fought where the fight was hottest. Presently the barbarians gave back into the hills. Antiochus and the Syrians imprudently followed. They found themselves caught in a narrow gully. Athenaeus, the general who had vexed the Greek cities, was the first to flee, and the panic was infectious. Antiochus was left almost alone, and he saw that the end of all his ambitions was come. But it was only the dead body of the Great King of which the Arsacid was allowed to become master.1

The great army which Antiochus had brought to the East was made captive. How much of it survived to become the slaves of the Parthian we do not know. We are only told of the fate of the traitor Athenaeus. He came as a starving fugitive to those villages which he had afflicted in the day of his authority. No one would now receive him or give him a morsel to eat, and he died outcast by the wayside.2 Phraates also got possession of those members of the royal house who had come in Antiochus' company. But to offer indignity to the imperial house of the East would not have been according to the Parthian king's view of what was fitting. The body of Antiochus he had treated with all possible honour. The son of Antiochus, the boy Seleucus, was brought up at the Parthian court as a son of kings.3 The daughter of Demetrius was taken into the royal harem.*

But the generosity of Phraates, shown as that of a king to kings, did not extend to those whom he held rebellious subjects. He remembered against the city of Seleucia what it had done to his officer. When it sent envoys to implore forgiveness, they were taken to a place where an eyeless man was sitting upon the ground. He was a Greek, perhaps a Seleucian, on whom the Parthian government had set the mark of its displeasure. The envoys were ordered to go and tell the Seleucians what happened to rebels. We hear of the city soon after suffering days of horror under the rod of Himeros or Euemerus, a vile favourite of Phraates, to whom

1 Diod. xxxiv. 15 f.; Just. xxxviii. 10, 9 f.; Eus. i. 255; Joseph. Arch. xiii. § 253; App. Syr. 68. 2 Diod. xxxiv. 17, 2.

3 Eus. i. p. 257. This young Seleucus is generally thought to be intended in Posidonius, frag. 19, F.H.G. iii. p. 258.

4 Just. xxxviii. 10, 10.

5 Diod. xxxiv. 19.

he delivered the kingdom during his expedition against the Scythians. The Greek cities had cause to regret their desertion of Antiochus.1

"2

In Antiochus Sidetes it was not only an individual who perished. It was the death-blow of the Seleucid dynasty. The last great king of that house was gone; for the last time it had stood before the world as the imperial house of the East. It had no more revivals. And the last real king whom it produced embodied in a striking way the typical qualities of his race-impulsive energy, a high and generous courage, the old Macedonian delight in wassailing and war. Like his predecessors, Antiochus VII drank freely in his convivial hours. Boldness and wine," Phraates is recorded to have said, "these, Antiochus, were thy destruction ! Thou didst think to drink up the kingdom of Arsaces in thy large cups." But his success in dealing with the Jews-the only case where we can observe his political action—seems to argue a degree of adroit statesmanship more than belonged to the majority, if to any, of his predecessors. On the other hand, it is perhaps characteristic of the history of his house that its ultimate fall was due to neglect of the dull work of organizing the winter quarters and commissariat of troops which on the field of battle the king would lead with such splendid élan. Here we perhaps touch the weakness which rendered so much of the brilliant ability of Antiochus VII, so much of the shining qualities of the Seleucid dynasty as a whole, ultimately frustrate.

1 Just. xlii. 1, 3; Diod. xxxiv. 21; Posidonius, frag. 21 (F.H.G. iii. p. 259); Trog. Prol. xlii.

2 Athen. x. 439 e.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE LAST CONVULSIONS

His victory made the Parthian king sorry that he had let Demetrius go, and horsemen were sent in desperate pursuit to overtake him, but Demetrius was already beyond the reach of his arm.1 Phraates meditated an instant move upon Syria itself before the new government was established. Had he carried it out, the Parthian dominion might have touched the Mediterranean within the next year. But a mutiny of his Scythian mercenaries-hordes from the steppes of Central Asia -made him instead march east. What remained of the army of Antiochus was compelled to go along with him, but they only waited for the battle with the Scythians to turn their swords against the Parthian, and by the irony of fate the army which Antiochus had led against Phraates did thus in the end destroy him.2

To the Syrian cities the disaster in the East came as an appalling calamity. It was not only to the Greco-Macedonian population a national humiliation. There was hardly a house without its private bereavement, for nearly 300,000 men were taken away at a blow. Antioch was filled with the noise of women's lamentation. For days it was given up to mourning.

3

Nor was there anything about Demetrius to console the people of Syria for the loss of the well-beloved Antiochusthis foreign figure with the long beard and the manners of a Parthian. With how much affection Cleopatra returned to her former husband the event shows. The second surviving son of 2 Just. xlii. 1; Diod. xxxiv. 18. 3 Ibid. xxxix. 1, 1; Diod. xxxiv. 17.

1 Just. xxxviii. 10, 11.

Antiochus VII,' called also Antiochus, she sent hurriedly out of the country under the charge of the eunuch Craterus to be reared in Cyzicus, at the other end of Asia Minor.2

men.

Demetrius in his former reign had been in leading-strings. He had now an opportunity of showing his true quality. The thing most needful for Syria was a period of absolute rest, a time for recuperation, for filling the empty places of 300,000 No sooner, however, was Demetrius in the seat than he was elaborating plans for the conquest of Egypt! His motherin-law, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, had come to Syria, driven out of Egypt by her brother, Ptolemy Euergetes. She now urged Demetrius to restore her, and promised him that, if he did so, he would certainly add Egypt to his dominions.* Demetrius actually marched out to do so, but he got no farther than Pelusium, for there his way was barred by the forces of Euergetes, and Syria, the moment his back was turned, sprang into insurrection behind him. Antioch and Apamea had already renounced Demetrius-the same regions which had before broken away under Tryphon." The disaffection was found to extend to the army which Demetrius had with him." He was obliged to turn back to restore order in his own kingdom.

Nothing save the rival claimant was wanting to complete the situation; but negotiations on this subject had already passed between Antioch and the king of Egypt. Euergetes

1 He had five children by Cleopatra; two daughters, both called Laodice, and an elder Antiochus died young; two sons survived, Seleucus, whom Phraates had captured, and this Antiochus, Eus. i. p. 257.

2 Eus. i. p. 257; App. Syr. 68; Joseph. Arch. xiii. § 271. At Delos the base of a statue of this Craterus has been found ; he is described as τροφεὺς ̓Αντιόχου Φιλοπάτορος, τῶν πρώτων φίλων βασιλέως Αντιόχου καὶ ἀρχίατρος καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ κοιτῶνος τῆς βασιλίσσης, Michel, No. 1158.

3 It is difficult to know how to express the horrible tangle of Ptolemaïc relations in the ordinary terms of affinity. This was Cleopatra II, the daughter of Ptolemy Epiphanes and the Seleucid Cleopatra (I). By her elder brother, Ptolemy Philometor, she was the mother of Queen Cleopatra of Syria and of Cleopatra III. She was now officially the wife of her second brother, Ptolemy Euergetes; but Euergetes had also married her daughter, Cleopatra III. 4 Just. xxxix. 1, 2.

The phraseology of Justin xxxix. 1, 3, can only mean that on this occasion, too, the leader of the rebellion was called Tryphon, but one suspects a confusion with the former rebellion. Eus. i. p. 257.

1

was only too willing to put in a creature of his own, to counteract the machinations of his sister in Syria. He chose a youth who was given out to be of the Seleucid stock and the adopted son of the beloved Antiochus: he was really, according to the hostile account, the son of Protarchus, some Egyptian Greek of the commercial class.2 He was accepted by Antioch, and installed with the support of an Egyptian force as King Alexander. The people added the nickname, derived from the native Aramaïc, of Zabinas, the "Bought-one." The situation was once more very much what it had been before the captivity of Demetrius, the legitimate king holding the coast, with his base at Seleucia, and the usurper holding Antioch and the middle Orontes. But although the Jews were adherents of Alexander, he was not so strong in ColeSyria as Tryphon had been. Ptolemaïs, for instance, Demetrius retained.

In Judaea, of course, the work of Antiochus VII was immediately undone by his death. Hyrcanus had returned to Jerusalem before the fatal spring of 129. When the news of the catastrophe came he once more felt himself an independent prince, and resumed the schemes of aggrandizement which the Hasmonaeans, their independence once secured, had come to form. He pushed out the frontiers of the Jewish state in all directions, across Jordan by conquering from the Nabataeans the plateau north of the Arnon dominated by Medeba, in central Palestine at the expense of Samaria, taking even the rival sanctuary on Mount Gerizim, whilst in Idumaea he not only seized fresh territory, but compelled the conquered to embrace Judaism or go. It was the beginning of that expansion of Israel over Palestine by forcible proselytism which was one of the great works of the Hasmonaean princes.

The decisive battle between Demetrius II and Alexander

1 Joseph. Arch. xiii. § 267.

2 The statement of Eus. i. p. 257, that he was represented as the son of Alexander Balas, is probably a confusion.

3 In Aramaïca, Z'bînâ. The Greek form, Zăbinas (Diod., Eus.), is attested by an inscription. Letronne, Recueil des Inscriptions grecques de l'Egypte, ii. p. 61. In Josephus it is Zebinas. The form given by Trogus, Zabbinaeus, seems a corruption. See Appendix Z.