The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.3

c10.s3.3

Antiochus IV has often had hard measure from his historians. Some have repeated the Hellenistic gossip which made of him half a fool—vain, silly, theatrical; it is worth precisely what any Hellenistic gossip is worth, and the less that serious history has to do with it the better. To others, he is little but the king who persecuted the Jews; that story can be read in many books, and I need only say here that, whatever he did to the Jews, they have had an ample revenge. The latest and ablest account of him,¹ while recognising his ability, has drawn a brilliant picture of his later life as that of a man broken by the ‘day of Eleusis’ when Rome ordered him out of Egypt, half hysterical and perhaps verging on madness, the result of whose career was to end the days of his empire as an international force. But one feature is common to every account: certain well-attested details of his reign are either omitted altogether or, if noticed, are explained away somehow—anyhow—because they will not fit the writer’s picture, whatever it may be. Why, in the spring of 166, did he hold that great review of his army at Daphne, the Hellenistic equivalent of the Roman triumph, two years after a Roman envoy with a walking-stick had turned him out of Egypt? Why, three months later, did he celebrate a Festival of Deliverance at Babylon, and why was he hailed Saviour of Asia? Why did Diodorus (reproducing Polybius) say that in 165 he was stronger than any other king? Why did Jason of Cyrene, who loathed his memory, say that his power seemed irresistible? And why, above all, did Mithridates I of Parthia, the able and ambitious monarch who created the Parthian empire, make no move till the broken nervy Seleucid was safely dead? One could easily add to the list; and it has to be considered whether we may not here possess the débris of a lost chapter in the life of this king which has never been written. We shall, I hope, find reason to believe that this is true.