Between 200 and 168 BC, the Romans and Seleucids clash, Greek Bactria stretches down into India, and Latin becomes an official language
AT THE AGE OF FIFTY, Antiochus III was now in his thirty-second year of rule over the Seleucid empire. He had pushed the Seleucid border down through the old Egyptian holdings, and had forced both Parthia and Bactria to a peace, accomplishments that later earned him the title Antiochus the Great. Now he decided to embark on a new campaign: to go west and capture some more of Asia Minor, perhaps even crossing the Hellespont and taking Thrace as well.
He knew that if he didn’t make some move to the west, he was likely to find Romans breathing down his neck. Buoyed by their victory over the Carthaginians, Roman troops were now looking back to the east. The largest power left in the world was the Seleucid empire, and with Hannibal conquered, Antiochus III was Rome’s new enemy.
The king who was about to get pinched between these two powers was Philip V of Macedonia, who had managed to emerge from the First Macedonian War in pretty good shape. There were still Roman peacekeepers down in Greece, but Macedonia had increased its holdings in the Peace of Phoenice. And while the Romans were preoccupied with Carthage, Philip V had made a secret treaty with Antiochus III to divide up Egyptian territories which had once belonged to the Ptolemies.
The Romans were quite sure that Philip V was still planning to invade Greece, and they did not want the peninsula under the control of a pro-Seleucid king; Greece needed to remain a buffer between Rome and the power of Antiochus III. In 200, almost before peace with Carthage had been concluded, Roman troops marched on Philip V.
The Aetolian League once again jumped onto Rome’s side, as did Athens, and this Second Macedonian War was brought to a speedy close by 197. In the final battle, fought at Cynoscephalae, Philip’s soldiers were so thoroughly beaten that the king of Macedonia was afraid he might lose his throne itself.1 But the Romans, who did not want to spend the next decades fighting to hang on to the Greek cities, proposed a peace that would allow Philip V to stay in Macedonia. Philip was to give up all thought of conquering Greek cities, surrender all of his warships, pay a fine, and withdraw all of his soldiers from Greek territory. The Roman consul Flaminus, who was in charge of the Roman forces in Macedonia, was given permission to play the Merodach-baladan/Napoleon/Sargon II/Cyrus card: he announced that the Romans had now liberated the Greeks from Macedonian oppression. “All the rest of the Greeks both in Asia and in Europe are to be free and to enjoy their own laws,” the decree read.
Polybius notes that there were a few skeptical voices, at this; more than one Aetolian leader pointed out that “the Greeks were not being given their freedom, but merely a change of masters.”2 But the Romans insisted on their own disinterested benevolence (“It was a wholly admirable action…that the Roman people and their general should have made the choice to incur unlimited danger and expense to ensure the freedom of Greece,” Polybius gushes),3 and the cities of the Achaean League, which included Corinth, were pleased to sign a pro-Roman treaty, as long as it was also anti-Macedonian.
No sooner had the treaties all been signed than Antiochus III appeared in the north. By 196, he had blown through the disorganized resistance that met him in Asia, crossed over the Hellespont to claim Thrace, and was looking down on the new Roman allies. He was rather more inclined to start a war with Rome than not, partly because he now had a new military advisor: Hannibal, who had shown up at the Seleucid court after fleeing from Carthage. Hannibal had left his native city in bitterness and fury; his love for Carthage had faded, but his loathing for Rome remained. His arrival at the court of Antiochus III, the only power great enough to challenge the Romans, was a continuation of his lifelong obsession: “He impressed upon Antiochus,” Polybius tells us, “that so long as the king’s policy was hostile to Rome he could rely upon Hannibal implicitly and regard him as his most whole-hearted supporter…for there was nothing that lay in his power that he would not do to harm the Romans.”2104
Taking away Greece would undoubtedly harm the Romans. The Greek cities, caught between an old and frightening power to their northeast and a new and frightening power to their west, divided in their allegiances. The cities of the Aegean League kept their treaty with Rome, but the Aetolian League agreed to make an alliance with Antiochus III instead. More Roman troops arrived in the south of Greece while Antiochus’s Seleucid troops (accompanied by Macedonian allies and elephants) came down from the north.
The two armies met in 191 at the Pass of Thermopylae. The Roman legions were exhorted by their consul in terms that tended to confirm the worst suspicions of the Aetolian leaders: “You are fighting for the independence of Greece,” the consul bellowed, “to free now from the Aetolians and Antiochus a country which you earlier freed from Philip. And after that you will open up to Roman domination Asia, Syria, and all the wealthy kingdoms stretching as far as the rising sun. The entire human race will revere the Roman name only after the gods!”5 It was not a particularly convincing speech of liberation, but it did the trick. The Romans drove Antiochus’s army back, killing thousands, and he was forced to withdraw entirely from the peninsula.
The defeat was the beginning of the end for Antiochus the Great. As he backed up, he lost part of his Asia Minor conquests as well; the satrap of the Asia Minor province called Armenia, Artaxias I, set himself up as a king around 190. The Romans then carried the fight over into Seleucid land, under another member of the Scipio family. Antiochus gave Hannibal command of a naval force, and himself commanded a land defense, but both failed. Hannibal’s fleet surrendered off the south coast of Asia Minor; Antiochus’s army was defeated again, this time at Magnesia. Scipio earned himself the title Asiaticus for his victory, while Antiochus was forced to sign the Treaty of Apamea, which deprived him of most of his navy as well as his territory north of the Taurus Mountains.
Nor did Philip V escape. He was punished for his friendship with Antiochus by losing his navy, his border cities, and his son Demetrius, who was hauled off to Rome as a hostage for his father’s good behavior.
Antiochus’s defeat encouraged other satrapies to revolt. The following year, in 187, Antiochus the Great was killed in a minor battle against a rebellious satrap to the east. His son Seleucus IV inherited the Seleucid throne, but was forced, like Philip V, to send his oldest son and heir to Rome, also as a hostage.
Hannibal, deprived of his protector, fled. Plutarch says that he eventually settled in an obscure little town on the coast of the Black Sea, where he had seven underground tunnels dug from his house that emerged a “considerable distance” away in all directions, so that he could not be cornered by Roman hit men.
But in 182, at the age of sixty-five, he was recognized by a Roman senator who happened to be visiting the local king. The senator threatened the king with the wrath of Rome should Hannibal be allowed to escape. So with reluctance, the king sent out his own local guard to block the seven passages and kill the old general. Rather than allowing himself to be taken alive, Hannibal drank poison. His last words, according to Plutarch, were “Let us ease the Romans of their continual dread and care.”6
THE DIMINISHING THREAT of Seleucid invasion gave the Bactrians, to the east, a chance to expand their own territory. Their current king, a Greek Bactrian named Demetrius I, had his eye on the southeast: on India, which since the days of Alexander the Great had been a mirage of wealth, just waiting to be conquered.
There was no single strong king in India to resist invasion. After Asoka’s death, his sons—inheriting their father’s legacy of philosophical preoccupation—lost their grip on his land. In the fifty or so years between Asoka’s death in 240 and Demetrius I’s invasion, seven kings of Mauryan descent ruled over a diminishing territory.
The last of these Mauryan kings was Brhadratha, whose reputation as a devout Buddhist survives in sacred texts which describe his thousand-day penance in search of truth. During these thousand days, he is said to have left his oldest son in charge of the throne.7 This suggests a king with a loose hold on power; and in fact Brhadratha lost his kingdom, sometime around 185, to the commander of his army, who assassinated him. The commander, a devout Hindu named Pusyamitra Sunga, took control of what was left of the empire. His reputation too survives in Buddhist texts; he is said to have led a persecution against Buddhists in an attempt to reestablish Hindu orthodoxy. Since several stupas (Buddhist sacred monuments) have been dated to his reign, this may not be entirely true. All we can say for sure is that Pusyamitra founded a dynasty, and began to expand the old kingdom of the Magadha. Unlike his predecessors, he was willing to fight for his power.
Right about this time, Demetrius I came down through the Khyber Pass, towards the Punjab. There is no written account of his invasion that followed; to reconstruct the conquests of the Greek Bactrian kings, we have to follow the trail of coins they left behind them (each king struck his own coins with his own portrait, with the result that although we know practically nothing about these kings, we have some idea of what they looked like). As far as we can guess, the first cities Demetrius I encountered were Purushapura and Taxila, which had been independent from the Mauryans for some time and had not yet been reconquered by Pusyamitra. He took both, and by 175 seems to have fought through the Punjab.
74.1 Bactria and India
Meanwhile the Sunga king Pusyamitra spread his own grasp along the east and southwest. The two Indian kingdoms bordered each other, Greek and native side by side.
BACK IN MACEDONIA, Philip V’s hostage son (also called Demetrius) had been returned from Rome, and had been welcomed by the Macedonians with enough joy to put his younger brother’s nose out of joint. This young man, Perseus, had been heir apparent as long as Demetrius was a prisoner; now his chance of a throne was threatened.8 He began to drop hints to Philip V that the newly freed Demetrius had been brainwashed by the Romans, who intended to put him on the throne of Macedonia as a Roman puppet. “We have in our bosom,” he remarked, with apparent reluctance, “I don’t want to say a traitor, but at least a spy. The Romans gave his body back to us, but they have retained his heart.”9 In 181, Philip gave in to his suspicions. Livy says that he ordered poison put into Demetrius’s cup; the young man, feeling the first pains, realized what had happened and died screaming out against his father’s cruelty.
Philip himself died two years later, and Perseus became king of Macedonia. He sent messages of friendship to Rome, but they were deceptive; he was gathering Macedonia to invade Greece once more.
His intentions were made clearer when he married one of the daughters of Seleucus IV. But he couldn’t count on Seleucid help against Rome; Seleucus IV was murdered by his prime minister right after the wedding, and a big Persian succession-fight broke out. Seleucus IV’s younger brother, Antiochus IV (later known as Antiochus Epiphanes), won the right to act as regent for Seleucus’s baby son, whom he then murdered.
Perseus, meanwhile, set out to conquer Greece without raising Roman suspicions. Polybius says that he marched through central and northern Greece and called on various cities to “gain their confidence” while being very careful not to “inflict any damage” on the territory through which he passed.10 This went on for three years or so before one of the Greek kings—Eumenes, ruler of the city of Pergamum, in Asia Minor—went to Rome in person to complain about Perseus’s behavior. Perseus sent an assassin after Eumenes to silence him; this was a mistake, as the assassination failed and made the accusations that much more believable.
In 171, seventeen thousand Roman soldiers headed for Macedonia, inaugurating the Third Macedonian War. Perseus sent ambassadors to Rome to ask, in injured tones, why the Romans were harassing him. “Go back and tell your king that, if he really wants an answer, he should talk to the consul who will soon be in Macedonia with his army,” the ambassadors were told.11
The Third Macedonian War lasted about three years, like the Second; as in the Second, the Romans finally crushed the Macedonians in one big disastrous battle, this one at Pydna. Unlike the Second Macedonian War, the Third brought an end to Macedonia. The Romans were fed up with fighting unpleasant little wars in the north of Greece. In 168, Perseus was hauled back to Rome as a captive, and the Roman consul oversaw the division of Macedonia into four separate subject countries. The Macedonian monarchy which had produced Alexander had ended.
ROMAN ENVOYS had come to the court of Antiochus Epiphanes to ask him whether he intended to support Perseus’s war with Rome; Antiochus Epiphanes was able to assure them, with perfect truth, that he had no intention of joining with Perseus against Rome.12
He was planning on invading Egypt instead. The young Egyptian king Ptolemy VI, under the direction of his regents, had demanded that the Seleucid empire return its Western Semitic lands: the old kingdoms of Israel, Judah, Syria, and some of the surrounding land, which Antiochus the Great had taken away from the Ptolemaic dynasty. They had all been folded into a satrapy known as “Coele Syria,” and Egypt wanted it back.
Instead, Antiochus Epiphanes marched his army down and laid siege to Alexandria while Rome was busy fighting in Macedonia. But he had overestimated the Roman preoccupation with Perseus. The Senate was not blind to this blatant bid for more territory; a Roman ambassador showed up at Antiochus’s camp with a letter demanding that Antiochus retreat and leave Egypt to the Ptolemys. Antiochus offered to talk the matter over with his advisors, but the ambassador (according to Livy) “drew a circle round the king with the stick he was carrying and said, ‘Before you step out of that circle, give me a reply to lay before the Senate.’ For a few minutes he hesitated, astounded at such a peremptory order, and at last replied, ‘I will do what the Senate thinks right.’”13 He was not prepared to take on the entire weight of Rome’s anger.
74.2 Contested Satrapies
Instead, he marched back up the coast and took his frustrations out on the satrapy of Coele Syria, beginning a purge among anyone who had shown sympathy for the Egyptians’ request. This included a good many residents of Jerusalem: “At the same time that Antiochus, who was called Epiphanes, had a quarrel with the sixth Ptolemy about his right to the whole country of Syria,” Josephus says, in his Wars of the Jews, “…[he] came upon the Jews with a great army, and took their city by force, and slew a great multitude of those that favored Ptolemy, and…spoiled the temple.”14
The spoiling of the temple was pure opportunism; Antiochus was broke and needed the sacred treasures. On his pass through Judea, he not only plundered the temple treasury and butchered a great many citizens of Jerusalem, but also installed a garrison in Jerusalem to keep the Jews loyal.15
The garrison was standard procedure for a conqueror, but Antiochus Epiphanes’s plan for keeping the Jews loyal was horrifically misguided. He knew nothing about the Jewish religion; his plan for folding the Jews more tightly into the Seleucid fold (and keeping them out of the Ptolemaic fence) was to change the temple cult so that their Yahweh became identified with Zeus. This chief god would then be worshipped as manifest in his own person: Antiochus Epiphanes, the “epiphany” or revelation of Zeus-Yahweh on earth.16
This was a fairly standard mixture of the Greek pantheon with Persian ideas about the king’s divinity, as might be expected from a Greek ruler of the old Persian realm. For the Jews, who (unlike most ancient people) believed not only in a single God, but in that God’s essential difference from man, it was hideous blasphemy. Antiochus wanted them to sacrifice to Zeus in the temple, and to celebrate his own birthday as a religious festival.
The Jews of Jerusalem went into hiding at this, or had to be flogged into obedience. Antiochus, infuriated by their stubbornness, declared Judaism an illegal religion. Anyone who refused to eat pork when required (this was against the Jewish regulations) or was found with a copy of the Jewish scriptures was put to death. “Two women were brought in for having circumcised their children,” the book of 2 Maccabees records. “These women they publicly paraded about the city, with their babies hung at their breasts, then hurled them down headlong from the wall.”21117
This level of savagery lasted for less than a year before revolt rose up among the Jews. It was led by a family of five brothers who were descended from the old tribe of priests. The oldest brother Judas was the general of the resistance; he went through the countryside, enlisting indignant Jews, until he had six thousand men who joined him in an ongoing guerilla war against the Seleucid occupiers. “Coming without warning,” 2 Maccabees says, “he would set fire to towns and villages. He captured strategic positions and put to flight not a few of the enemy. He found the nights most advantageous for such attacks, and talk of his valor spread everywhere.”18 He earned himself a freedom-fighter’s nickname, “Judas Maccabeus,” or “Judas the Hammer,” and the rebellion became known as the Maccabean War.
The fury of the Jews and Antiochus’s own difficulties elsewhere (he had to send troops up north to fend off invading Parthians) prolonged the rebellion. So did another factor: Judas made “a league of friendship with the Romans,” as Josephus puts it; Rome was anxious to go on checking Seleucid power.19 The Jewish-Roman alliance did not last long, but it helped keep Jerusalem out of the hands of Antiochus for a full four years.212
At the end of that time, Antiochus Epiphanes died, and the usual internal fight over the succession commenced. No one had energy to send more soldiers down to Jerusalem, and Judas declared himself king of the city: the first king of the Hasmonean Dynasty of Jerusalem. Eventually Antiochus’s nephew, Demetrius I (not to be confused with the Greek Bactrian Demetrius or the Macedonian Demetrius), managed to declare himself king of the Seleucid empire. When his crown was firmly on his head, he sent an army down to reconquer Jerusalem. Judas was killed in the fighting, and Jerusalem became once again part of Coele Syria under the Seleucid crown. But Demetrius I, taking his lesson from his dead uncle’s catastrophic decisions, granted Judas’s brother Jonathan a fair amount of freedom to govern the Jews as he saw fit, as long as he remained a faithful subject governor of the empire. Jonathan, Josephus says, “behaved himself with great circumspection,” meaning that he was not a freedom-fighting hothead like his older brother.20 He paid polite deference to the Seleucid authorities, and managed to stay in power in Jerusalem for almost twenty years.
MEANWHILE, Rome was doing splendidly.
Something extraordinary had happened a few years before. In 180, the city of Cumae, in Campania, had asked for permission to change its official language from its old dialect of Oscan to Latin.
The people of Cumae already had the privilege of civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote; the civitas sine suffragio was more like an alliance than anything else, a right which did nothing to destroy the original identity of the cities which held it.21 Now the people of Cumae were asking for a new level of identification with Rome. They did not become full Romans; nor did they entirely give up speaking Oscan. Without abandoning their identity as Cumaeans, they were making a willing identification not just with Roman politics, but with Roman culture.
The Greeks had never had to make such a formal outwards pledge of unity, as they all spoke Greek already. Perhaps their very shared language kept them from ever allowing that pan-Hellenic identity to trump their identity as Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians, Thebans. But the official status of Latin allowed Cumae to remain Cumaean. Latin would not be their only language, but it would be used for commerce and administration, binding Cumae together with other cities and peoples who retained their own identities, but glossed another above it.
Rome granted the request. Cumae could use Latin as its official language and be, in that sense, Roman. The Romans did not yet feel any need to further erase the old identities of their subject cities, to replace old customs with Roman customs, old allegiances with Roman allegiances, old gods with Roman gods.
But this bestowal of Roman identity only went so far. Conquests were flooding into Rome, with the result that free foreigners were in danger of outnumbering free men of Roman birth. In 168, the censor Sempronius Gracchus began to register all foreign-born free men as a single tribe. They could become Roman, like the Cumaeans. They could even have the vote. But no matter how many came to Rome, they would never be able to outvote the native Romans.
