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Updated: April 30, 2025
It is true that our piecemeal information comes largely from writers who somewhat despised them; but the known history of the Seleucid Empire, closed by an extraordinarily facile and ignominious collapse before Rome, supports the judgment that, taken one with another, its kings were shallow men and haphazard rulers who owed it more to chance than to prudence that their dynasty endured so long.
What Pompey took, what remained for him to take, consisted only of Syria; all the eastern part of the Seleucid empire had gone long since. In 255 Diodotus, the Seleucid satrap of Bactria, rebelled and made himself a kingdom; and that the kingdom might become an empire, went further on the war-path.
While the Seleucid kings employed the animal to a large extent, and its use was also probably known to the Greek princes of Bactria, the Arsacidae appear to have almost entirely neglected it. On one occasion alone do we find their employment of it mentioned, and then we hear of only a single animal, which is ridden by the monarch.
Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia, ruled by princes of Iranian origin, were never integral parts of the Seleucid Empire, though consistently friendly to its rulers. Finally, in the hill-regions of the centre, as of the coasts, the Seleucid writ did not run. About those parts of it held by cities actually Greek, or by Pergamum, no more need be said.
All this indicates a healthy reaction that more than one philosopher underwent in coming in contact with Roman men of the world, but it also doubtless reflects the tendencies of the Syrian branch of the school from which he sprang; for the Syrian group had had to cast off some of its traditional fanaticism and acquire a few social graces and a modicum of worldly wisdom in its long contact with the magnificent Seleucid court.
Many of the soldiers clambered down to satisfy their curiosity about the latest addition to the starving garrison. But he proved to be a deformed old man, mute and weary, who was distressed for fear he would be detained by them and who hobbled out into the besieged city and posted as fast as his legs could carry him toward the house of Amaryllis, the Seleucid.
There is also some ground for thinking that he had a standing quarrel with the king of Media Atropatene. Altogether it is evident that from B.C. 280 to B.C. 250 the Seleucid princes were incessantly occupied with wars in the west, in Asia Minor and in Syria Proper, wars which so constantly engaged them that they had neither time nor attention to spare for the affairs of the far east.
He fought Eucratidas of Bactria, and won some territory from him. He fought eastward as far as to the Indus; then conquered Meida and Babylonia in the west. In 129 Demetrius II Nicator, the reigning Seleucid, attacked Mithradates' son, Phraates II, and was defeated; and the lands east of the Euphrates definitely passed from Seleucid to Parthian control.
The language in which the books were written was universally Greek, and in only one or two cases is there reason to suppose that the authors had any knowledge of the Phoenician tongue. The students at Berytus between A.D. 250 and 550 were probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, Greeks or Romans. Phoenician nationality had, in fact, almost wholly disappeared in the Seleucid period.
The Asian map of Christianity at the end, say, of the fourth century of the latter's existence, will show it very exactly bounded by the limits to which the Seleucid Empire had carried Greeks in any considerable body, and the further limits to which the Romans, who ruled effectively a good deal left aside by their Macedonian predecessors much of central and eastern Asia Minor for example, and all Armenia had advanced their Graeco-Roman subjects.
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