hour when the two houses must draw together against the foreigner; or it might be a notice to the world, when the reigning Antigonid king had only one legitimate son, that the kings who reigned in Antioch were the next heirs by blood.1

Of the internal administration of Seleucus Philopator we know only that the necessities of the time made its first object the replenishing of the empty treasuries. The war indemnity paid by annual instalments to Rome was a continuous drain. The country had now to pay the bill for the grandiose enterprises of Antiochus III, and it was squeezed at a time when it had not even the imaginative compensation of seeing its king in the lustre of military glory. For the first time the inhabitants of Syria saw the Seleucid King sitting, year in, year out, at home. Such a king was not worth paying for, and yet he made them pay more heavily than they had ever paid before. "And there shall rise up in his (Antiochus III's) place an exactor, who shall cause the royal dignity to pass away, and in a few days he shall be broken, but not in battle array or in war.2

The government appeared to be merely a vast machine for expressing money, and the working of it was in the hands of the chief minister Heliodorus the son of Aeschylus, a citizen of Antioch. An inscribed base declares that the statue once upon it was that of Heliodorus, put up in Delos by a mercantile association of Laodicea in gratitude for his benefits.3 This may show that the administration of Heliodorus was adroit in encouraging commerce; it may, of course, only mean that the merchants sought to win his favour by such honours. A Jewish work gives us a picture of him making a progress through the cities of Palestine, accompanied by his bodyguards (dopvpópot). His great position tempted Heliodorus to aspire still higher. He formed a conspiracy against the King, and in 176-175 Seleucus Philopator was suddenly murdered in the quiet of his kingdom.5 With Seleucus the quiet also came to an end.

1 Demetrius, the son of Seleucus, was born about 185, and at that time Demetrius, the legitimate son of Philip, was still alive.

2 Daniel 11, 20 ; cf. Σελεύκου . . . ἀπράκτως ἅμα καὶ ἀσθενῶς (βεβασιλευκότος), 3 Bull. corr. hell. i. (1877), p. 285.

App. Syr. 66.

4 2 Macc. 3.

CHAPTER XXIII

ANTIOCHUS IV AND THE CONQUEST OF EGYPT

It is probable that after assassinating Seleucus Philopator, Heliodorus proclaimed the infant son of Seleucus king. He intended, of course, to wield the whole royal power himself, and he would have lost more than he gained by assuming the diadem.1 The real heir was Demetrius, the elder son of Seleucus, now a boy of some nine years, growing up as a hostage in Rome. And there was yet another member of the royal house to be reckoned with.

Antiochus, the brother of Seleucus Philopator, was in Athens when the news of the coup d'état in Syria reached him. He had betaken himself thither on being set at liberty, and had not only become an Athenian citizen, but had even been elected to the chief magistracy (that of σTρATNYÒS ÈTì тà őπλα). Then whilst playing at being the successor of Pericles the prospect suddenly opened before him of being the successor of Seleucus Nicator. It was not from Syria only, but from Pergamos that the call came to him.

The situation created by the murder of Seleucus jumped well with the policy of Eumenes. The action of Seleucus

1 Of the proceedings of Heliodorus we have no direct information, but it is incredible that, had he assumed the diadem, he would have left the infant son of Seleucus alive. I should propose to see this infant son in the problematic child of the coins (Plate II. No. 5). His resemblance to Seleucus IV is striking. Mr. Macdonald prefers to regard the child of the coins as the eldest son of Antiochus III, but that Antiochus was already about ten when associated with his father, and the child of the coins looks younger.

2 There are Athenian coins for the year 175 with his name and the Seleucid elephant. See Reinach, Rev. d. Études Grecques, 1888, p. 163 f.

during the war with Pharnaces shows that the hopes of Eumenes to heal the quarrel with the Seleucid house had so far been vain. But the irreconcilable sovereign was now gone, and instantly Eumenes saw his chance of securing that the vacant throne should be held by a friend. He offered Antiochus the help of the Pergamene arms in seizing the inheritance.

Antiochus left Athens and crossed over to Asia Minor. He had probably at this moment no resources. But everything was provided. Eumenes and his brother Attalus escorted him with a Pergamene army along the eastern road to the frontier of the two realms. At their expense Antiochus was furnished with the externals of royalty. A solemn treaty of friendship between the Attalid and the new Seleucid king was made with sacrifice, and, surrounded by the troops of Eumenes, Antiochus descended upon Syria.1

The position of Antiochus in Syria does not seem to have been at first an easy one. We have no exact information as to the sort of opposition he met with, but we can see that not only would Heliodorus confront him, but that his manifest usurpation, while children of Seleucus lived, would set against him many loyal adherents of the Seleucid house. We also gather that in southern Syria there was a faction at work for the restoration of the province to Egypt. Antiochus seems to have proceeded with a mixture of calculated mildness and equally calculated bloodshed.2 "And there shall arise in his (Seleucus IV's) place a contemptible man, upon whom they have not conferred royal dignity, but he shall come in unawares, and shall seize the kingdom by guile. And forces shall be utterly overwhelmed before him. . . . He shall practise fraud, and shall rise and become strong with (but) few men. And by stealth he shall assail the mightiest men of (each) province, and he shall do what his fathers have not done, nor the fathers of his fathers. Spoil and plunder and riches shall he scatter among them, and against strongholds shall he devise his devices."

Whatever those manoeuvres were which we can no longer

1 App. Syr. 45; Michel, No. 550.

2 Jerome on Daniel 11, 21.

3 Daniel 11, 21 f. (my brother's translation, involving some correction of the

text).

trace, Antiochus succeeded in bringing all his brother's kingdom under his authority. The opposition melted away. Heliodorus is no more heard of. Apollonius, one of the persons of greatest influence with the late king, retired to Miletus.1 The Jew Hyrcanus, who had made himself a petty prince in the country east of Jordan, committed suicide.2 To get rid of the infant son of Seleucus, Antiochus resorted to the familiar device of employing an agent, whom he afterwards disowned. The child was assassinated at Antiochus' word by Andronicus; Antiochus then turned upon Andronicus and put him to death.3

The man who had set himself upon the Syrian throne had for his contemporaries, and has for us, the fascination of enigma. No other king of his house had been such as he. We must take into account, of course, that no other king had had the same sort of education. Instead of growing up in a palace among eunuchs and courtiers, he had grown up in Rome. There was already in Rome the beginning of that corruption which reached such fearful proportions later on, but the tradition of a purer time had not lost its power. Nowhere else was there found the same proud and ordered freedom, and the political morality of the Republic was still (in comparison with that of his native land) the admiration of the contemporary Greek. The young Macedonian prince was received on friendly terms by the youth of the Roman aristocracy, and became intimate with many of the men in whose hands the destiny of the world rested. The effect of such surroundings can be traced in the character of Antiochus IV. He had come into contact with a political system more vigorous and effective than that of Asiatic monarchy, and a new vigour and élan, as we say, marked his rule. He had consorted as an equal with equals, and his character acquired a republican bent, his manner scandalized the court by its unceremonious freedom, its undignified familiarity. He had, besides that, violently caught the fashionable Hellenism with 1 Polyb. xxxi. 21, 3. 2 Joseph. Arch. xii. § 236.

3 Diod. xxx. 7, 2; John of Damascus, frag. 58 (F.H.G. iv. p. 558). In 2 Macc. Antiochus is, of course, represented as putting Andronicus to death in punishment for the murder of Onias.

4 Liv. xlii. 6; Just. xxxiv. 3, 2.