The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.123

c10.s3.123

Antiochus celebrated the recovery of his eastern provinces by the review of his army at Daphne, his Charisteria at Babylon, the title ‘Saviour of Asia’ (whether he assumed it or merely permitted others to give it him), and a new series of coins, on which Zeus sometimes has his own features and the word νικηφόρου appears in the legend, making his full title ‘King Antiochus the god manifest, the Victorious’.³ If he be really the king of the seal from Babylonia (p. 189), his adoption of the elephant-scalp of Alexander may belong to this period; certainly he put on the coins he issued at Tripolis in 166–5 the Saviour gods, the Dioscuri,⁴ but as he could not very well adopt the type of his sub-king he adopted that of the Roman denarius: his Dioscuri are not merely galloping, like those of Eucratides, but charging with couched spears. Doubtless the adoption of the Roman type and of the elephant-scalp were intimations that Alexander’s empire was reviving and that there might be a second Great Power in the world as a counterpoise to Rome. But such intimations were merely of local importance; if he desired the world to take notice he must do something to capture its imagination; that was why his show at Daphne was deliberately meant to outrival that of Aemilius Paullus in its magnificence.¹ He did strike the world’s imagination; Polybius said that he was stronger than any other king,² and Jason of Cyrene wrote that his power seemed irresistible.³ Even Rome began to regret that she had never enforced the disarmament clauses of the treaty of Apamea (188 B.C.). She could easily have done so at any time down to 175, and as she did not it must be supposed that she then thought it did not matter; now she wished and could not do it without a serious war; that she wished to and feared to is conclusively shown by the fact that she enforced these clauses the moment Antiochus was dead. He was stronger than Antiochus III; and after all there were men at Rome who knew very well, though they did not blazon it abroad, that had there been a competent general on the other side Magnesia would no more have been a Roman victory than was Heraclea or Asculum. We seem to have travelled some distance from the king with disordered nerves who was broken by the ‘day of Eleusis’. It is one of the ironies of history that, though there was to be a counterpoise to Rome, it was not after all to be provided by the empire of Antiochus but by the little state whose destruction was to be the final item in his programme.