CHAPTER XIX

THE ADVANCE IN THE WEST

IN the spring of 197 Antiochus launched his forces upon Asia Minor. The land forces were sent by the direct road over the Taurus under the command of the King's sons, Ardys and Mithridates,1 to Sardis, where they had orders to await his arrival. Antiochus himself went with the fleet along the coast. The immediate object indeed of the expedition was to seize the possessions of the house of Ptolemy, and these were all on the coast. Was there an ulterior design? Had Antiochus at last made up his mind to intervene openly in the struggle going on in Greece? On the rumour of his advance this was believed-with what ground can never be known. As he passed along the coast of Rugged Cilicia he summoned all the towns and fortresses subject either to local dynasts or to Ptolemy to surrender. And one after another -Soli, Corycus, Zephyrium, Aphrodisias, Anemurium, Selinus -they obeyed the summons without resistance.3 Antiochus met with no check till he reached Coracesium, the strongest place along that rugged coast. The steep isolated hill of Alaya, which reminds modern travellers of the Rock of Gibraltar, still shows the masonry, of every date, by which the

1 I have suggested on p. 16 that this is an adoptive son of Antiochus, the son karà púσw of his sister mentioned by Polybius.

2 Liv. xxxiii. 19, 9 f.

3 Jerome (on Daniel 11) includes Mallus among the towns taken by Antiochus on this expedition. The fact that no mention is made of this by Livy, who had Polybius before him, as well as the nearness of Mallus to Syria, seem to me to make it probable that Mallus had been recovered by Antiochus at an earlier date.

successive masters of the place, down to the Middle Ages, have laboured to make it impregnable. The determination to reduce it brought the King to a halt, and he was still lying before it when the situation was modified in a disagreeable way.

First an embassy from the Rhodian Republic presented itself. It brought him the astonishing declaration that should he attempt to pass the Chelidonian promontory—the point assigned in the old days of Athenian supremacy as the bound for the Great King's ships-the Rhodians would oppose his advance with an armed squadron. They justified this action by accusing Antiochus of a design to join Philip. Antiochus had the self-command to return a polite answer; he assured them that their imputation was quite groundless, and promised an embassy which should dissipate the suspicions entertained of him in Rhodes. The embassy went, and by a strange chance, at the very moment when its spokesman was addressing the Rhodian Assembly, a post arrived with the disconcerting intelligence that the war was over. Philip had met with a final defeat at Cynos-cephalae in the Thessalian plains.1

The hesitating policy of Antiochus had thus let the opportunity of joining his forces with the Macedonian power, before it was crushed, go by, whilst it had at the same time awaked the suspicions of Rome. But the overthrow of Philip was not altogether unwelcome to Antiochus. All the time that Philip had been an ally, his other character, the rival, had peered through. It was plain that the king of Macedonia would now have to relinquish that share in the spoils of Ptolemy made over to him by the late compact, and Antiochus would stretch his hand over the whole.

But the imaginations kindled in the Seleucid court by the humiliation of the Antigonid reached farther than Asia Minor and Thrace. Those unfortunate memories of the first Seleucus could never be charmed to sleep; his successors had acquiesced perforce in seeing the European part of Alexander's heritage occupied by the houses of Ptolemy and Antigonus, but now a moment was come when the house of Ptolemy had sunk into the extreme of impotence and the house of Antigonus

1 Polyb. xviii. 41a; Liv. xxxiii. 20.

had been bruised in the conflict with a remote power.

Alone

Wild

of the three, the house of Seleucus seemed to have renewed its youth and still to possess the secret of conquest. hopes and heated language grew rife in the congenial atmosphere of a court; it was soon no secret that Antiochus meditated appearing in Greece as the heir of Alexander and Seleucus Nicator.1

It was natural under these circumstances that Philip should not on his part feel any good-will towards his late ally, who had not only left him to go down unaided, but who was preparing to seize the prizes in Asia Minor and Thrace which he himself was compelled to drop, and even dreamed of supplanting him in the domain where the house of Antigonus had been predominant for four generations. From the time of Philip's defeat the alliance between the two kings was replaced by complete estrangement.

In break

The Rhodians, after the news of Philip's defeat reached them, had no further ground for opposing the advance of Antiochus. But they did their best to prevent his obtaining possession of the cities of Caria and the neighbouring islands. After more than a century of Macedonian domination, during which the Greek ideal of separate independence for every Greek state, whether city or league, had suffered violence, it seemed as if that ideal were now at last to be realized. The great Italian republic had stood forward as its champion. ing the Macedonian power Rome had inscribed the liberty of Greece upon its banners. The victor of Cynos-cephalae, Titus Quinctius Flamininus, was a phil-Hellene of the most enthusiastic type, and the circle of choice spirits among the Roman aristocracy whom he represented were as genuinely eager to create a free Greece as the phil-Hellenes at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was not the duplicity of Roman statescraft but the hard facts of the world which made these visions futile. After Cynos-cephalae, however, liberty was in the air. Rhodes had borne a part in the struggle and was in a high degree animated by the ideal. But from the practical point of view Rhodes was more nearly concerned in the cessation of Macedonian rule over the cities of the neighbouring 1 Polyb. xviii. 45, 10 f.; Dio Cass. frag. 60.

coast and islands than in the emancipation of Greece itself. The Ptolemaic rule here was ready to vanish away; Rhodes was anxious that the Seleucid should not take its place.

Antiochus addressed himself to the conquest of the coast of Asia Minor from Cilicia to the Troad. Of his operations we know very little. We are not told whether he ended by reducing Coracesium or what were the remaining events of that year. Some of the states succeeded, with the help of Rhodes, in throwing off their present yoke and defying the efforts of Antiochus to impose another. Caunus, Halicarnassus, Myndus and Samos are mentioned as recovering their liberty at this moment.1 In the case of Caunus the Rhodians seem to have understood "liberty" in the sense most congenial to their own ambitions; the transaction consisted apparently in their paying down a sum of 200 talents to the Ptolemaïc commanders as the price of their withdrawal and then annexing the city to their own dominions. In the Cyclades also a Rhodian supremacy seems to have now superseded the Ptolemaïc or Antigonid.3

Beyond Coracesium westwards Antiochus would come to the coast of Pamphylia. The interior had mostly been conquered by Achaeus, and perhaps the coast as well. If so it would have already passed in 216 under the sway of Antiochus. It is at any rate occupied by his forces seven years later, when we find him maintaining a garrison in Perga.5

Lycia, the next country along the Asiatic coast, yielded at once to the summons of Antiochus. Jerome speaks of the capture of Andriace (the harbour of Myra), Limyra, Patara and Xanthus. Antiochus certainly had a garrison in Patara in 190. The Seleucid cause, in fact, seems to have been popular with the Lycians, probably because it was antagonistic to Rhodes.7

In Caria Antiochus already touched the sphere which had been by the compact assigned to Philip. The political situation which Philip left there on his retirement in 201 had been a 1 Liv. xxxiii. 20, 12. Jerome makes Antiochus conquer Rhodes (!) and 2 Polyb. xxxi. 7, 6.

Samos.

3 Bull. corr. hell. x. (1886), pp. 111 f.; Delamarre, Revue de Philol. xxvi. (1902), p. 324. + Polyb. v. 72. 5 Ibid. xxi. 44. 7 See Appendix B.

6 Liv. xxxvii. 16, 7.

confused one. Some of the cities still obeyed Ptolemy; in Caunus at any rate we saw that there remained a Ptolemaïc garrison. Other cities had been annexed by Philip; the headquarters of his army of occupation were at Stratonicea, and he had garrisons in Pedasa, Euromus, Bargylia and Iasus.1 A third category is made by cities like Alabanda and Mylasa, which maintained their independence alike of Macedonia, Egypt and Rhodes. Shortly before Cynos-cephalae the Rhodians had struck to recover their Peraea from Philip's forces, and Alabanda seems to have made common cause with them. A battle had taken place near Alabanda between the Macedonian troops under Dinocrates and the Rhodians. The result was a complete victory for Rhodes, which was followed up by their recovery of a number of small townships and fortresses, but the larger towns occupied by Philip they were unable to reduce. Dinocrates, who had in the first instance fled to Bargylia, succeeded in entering Stratonicea, and the city defied all the efforts of the Rhodians to capture it.2

Except, however, for the cities who asserted their freedom or were annexed by Rhodes, Antiochus appears to have brought Caria under his dominion without difficulty. From Ptolemy, even if his garrisons had not already all disappeared before the invasion of Philip and the active diplomacy of Rhodes, no opposition was possible. Philip was certain to be compelled, when Rome dictated the definite terms of peace, to evacuate everything he had occupied in Asia. The field was left empty for Antiochus. Only for a time in Bargylia, and perhaps in some other places, Philip's garrison was left in possession.3 At Iasus the garrison of Philip was soon replaced by that of Antiochus, and the anti-Seleucid party driven into exile.* Towards Rhodes the King adopted a most conciliatory attitude. He acquiesced apparently in the occupation of the mainland, and not only so, but after taking over Stratonicea, either by the expulsion of Philip's garrison or its withdrawal, he placed the city at the disposal of Rhodes."

1 Liv. xxxiii. 30, 3; Polyb. xviii. 44, 4.

3 Polyb. xviii. 48, 2; 50, 1; Liv. xxxiii. 35, 2; 39, 2.

4 Liv. xxxvii. 17, 5.

2 Liv. xxxiii. 18.

5 Liv. xxxiii. 18, 22; cf. Polyb. xxxi. 7, 6: Eтpaтovíkeιav éláßoμev év μεγάλῃ χάριτι παρ' ̓Αντιόχου καὶ Σελεύκου. The view of Beloch (Histor. Zeitschr.