all, were owned by princelings and noblemen, who, if natives, had been undisturbed by the Persians, if Iranians, had come into their possessions by reason of royal grants. All through Syria and Asia Minor may be seen to-day the ruins of "square towers" (tetrapyrgiæ) and manorial castles such as these grandees built and fortified for defense against their neighbors and, if need be, against the royal authority itself. Those who built them had apparently had little loyalty to the Persian king, but also little inclination to obey his successor. They were, accordingly, ejected right and left. Of the estates thus obtained, the Macedonian kings could dispose at their pleasure. They formed again part of the royal domain, which stretched in all directions at the edges of the deserts and the mountains, among the temple lands, the feudal fiefs, and administrative cities--a veritable archipelago of landed property, tilled for the crown by myriads of royal serfs. Here was the ὑλη the material, of which the Seleucids founded many of their city-states.

The handle for reorganization which the priestly towns offered to the new government was often the non-ecclesiastical part of the population. That the temple was regularly the centre of local trade and the scene of a recurrent bazaar tempted to its proximity money-changers and the like. When the Greek immigration began this element was naturally strengthened. It was, therefore, possible for the Seleucids to give it an urban organization--a general assembly, a council, and magistrates; and in this way to create a new city-state.

According to invariable Greek practice, however, such a city controlled--with certain limitations--its own shrines. The great temples of Apollo at Delphi and Delos, for example, were governed by the citizens of those towns. Hence the natural policy for the Seleucids, and the one which they in fact followed wherever practicable, was to subordinate the high priests and clergy to the adjacent urban authorities, thus solving the ecclesiastical question in a way convenient for themselves and agreeable to European feeling. Where this did not prove practicable, they often despoiled the temple of its lands for the benefit of their followers. Thus the village of Bætocæce was taken from the local temple of Zeus and given to a certain Demetrius, and the sacred land of Zeus of Æzani was divided into lots, which were assigned to cleruchs, subjected to a tax, and attached to the financial jurisdiction of an adjoining city. It is simply another aspect of the same general policy when king after king sought to lay "impious" hands upon the treasures stored up in the temples of Bel, Anaitis, Atargatis, and Jehovah.

The secularization of religious properties was a very difficult matter, and it was not pushed at all times with equal vigor by the Seleucids. When the monarchs were embarrassed by foreign or domestic troubles, they had to conciliate the priests even to the point of undoing what they had already done. How easily a reaction might occur we can perceive from the case recorded in the splendid inscription which Mr. Butler has recently found cut on the inner wall of the great temple of Artemis at Sardis. A certain Mnesimachus, presumably a Macedonian officer or adventurer, had got a huge fief from King Antigonus. It consisted of the village of Tobalmura in the Sardian plain and its appurtenances, the villages of Tandu and Combdilipia. On these he had to pay annual dues of £50 to the proper chiliarchy, or subdivision of the satrapy. Near by, in Cinara was a kleros, or lot, on which he paid £3 yearly. The fief consisted, in addition, of the village of Periasasostra, of which the annual dues, payable to another chiliarchy, were £57. Close by, in Nagrioa was again a kleros, on which he paid £3 7s. yearly. The fief consisted, moreover, of the village of Ilu in the territory of the well-known city of Attuda, of which the dues, paid annually to the city of course, were £3 5s. The manor (aule) of the fief was in the village of Tobalmura, and together with certain lodges held by bailiffs and certain gardens and parks tilled by manorial serfs in Tobalmura and Periasasostra, it had once been assigned to Pytheus and Adrastus, likewise Macedonians; but later on it had seemingly come into the possession of Mnesimachus. The happy holder of this great estate enjoyed, doubtless, the total net yield of the manor and the lots, and, in addition, as the possessor of the manor and lots, rights to exact services in money, kind, and labor from the villeins of the villages. Had he been so minded he might have settled down in Lydia and become a baron like the Iranian nobles whom the Macedonians dispossessed; and, doubtless, many Macedonians and Greeks established themselves in Asia in this fashion. Mnesimachus, however, wanted money rather than "rights"; and, turning to the temple of Artemis in Sardis, he secured a loan of £1325 from the temple treasurers. The inscription cut on the temple wall records the sale to Artemis, with right to repurchase, of Mnesimachus's interest in the fief. His inability to repay his loan resulted in the aggrandizement of the temple.

Incidents of this sort were, doubtless, of frequent occurrence and show what the Seleucids had to guard against. Their land policy seems to have been prudent and far-sighted. They were bound to deal cautiously with their gigantic domain, since from it came the most valuable and stable portion of their revenues. On the other hand, they found a limit set to the quantity which they could profitably retain by the fact that, unlike the Ptolemies, they inherited from the Persians a public service adequate, not to administer, but simply to supervise administration. They did indeed increase the number of their satrapies, without, perhaps, diminishing the number of chiliarchies or hyparchies into which each satrapy was divided, and they seem to have paralleled the general service by a distinct fiscal service and by a distinct priestly service; but, none the less, they had to leave the details of fiscal, judicial, and religious administration to the villages. Though we are singularly ill-informed as to how they organized the villages, it is conceivable that they picked out certain persons, like the elders in the Egyptian villages, and held them responsible for the taxes of the villagers and for their general good behavior. These men would be rather hostages than officials, and would be nominees of the central government rather than of the villages. But we really know nothing of the facts, except that the villagers had some means by which they paid their taxes collectively.

One way by which the Seleucids could relieve themselves of the troubles of local administration and at the same time strengthen their hold upon the country was to make grants of whole blocks or complexes of their land, villages and villagers and all, to Macedonian and Greek feudatories, like Mnesimachus, who of course became responsible for the dues owing to the crown. But the evils of this system had been discovered by the Persian kings when they found their vassals more unruly than the villages. Hence the Seleucids refused to give a clear title to those to whom they made grants of portions of the royal domain, and in the case of Mnesimachus the temple of Artemis, to which he sold his rights, had to secure itself in the contract against the loss which it might sustain should the king recall his grant. On the other hand, when the king sold outright parts of the domain, as he frequently did, particularly in times of financial distress, and the lands and villages sold became with their peasants private property, he required that they should be added to the territory of some city-state, it being a privilege highly cherished by the purchasers that they should be given the liberty of deciding to which city their property should belong. The Seleucid policy that land should belong either to a city-state or to the crown was admirably calculated to destroy priestly and feudal sovereignties, and it was taken over by the Roman emperors, into whose patrimony in Asia Minor passed many temple lands which had either escaped secularization under their predecessors or had been regained by the priests during the later, weaker days of the Seleucid dynasty.

By a similar sale, or by a gift outright, the colonists who formed a new city, or the old inhabitants of a village on being constituted citizens of a free town, obtained full ownership of the lots of land assigned to them. The citizens, in turn, had authority, subject of course to the city's laws and the constitutions of the realm, over the serfs when there happened to be any on their holdings. In this way the king lost control of his peasants and his property; for the foundation was not merely a new city, but at the same time a new state. Its sovereign was not, or not simply, the king: it was the body of its franchised inhabitants assembled in general assembly, and it proceeded to manage its public affairs by means of discussion and resolutions, by delegating functions to a council and magistrates, and by determining its own domestic and foreign policies. The language of public life was of course Greek. The code of public and private law was, doubtless, drafted according to Hellenic models. Gymnasia appeared and with them gymnastic and musical contests--the most characteristic marks of Greek education. The deities they honored were those whom they themselves chose: they chose native gods and goddesses as well as Greek; above all they chose as their chief city-god the living emperor.

The Seleucid empire was a state without a citizenship. If an Athenian settled in it, he remained an Athenian, even if he became a satrap, unless he were given citizen rights in some one of the free cities. In other words, the empire had as many different citizenships as there were different cities, and as many distinct states as there were distinct citizenships.

Accordingly, each city could adopt whatever policy it pleased in the matter of admitting foreigners, be they Greeks or Asiatics, newcomers or natives, to its body politic. It might prohibit the intermarriage of citizens with non-citizens altogether, or it might go so far as to open its doors to bastards. It is, therefore, impossible for us, without such sources of knowledge as the papyri afford for Egypt, to speak in any general way of the extent and effects of racial fusion in the Seleucid empire. Two things, however, seem clear: (1) Intermarriage between citizens of different cities was of frequent occurrence and, doubtless, of full legal propriety; (2) the great mass of the agricultural population was not much affected racially by the proximity of Greeks, Macedonians, Jews, or Iranians. The peasants were practically serfs. Their social inferiority protected them against assimilation by citizens. On the other hand, they were, doubtless, much more deeply stirred by the European immigration than were the fellahs in Egypt; for the influx into their land was much more abundant and more spontaneous than was that into the valley of the Nile. Here, too, Hellenism had much more effective agents for its diffusion than it had there. For within the hundreds of city-states in Asia we must presume that intermarriage was permitted among all citizens, whether the elements which mingled with the Greeks were Phrygians, Lydians, Syrians, Jews, Babylonians, or Iranians. We must presume that at least the men knew in a fashion the Greek language. They certainly tended to take Greek names, and in documents of Delos dating from the second century B.C. we meet with natives of Bambyce--now a polis and renamed Hierapolis, or the Sacred City--who would be indistinguishable from native-born Greeks were it not for the Semitic names of their wives. Indeed, some of them may have been Greeks who had married Syrian women. The various circles of Europeans in Syria, and, though to a less degree, elsewhere in Asia, must have been surrounded at an early date by a penumbra of half-breeds, by means of which the sharp contrast of antagonistic civilizations was lessened. In these circumstances Greek ideas and customs became a ferment which stirred the peoples of Asia to the depths. The awakening of the Nearer East was in progress in the third century B.C., and had the Romans succumbed to Hannibal and the Greeks maintained their prestige unimpaired for a century or two longer, the whole course of history would have been changed.

The Greeks came to Asia "not to send peace but a sword." They came to fill the continent up with cantankerous little republics where formerly a dense multitude had lived in a state of political lethargy. And curiously enough those who directed the dismemberment of Asia into far more states than even mediæval Germany produced were the rulers who had the responsibility for the government of the whole region. How explain this anomaly?

The anomaly is more apparent than real. The ruler was not simply the great landed proprietor of the cities' neighborhood; he was the founder, or the descendant of the heroized founder, of most of them; he was the "benefactor" or the "preserver" of them all. As such he was deserving of their homage and entitled to their obedience. This they could proffer in an unobjectionable manner once Alexander had shown them the way. They had simply to make their proskynesis; to elect him to membership in their circle of deities, furnish him with a sacred precinct, temple, altar, image, procession, and contest, and designate a priest to attend to the sacrifices and other matters pertaining to his worship. This they did of their own volition during the reign of the founder of the dynasty. Apotheosis without territorial limitations Antiochus I demanded for Seleucus "after his departure from the life among men," and the second Antiochus demanded it for himself and his sister-wife during their lifetime as well as for their "departed" father; so that just as in Egypt and for the same reasons an imperial cult of the rulers dead and living was established throughout not only the satrapies and hyparchies but also the cities of the realm.

The city had, accordingly, a dual character: it was at once both in theory and fact a nation and a municipality. In the former capacity it could grant or withhold allegiance to the king; in the latter it had simply to obey. It had for example to pay tribute to him (phoros or syntaxis), which might be viewed as a rent for the land assigned to it, or as the price paid for military protection. It might have not simply a priest of the king and a priestess of the queen, but also a resident (epistates), who on occasion might also be phrurarch, or commandant, of the royal garrison when it had one. The double status of the city is further evidenced by the fact that its citizens were subject not only to the laws which they themselves passed but also to the mandates (prostagmata) which the king issued. In cases of conflict there could be no doubt which was superior. The king was in theory absolute as a god was absolute. He had, of course, citizenship in no state, but was simply basileus, or king. This title, attached to the name without an ethnicum, was the only one that the early Seleucids used; but the later members of the dynasty, beginning with Antiochus IV, added to it the title, such as Epiphanes, or God Manifest, by which their peculiar office as gods was indicated. Thereafter, on their coins and edicts the two titles appeared, and the monarchs were thereby classified in the two worlds to which they belonged--that of men and that of gods--as completely as were citizens when to their names were added the adjectival forms of their city's name. In either capacity they were superior to the cities. On the other hand, the Seleucid god-kings had to consider carefully the demands of their cities, since these, having the means to organize resistance, could easily revolt. When they did not get satisfaction they might choose some other god-king instead, as the cities in Parthia and Bactria actually did; or they might secure immunity from tribute, as did the cities in Asia Minor in the reign of Antiochus I. Room was, accordingly, left for a large measure of municipal liberty; and, in general, the activities of the citizens were numerous and important. They had to attend to the maintenance of order, the administration of justice, and the collection of taxes within their several territories. Hence the cities gave a stimulus to political interest and ambition such as Asia had never known before. They occupied, in fact, a place in the Seleucid empire quite as important as that of the municipalities in the early Roman empire, of which they were, indeed, the prototypes.

The Roman empire, however, had not yet come into existence. It was the Italian federation under Rome's leadership which defeated Hannibal and won the battles of Thermopylæ and Magnesia. When compared with this aggregate of incorporated and allied states, the Seleucid empire demonstrated fatal weaknesses. Rome had, perhaps, not many more citizens on her army list than there were males of military age in the franchised population of the Seleucid cities; and her public land, which, too, was her chief source of revenue, was far inferior in extent and yield to the royal domain of the Seleucids. Her advantages were twofold and their enumeration will help us to understand the disabilities under which the Asiatic monarchy labored. First, apart from the soldiers on Rome's army list there were few males of military age in Italy; in other words, there was no vast native population to hold in subjection. Second, Rome could mobilize her forces much more easily, quickly, and completely than could the Seleucids. The great distances, often of mountain and desert, which separated the cities of Asia from one another; the considerable trading, industrial, Asiatic, and otherwise unwarlike, element in the free population of the Hellenic and Hellenized cities; and the independence of the cities, particularly in the matter of giving or refusing military aid to their suzerain, had no parallel in Italy, where the territory was compact, the population mainly a warlike peasantry, and the cities all bound to provide troops at the call of Rome to the full extent of their power. Like the giant Antæus in his trial of strength with Heracles, Rome with every fall renewed her might from contact with her native soil. The Seleucids ruled over a cosmopolitan, denationalized world. They had no native soil on which to fall. It is of profound significance that there were and could be no fellow-citizens of Seleucus in all Asia. The loyalty of true men in his realm was due first of all to their cities, and it was only by the lapse of time that a secondary loyalty to the ruling dynasty ceased to imply treason to their native states. The cities stood always before the decision whether in any given case they had more to gain or to lose by abandoning the Seleucid and transferring their allegiance to his enemy or to some other king.

It was the tragedy of Antiochus IV that through an education in Italy he came to realize fully the political grounds for the military superiority of Rome, and that through a sentimental attachment for Athens and the art, letters, and philosophy for which Athens stood, he renewed his conviction as to the absolute superiority of Greek culture. He attempted to push more vigorously than ever the dynastic policy of Hellenization, by which alone a new nation could be bred in Asia, at a time when native hopes were revived; and he tried to draw the city-states of his realm into more complete dependence upon himself by the only means available to him--the right which he possessed as one of their gods to unhesitating obedience in all matters--at the very time when this policy came into collision with a religion to which deification of kings was an abomination. For in 200 B.C. Palestine had passed from the control of Egypt into the control of Antiochus the Great, whereupon his dynasty had to deal with the Jews. The trouble was, of course, that the Jews were monotheists. Many Jews in Jerusalem, as well as in the other cities of the realm, were not averse to Hellenism, and frequented the gymnasia, enrolled their sons in the ephebe corps, and gave them Greek names, but the devout shrank with horror from worshiping the emperor, and the peasants from everything foreign. Accordingly an open revolt occurred in Judæa, chiefly among the country people, when Antiochus IV chartered Jerusalem as a Hellenized city, substituted for the bizarre law of Moses an enlightened, up-to-date, Greek code, and set down his own image as the Olympian Zeus in the Holy of Holies.

This is the same Antiochus who twice led his victorious army to the walls of Alexandria, once to retreat after dictating terms to the Ptolemies, once to meet a Roman embassy headed by his old friend Gaius Popillius. Before answering the king's pleasant greeting, the Roman handed to him the message of his Senate and curtly bade him read it. He found it to be an order to evacuate Egypt immediately. On asking for time to consider the proposal, he got a further surprise; for, drawing a circle round the king in the sand with his cane, Popillius demanded an answer "Yes" or "No" before he stepped outside of it. A few months earlier, by crushing Perseus of Macedon on the battle-field of Pydna (168 B.C.), Rome had rid itself of its last serious rival. Since for Antiochus to resist meant now to stand alone against the master of the world, the only answer he could give was "Yes"; yet it meant the ruin of the Seleucid empire. Thereafter, there was but one free will in the vast territory of Africa, Asia, and Europe which lay between the Euphrates River and the Atlantic Ocean--the will of the government of Rome. Instruments to give it continuous effect in Italy that sagacious and persistent corporation, the Roman Senate, had made and used already; and in its march to universal empire it had broken and hurled to the ground the instruments of authority raised against it by its Greek adversaries. To pick them up, mend them, and improve them for further use was the imperial task of the immediate future.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Schürer, E. Geschichte des jüdischen Volks im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, I^3 (1901), II^4 (1907).

2. Bevan, E. The House of Seleucus (1902).

3. Niese, B. Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten. Especially Vol. III (1903).

4. Beloch, J. Griechische Geschichte, III (1904).

5. Rostowzew, M. Studien zur Geschichte des römischen Kolonates (1910), pp. 240 ff.

6. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen: D. Die makedonischen Königreiche (1910).

7. Bouché-Leclercq, A. Histoire des Séleucides (1913).

FOOTNOTES: