The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Seleucus I was assassinated in 281, after thirty-five years of beneficent and popular rule. From his death his empire began to disintegrate, torn with geographical and racial divisions, violent struggles for the throne, and barbarian invasions on every side. Antiochus I Soter (Savior) fought gallantly against the Gauls. Antiochus II Theos (the God) lived in a perpetual intoxication, as if again to illustrate the gamble of hereditary monarchy; his wife Laodice began that chain of intrigue which disrupted and finally ruined the royal house. Antiochus III the Great was a man of capacity and culture; his bust in the Louvre shows a Greco-Macedonian with the courage of Macedon and the intelligence of Greece. He recaptured by untiring war most of the territory which the empire had lost since Seleucus I. He established a library at Antioch, and promoted the literary movement that culminated in Meleager of Gaza at the close of the second century. He preserved the Greek custom of municipal autonomy, writing to the cities that “if he should order anything contrary to the laws they should pay no attention, but assume that he had acted in ignorance.”2 He was ruined by ambition, imagination, and a flair for love. In 217 he was defeated by Ptolemy IV at Raphia, and lost Phoenicia, Syria, and Palestine; he consoled himself by a victorious expedition into Bactria and India (208), duplicating the exploits of Alexander. Lured by Hannibal into helping him against Rome, he landed an army in Euboea, fell in love at fifty with a pretty maid of Chalcis, courted her honorably, married her elaborately, forgot the war, and spent the winter enjoying his happiness.3 The Romans defeated him at Thermopylae, drove him into Asia Minor, and overwhelmed him at Magnesia. Restless, he plunged into another eastern campaign, and died in its course (187), after a reign of thirty-six years.

  His son Seleucus IV loved peace, administered the empire with economy and wisdom, and was assassinated in 175. At that time his younger brother was serving as archon at Athens, where he had gone to study philosophy. Hearing of Seleucus’ death, he organized an army, marched to Antioch, deposed the assassin, and took the throne (175). Antiochus IV was both the most interesting and the most erratic of his line, a rare mixture of intellect, insanity, and charm. He governed his kingdom ably despite a thousand injustices and absurdities. He allowed his delegates to abuse their power, and gave his mistress authority over three cities. He was generous and cruel without judgment, often forgiving or condemning by whim, surprising simple folk with costly gifts, and tossing money with a child’s ecstasy among the crowds in the street. He loved wine, women, and art; he drank to excess, and left his royal seat, at banquets, to dance naked with the entertainers, or to carouse with wastrels;4 he was a Bohemian whose dream of power had come true. He despised the solemnity and trappings of the court, played practical jokes upon his dignitaries, and disguised himself to know the luxury of anonymity; it delighted him to mingle with the people and overhear their comments on the King. He liked to wander among the shops of the artisans, watching and studying the work of engravers and jewelers, and discussing with them the technical details of their craft. He felt a sincere enthusiasm for Greek art, literature, and thought. He made Antioch for a century the art center of the Greek world; he paid artists handsomely to set up statuary and temples in other cities of Hellas; he redecorated the shrine of Apollo at Delos, built a theater for Tegea, and financed the completion of the Olympieum at Athens. Having lived fourteen impressionable years in Rome, he had imbibed a taste for republican institutions; and as if to foreshadow Augustus, it pleased his humor and policy to clothe his monarchical power in the forms of republican freedom. The chief effect of his passion for things Roman was the introduction of gladiatorial games in Antioch, his capital. The people resented the brutal sport, but Antiochus won them over by lavish and spectacular displays; when they became accustomed to the butchery he considered their degeneration a personal victory. It was characteristic of him that he began as an ardent follower of the Stoics, and ended as an easy convert to the Epicureans. He enjoyed his own qualities so keenly that he labeled his coins Antiochus Theos Epiphanes—the God Made Manifest. Overreaching himself in the manner of his imaginative kind, he attempted in 169 to conquer Egypt. He was succeeding when Rome, herself a candidate for the Egyptian plum, ordered him to retire from African soil. Antiochus asked time to consider; but the Roman envoy, Popilius, drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus, and bade him decide before stepping over its line. Antiochus yielded in fury, plundered the Temple at Jerusalem to restore his treasury, sought glory like his father in a campaign against the eastern tribes, and died in Persia on the way, of epilepsy, madness, or disease.5

  II. SELEUCID CIVILIZATION

  The function of the Seleucid Empire in history was to give to the Near East that economic protection and order which Persia had provided before Alexander, and which Rome would restore after Caesar. Despite the wars, revolutions, spoliations, and corruption normal to human affairs, that function was performed. The Macedonian conquest broke down a thousand barriers of government and speech, and invited the East and the West to fuller economic exchange. The result was a brilliant resurrection of Greek Asia. While division and strife, the poverty of the soil, and the migrations of trade routes ruined the mainland, the comparative unity and peace preserved by the Seleucids encouraged agriculture, commerce, and industry. The Greek cities of Asia were no longer free to make revolutions or experiments; homonoia, Harmony, was enforced by the kings, and was literally worshiped by the people as a god.6 Old cities like Miletus, Ephesus, and Smyrna had a second blooming.

  The valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Jordan, the Orontes, the Maeander, the Halys, and the Oxus were fertile then beyond the conception of present imagination, obsessed with the vision of the deserts and rocky wastes that cover so much of the Near East after two thousand years of erosion, deforestation, and neglectful tenant tillage.7 The soil was irrigated by a system of canals maintained under the supervision of the state. The land was owned by the king, or his nobles, or the cities, or the temples, or private individuals; in all cases the labor was performed by serfs transmitted with the soil in bequest or sale. The government considered as national property all the riches contained in the earth,8 but did little to exploit them. Trades, and even cities, were now highly specialized. Miletus was a busy textile center; Antioch imported raw materials and turned them into finished goods. Some large factories, manned with slaves, achieved a modest degree of mass production for the general market.9 But domestic consumption lagged behind production; the people were so poor that no adequate home market encouraged large-scale industry.

  Commerce was the life of Hellenistic economy. It made the great fortunes, built the great cities, and employed a growing proportion of the expanding population. Money transactions now almost completely replaced the barter that had survived for four centuries the coinage of Croesus. Egypt, Rhodes, Seleucia, Pergamum, and other governments issued currencies sufficiently stable and similar to facilitate international trade. Bankers provided public and private credit. Ships were larger, made four to six knots per hour, and shortened voyages by crossing the open sea. On land the Seleucids developed and extended the great highways left as part of Persia’s legacy to the East. Caravan routes converged from inner Asia upon Seleucia, and opened out thence to Damascus, Berytus (Beirut), and Antioch. Enriched by trade, and enriching it in turn, populous centers rose there and at Babylon, Tyre, Tarsus, Xanthus, Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Byzantium, Cyzicus, Apamea, Heracleia, Amisus, Sinope, Panticapaeum, Olbia, Lysimacheia, Abydos, Thessalonica (Salonika), Chalcis, Delos, Corinth, Ambracia, Epidamnus (Durazzo), Taras, Neapolis (Naples), Rome, Massalia, Emporium, Panormus (Palermo), Syracuse, Utica, Carthage, Cyrene, and Alexandria. One busy web of trade bound together Spain under Carthage and Rome, Carthage under Hamilcar, Syracuse under Hieron II, Rome under the Scipios, Macedonia under the Antigonids, Greece under the Leagues, Egypt under the Ptolemies, the Near East under the Seleucids, India under the Mauryas, and China under the Hans. The routes from China passed through Turkestan, Bactria
, and Persia, or over the Aral, Caspian, and Black Seas. The routes from India passed through Afghanistan and Persia to Seleucia, or through Arabia and Petra to Jerusalem and Damascus, or across the Indian Ocean to Adana (Aden), then through the Red Sea to Arsinoë (Suez), and thence to Alexandria. It was for control of the last two routes that the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties fought those “Syrian Wars” that finally weakened them both to the point of falling vassal to Rome.

  The Seleucid monarchy, inheriting the Asiatic tradition, was absolute; no assembly limited its power. The court was planned on the Oriental style, with chamberlains and lace, eunuchs and uniforms, incense and music; only the speech and the inner dress remained Greek. The nobles were not half-independent chieftains as in Macedonia or medieval Europe, but administrative or military appointees of the king. It was this structure of monarchy that passed down from Persia through the Seleucids and Sassanids to the Rome of Diocletian and the Byzantium of Constantine. Knowing that their power, in an alien scene, rested upon the loyalty of the Greek population, the Seleucid kings labored to restore the old Greek cities and to establish new ones. Seleucus I founded nine Seleucias, six Antiochs, five Laodiceas, three Apameas, one Stratonice; and his successors imitated him to the best of their lesser ability. Cities grew and multiplied as in nineteenth-century America.

  Through them the Hellenization of western Asia proceeded, on the surface, at a rapid pace. The process, of course, was old; it had begun with the Great Migration, and the Hellenistic Dispersion was in part the Renaissance of Ionia, a return of Greek civilization to its early Asiatic homes. Even before Alexander Greeks had held high offices in the Persian Empire, and Greek merchants had dominated the trade routes of the nearer East. Now the opening of political, commercial, and artistic opportunities drew from old Greece, Magna Graecia, and Sicily an emigrant flow of adventurers, settlers, scribes, soldiers, traders, doctors, scholars, and courtesans. Greek sculptors and engravers made statues and coins for Phoenician, Lycian, Carian, Cilician, Bactrian kings. Greek dancing girls became the rage of Asiatic ports.10 Sexual immorality took on a Greek grace, and Greek palaestras and gymnasiums aroused in some Orientals an unwonted devotion to athletics and baths. Cities secured new water supplies and drainage systems; avenues were paved and cleaned. Schools, libraries, and theaters stimulated reading and literature; collegians (epheboi) and university students roamed the streets and played their ancient pranks upon one another and the populace. No one was counted cultured unless he understood Greek and could enjoy the plays of Menander and Euripides. This imposition of Greek civilization upon the Near East is one of the startling phenomena of ancient history; no change so swift and far-reaching had ever been seen in Asia. We know too little of its details and its results. We are poorly informed about the literature, philosophy, and science of Seleucid Asia; if we find in it few figures of prime magnitude—Zeno the Stoic, Seleucus the astronomer, and, in the Roman period, Meleager the poet and Poseidippus the polymath—we cannot be sure that there were not many more. It was a flourishing culture, full of variety, refinement, and verve, and as fertile in art as any preceding age. Never before, so far as our knowledge goes, had a civilization achieved so wide a spread and such complex unity amid so many diverse environments. For a century western Asia belonged to Europe. The way was prepared for the Pax Romana, and the embracing synthesis of Christendom.

  But the East was not conquered. It was too deepiy and anciently itself to yield its soul. The masses of the people continued to speak their native tongues, to pursue their long-accustomed ways, and to worship their ancestral gods. Beyond the Mediterranean coasts the Greek veneer grew thin, and such Hellenic centers as Seleucia on the Tigris were Greek islands in an Oriental sea. There was no such fusion of races and cultures as Alexander had dreamed of; there were Greeks and Greek civilization on the top, and a medley of Asiatic peoples and cultures underneath. The qualities of the Greek intellect made no entry into the Oriental mind; the energy and love of novelty, the zest for worldliness and the passion for perfection, the expressiveness and individualism of the Greek effected no change in the Oriental character. On the contrary, as time moved on, Eastern ways of thought and feeling surged up from below into the ruling Greeks, and through them flowed westward to transform the “pagan” world. In Babylon the patient Semitic merchant and the temple banker regained ascendancy over the volatile Hellene, preserved the cuneiform writing, and forced back the Greek language into second place in the business world. Astrology and alchemy corrupted Greek astronomy and physics; Oriental monarchy proved more powerful than Greek democracy, and finally impressed its form upon the West; Greek kings and Roman emperors became gods in the manner of the East, and the Asiatic theory of the divine right of kings passed down through Rome and Constantinople into modern Europe. Through Zeno the East insinuated its quietism and fatalism into Greek philosophy; through a hundred channels it poured its mysticism and its piety into the vacuum left by the decay of the orthodox Greek faith. The Greek readily accepted the gods of the Orient as essentially identical with his own; but as the Greek did not really believe, and the Asiatic did, the Oriental god survived while the Greek god died. Artemis of the Ephesians became again an Eastern maternity goddess, with a dozen breasts. Babylonian, Phoenician, and Syrian cults captured great numbers of the invading Hellenes. The Greeks offered the East philosophy, the East offered Greece religion; religion won because philosophy was a luxury for the few, religion was a consolation for the many. In the rhythmic historic alternation of belief and unbelief, mysticism and naturalism, religion and science, religion returned to power because it recognized the secret helplessness and loneliness of man, and gave him inspiration and poetry; a disillusioned, exploited, war-wearied world was glad to believe and hope again. The least expected and most profound effect of Alexander’s conquest was the Orientalization of the European soul.

  III. PERGAMUM

  The gradual absorption of the Greeks by Asia weakened the Seleucid power, and generated independent kingdoms on the edge of the Hellenistic world. As early as 280 Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Bithynia set up their own monarchies; and soon the Greek cities of the Black Sea fell subject to Asiatic rule. Bactria and Sogdiana broke away about 250. In 247 Arsaces, chief of the Parni—an Iranian nomad tribe—killed the Seleucid governor of Persia and set up the kingdom of Parthia, destined to plague Rome for centuries. In 282 Philataerus, entrusted by Lysimachus with the care of nine thousand talents and the fortified hill of Pergamum in Asia Minor, appropriated the money and declared his independence. His nephew Eumenes I absorbed Pitane and Atarneus, and made Pergamum a sovereign monarchy (262). Attalus I earned the gratitude of Greek Asia by driving back the Gauls who had penetrated to his city walls (230); his eldest son, Eumenes II, continued his competent rule, but shocked Greece by calling in the aid of Rome against Antiochus III. After their defeat of Antiochus at Magnesia the Romans gave Eumenes nearly all of Asia Minor. His brother and successor, Attalus II, distrusted the power of his sons to keep Pergamum free, and at his death (139) bequeathed his kingdom to Rome.

  The little state did what it could to redeem the treachery of its birth and growth by making itself the rival of Alexandria as a center of art and learning. The wealth that came from the mines, vines, and cornfields, from the manufacture of woolens, parchments, and perfumes, from the making of bricks and tiles, and the mastery of north Aegean trade went not only to maintain a strong army and navy, but to encourage literature and art. The Pergamene kings believed that government and private business could fruitfully compete, supplying a mutual check on inefficiency and greed. The king cultivated large tracts of land with slaves, and operated, though not as monopolies, many factories, quarries, and mines. Under this unique system wealth increased and multiplied. Pergamum became an ornate capital, famous for its altar to Zeus, its luxurious palaces, its library and theater, its palaestras and baths; even its public lavatories upheld the municipal pride.11 The library was second only to Alexandria’s in the number of its
volumes and the repute of its scholars; and the pinakotheka housed, for the public enjoyment, a great collection of paintings. For half a century Pergamum was the finest flower of Hellenic civilization.

  Meanwhile the House of Seleucus had fallen into decay. The rise of independent kingdoms almost confined its power to Mesopotamia and Syria. Parthia, Pergamum, Egypt, and Rome patiently labored to weaken the dynasty by supporting pretenders at every succession, and fomenting faction and civil war. In 153, just as Demetrius I was restoring vigor to the Seleucid government, Rome collected mercenaries from every quarter to bolster up the false claims of a Smyrnean adventurer to the throne. Pergamum and Egypt joined in the attack; Demetrius fought and died heroically, and the Seleucid power fell into the hands of the worthless Alexander Balas, the puppet of his mistresses and of Rome.

  IV. HELLENISM AND THE JEWS

  The history of Judea in the Hellenistic age turns on two conflicts: the external struggle between Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt for Palestine, and the internal struggle between the Hellenic and the Hebraic ways of life. The first conflict is dead history, and may be briefly dismissed; Matthew Arnold believed the second conflict to be one of the lasting cleavages of human feeling and thought. In the original division of Alexander’s empire Judea (i.e., Palestine south of Samaria) had been awarded to Ptolemy. The Seleucids never accepted this decision; they saw themselves separated from the Mediterranean, and coveted the wealth that might come from the trade that passed through Damascus and Jerusalem. In the resultant wars Ptolemy I won, and Judea remained subject to the Ptolemies for more than a century (312-198). It paid an annual tribute of eight thousand talents, but despite this burden the land prospered. Judea was left a large measure of self-government under the hereditary high priest of Jerusalem and the Great Assembly. This gerousia, or Council of Elders, which Ezra and Nehemiah had formed two centuries back, became both a senate and a supreme court. Its seventy or more members were chosen from the heads of the leading families, and from the most learned scholars (Soferim) of the land. Its regulations—the Dibre Soferim—set the pattern of orthodox Judaism from the Hellenistic age to our own.