The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s3.40

c10.s3.40

I must explain in passing what I mean by restoring Alexander’s empire. Antiochus III had meant to restore the empire of Seleucus I,⁵ but no more; he had neither attempted to make conquests in India nor to take possession of defeated Egypt, but he had risked and finally suffered war with Rome for the sake of a few cities in Thrace, because they had belonged to Seleucus. The crash at Magnesia had greatly curtailed his realm; and the position which faced Antiochus IV was that most of Asia Minor was lost, the once vassal state of Parthia had recovered her independence and had succeeded in reaching out to the Caspian Gates, if not to the Nesaean fields,⁶ and Demetrius of Bactria had annexed all the Seleucid provinces east of the Persian desert and like his father, cannot be said; for whatever his plan was, it was deranged by the regents in Egypt, Eulaeus and Lenaeus, who in the spring of 169 declared war upon him with the object not only of recovering Coele-Syria but of destroying himself.¹ Antiochus’ war with Egypt was a thing he could not avoid. He mastered Egypt in 169 and was crowned at Memphis; but circumstances compelled him to return in 168, and that summer Rome warned him off. Now, granted that he was forced to fight, it would have been a possible course to defeat Egypt, exact an indemnity, and leave it at that; he decided instead to incorporate Egypt in his empire, for that is what his actions meant, however that meaning might be disguised as a protectorate over Ptolemy Philometor. As I have said, I am not seeking to prove that Antiochus was a statesman, and this was not the act of a statesman; it was merely the kind of ‘forward’ policy, common enough, in which one thing is allowed to lead to another with insufficient consideration of the ultimate consequences. He knew that Rome could hardly stand aside, and he was determined to have no breach with Rome; why did he do it? One possibility is that he miscalculated the strength of Perseus and thought that the Macedonian king might hold Rome off till, in weariness, she might accept his protectorate over Egypt as an accomplished fact; another is that, in vulgar parlance, he was just ‘trying it on’ to see how far he could go. In either case, as soon as he heard of Perseus’ defeat at Pydna he must have known that Rome would act; it is possible that when on the ‘day of Eleusis’ Popillius Laenas handed him the Senate’s ultimatum ordering him to quit Egypt he was the one man there who was not astonished. But Popillius, a ‘new man’ anxious to prove himself, presented the ultimatum in a way which outraged every decency of international intercourse; and Antiochus, the king whom even a bitter enemy called ‘fiery, born of the lightning’,² at the head of a strong and victorious army, swallowed the insult, accepted the ultimatum, and went. That was not the act of a man hysterical or half insane; to overlook the insult so as not to risk his plans meant great self-control and long views. For of what he had meant to do he had lost nothing; he had acted foolishly in Egypt, and by his self-control on the ‘day of Eleusis’ he had put it right.