The Greeks in Bactria and India c19: Appendix 7. Antiochus IV and the Temple of Nanaia

The Greeks in Bactria and India c19

Language: English

Appendix 7. Antiochus IV and the Temple of Nanaia

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Did Antiochus IV attack the temple of Artemis-Nanaia in Elymais and suffer a repulse, or is the story a doublet of the story of Antiochus III attacking the temple of Bel in Elymais and losing his life?¹ The sources are Polybius xxxi, 9 (11); I Maccabees vi, 1-4; II Maccabees i, 13 sqq. and ix, 1 sqq.; Josephus, *Ant.* xii, 354-9; Appian, *Syr.* 66; Porphyry, frs. 53, 56 in *F. Gr. Hist.*; Eusebius i, 253 (Schöne); Jerome on Daniel x, pp. 718, 722. Of these, the two early sources, Polybius and the author of I Maccabees (whose story is independent of Polybius and is reproduced by Josephus), know nothing of any attack on a temple.

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¹ Herzfeld, *Sakastan* p. 39, goes further than the doublet suggested by Bouché-Leclercq and says that Antiochus IV was never in Elymais at all. But, sources apart, he cannot have come to Gabae from the north-west, as Herzfeld suggests; he would have been going away from his objective, Parthia, and for no apparent reason.

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What Polybius says² is that Antiochus wanted money and proposed to attack the temple; it does not follow that he had information as to what Antiochus had in mind, and the statement might mean no more than that Antiochus had his army with him. Polybius does not say either that he then attacked the temple or that he was beaten off; he goes on to say that he was deceived of his expectation because the barbarians of the place would not agree to the proposed transgression of law (or custom). As Polybius could not possibly say that the natives did not agree to being attacked—a mere absurdity—the only thing which his rather obscure παρανομία can mean is that Antiochus made some proposal to the temple authorities which they rejected as unlawful or sacrilegious; and as he begins by saying that Antiochus wanted money, doubtless what it means is that the king demanded of the temple authorities money in some form, perhaps as (nominally) a loan which he may or may not have intended to repay. He was refused, and nothing further happened; when we come to the circumstances, it will be obvious that nothing further *could* happen.

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² βουλόμενος εὐπορῆσαι χρημάτων προέθετο στρατεύειν ἐπὶ τὸ τῆς ᾿Αρτέμιδος ἱερὸν εἰς τὴν ᾿Ελυμαΐδα. παραγενόμενος δ’ ἐπὶ τοὺς τόπους καὶ διαψευσθεὶς τῆς ἐλπίδος διὰ τὸ μὴ συγχωρεῖν τῇ παρανομίᾳ τοὺς βαρβάρους (τοὺς) οἰκοῦντας περὶ τὸν τόπον, ἀναχωρῶν κ.τ.λ.

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The story in I Maccabees is that Antiochus heard of a wealthy city called Elymais in Persia in which was a wealthy temple; he attacked the city but was beaten off and fled to Babylon where he died. This, as we shall see, is fiction, but the point is that the writer knew nothing of any attack upon, or intention to attack, a *temple*; the king attacks a *city*. This story is repeated by Josephus, who has added the name of the temple as that of Artemis.

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It is worth notice in passing that neither Strabo’s sources nor Josephus know of any attack upon the temple. Strabo, in his account of Susa and Elymais,¹ gives the attacks on temples there made by Antiochus III and Mithridates I of Parthia; had he found in his sources an attack by Antiochus IV, who comes between these two kings, he could hardly have omitted it. Josephus, in his criticism of Polybius, blames him for connecting Antiochus’ death with a wish to plunder a temple which (he says) he did not in fact plunder.²

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¹ Strabo XVI, 744.

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² Ant. XII, 358, βουληθέντα.

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Before going further, the actual circumstances must be considered, which means answering the question ‘What was this temple of Nanaia-Artemis?’ It has been known since 1931 (earlier writers on the subject could not know) that the Elamite nature-goddess Nanaia was the great goddess of Greek Susa, and that her temple was at Susa and was, for some purposes at any rate (e.g. manumissions), used by the Greeks of Susa as their city-temple (see p. 29). It is also clear from Strabo and Pliny that there was no other temple of Nanaia (i.e. no other of importance) in Elymais at all;³ this temple at Susa is the one Strabo calls τὰ ’Ἀζάρα,⁴ and this is the temple of the Antiochus story. It may be that Polybius knew this, though he has contrived to give the false impression of a temple in Elymais; the one writer who certainly knew that the temple stood in a great city is the author of I Maccabees (Josephus merely copies him). I do not know whether Nanaia’s temple stood within or without the wall of Susa;⁵ but as regarded the city it was a little temple-state with its own treasury, a state within a state, as the temple of Artemis at Ephesus had been prior to the reign of Lysimachus, and as many other Asiatic temples were, e.g. at Babylon and Uruk; and exactly as the Ephesians (before Lysimachus) nevertheless treated the Artemision as their own temple, so the Greeks at Susa regarded the temple of Nanaia. They sometimes called Nanaia Artemis, and it seems that by the latter part of the second century she, like Ishtar-Artemis of Uruk, had appropriated from Ephesus Artemis’ bee (p. 6); and the importance of this temple of Nanaia is shown by the fact that the Parthian king Phraates II, whose father Mithridates I had conquered Elymais, occasionally put her bee on the royal coinage.⁶ Now Susa was Antiochus’ city—the inscriptions show that it was Seleucid throughout the reigns of Seleucus IV and Antiochus IV;⁷ consequently the temple of Nanaia was Antiochus’ own temple. And Hellenistic kings did not sack their own temples;¹ that is first principles. But though Nanaia’s temple was a state, it was not a large territorial state like some temple-states in Asia Minor, but a city-temple like the Artemision at Ephesus; and had Antiochus really desired to sack it, the ‘barbarians of the place’, that is, the Elymean priesthood and personnel of the temple, would have had no chance of resisting his army, as very late writers make them do.

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³ Strabo XVI, 744; Pliny VI, 135, who shows it was at Susa.

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⁴ Strabo XVI, 744.

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⁵ If it be identical with the temple of Anaïtis mentioned by Aelian where tame lions lived in the precinct, it was probably outside; but the identification is guess-work.

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⁶ For the bee see Allotte de la Fuye, MDP XXV, 1934, p. 10.

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⁷ Seleucus IV: SEG VII nos. 17 and 2. Antiochus IV: ib. nos. 24 (see Fr. Cumont, CR Ac. Inscr. 1932 p. 285) and probably 15. It may be a question whether no. 18 belongs to the reign of Antiochus III, whose rule is known from Polybius (so Cumont and Holleaux, on the letter-forms, CR Ac. Inscr. 1931 p. 287), or of Antiochus IV (E. Cavaignac, BCH LVII, 1933, p. 416).

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¹ It has been thought that Antiochus III at Ecbatana was an instance to the contrary; see Holleaux in *CAH* VIII p. 140. I think myself that it proves that, as some have supposed, Ecbatana was at the time Parthian.

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It follows from this that the story in I Maccabees, that Antiochus attacked his own city of Susa, cannot be true, and also that the two late versions which grew up—that of Appian (second century A.D.), that he did sack his own temple, and that of Porphyry fr. 53, that he tried to sack it and was beaten off—cannot be true either, apart from the fact that these late stories cannot be set up against Polybius. They belong to a time when the facts about Nanaia’s temple and its connection with Susa were no longer known in the West (Porphyry fr. 56 apparently puts the temple on the summit of a holy mountain called Saba); and probably they all grew either out of Polybius’ unhappy phrase προέθετο στρατεύειν or out of the fact which itself gave rise to Polybius’ phrase and to the story in I Maccabees, the fact that Antiochus did march his army to Susa as a stage on the road to Parthia; I have given his route elsewhere (pp. 213 sq.). Whether Polybius understood what Antiochus was doing is very doubtful; but we cannot go behind him, and whatever the dealing between Antiochus and the temple authorities which is concealed beneath the obscure phrase μὴ συγχωρεῖν τῇ παρανομίᾳ, the words can only indicate some peaceful dealing and not an attack. Whether the late story of the attack may be a doublet of the story about Antiochus III is quite immaterial.

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I need hardly notice the two inconsistent stories in II Maccabees. In i, 13 Antiochus enters the temple of Nanaia peacefully to wed the goddess—that is taken from his marriage to Atargatis—and is murdered by the priests, which Polybius shows to be untrue. In chap. ix he attacks a temple in Persepolis, is beaten off, flies to Ecbatana, and dies ‘eaten of worms’ on his way to Judaea. Polybius shows the latter part to be untrue; but the story has this amount of interest—it knows that Antiochus was at Persepolis with his army, as he must have been on the road he was following (p. 214).

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The story then that Antiochus IV sacked or tried to sack the temple of Nanaia is very late and demonstrably untrue; but there is still one point to notice, and that is that Elymais, in the sense of the kingdom of Elymais, does not come into the story at all, though both the early sources use the name. Whether that kingdom sometimes included Susa or not,² it did not do so in the reign of Antiochus IV, as the inscriptions show that Susa was his city. It cannot be said for certain whether the first king of Elymais, Kamnaskires I, threw off Seleucid rule after Magnesia or after the death of Antiochus IV; Strabo would suit either view,¹ but the former is more probable, for Diodorus (? from Polybius) implies that when Antiochus III reached Elymais it was both independent and organised;² moreover, while Kamnaskires I on his drachms does not bear the title ‘Victorious’, on his tetradrachms he does,³ which could be interpreted to mean that it was only after the repulse of Antiochus III that he took that title and began to coin tetradrachms. But there is no certainty. It is however certain that if Elymais had a king, or whoever was its king, during the reign of Antiochus IV, that king was Antiochus’ vassal; for Eucratides, who was responsible, could never have gone eastward leaving behind him an independent rebel of considerable power⁴ at the very gates of Susa. And with the temple of Nanaia at Susa that king had no concern. I have mentioned Elymais because of one curious little fact bearing on Antiochus’ story: when Kamnaskires II, whose date (82–1 B.C.) is known from his dated coins, revolted from Parthia in the break-up which followed the death of Mithridates II in 87 and again made Elymais independent, he put on his coinage, not the Seleucid Apollo of Kamnaskires I, but the well-known type of Antiochus IV, Zeus enthroned holding Nike on his hand.⁵ There was no hostility to the memory of Antiochus IV in Elymais.

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² The notices are most confused. Weissbach, *Elymais* in *PW*, thought that Elymais and Susiane were ‘im Grunde’ identical; Cumont, *CR Ac. Inscr.* 1932 p. 248 argued that Susa was never subject to the kings of Elymais. I need not go into the question here.

Linked texts (2)

Naturalis historia — C. Plinius Secundus, Latin
Πορφύριος — Πορφύριος, Ancient Greek