the oriental context for the end of greek rule in the hellenistic age.

278 Pages·2012·15.64 MB·English

THE ORIENTAL CONTEXT FOR THE END
OF GREEK RULE IN THE HELLENISTIC AGE.
Thesis for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
of the University of Hull.
F. A. Gordon-Kerr, M.A. (Dunelm)
February 1981.
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CONTENTS
Frontispiece: Greek dedicatory inscription from Laodicea-in-Media
Preamble and acknowledgements
I The Establishment of Seleucid Rule 1
II The Revolts of Parthia and Bactria 9
1. Tribal movements
2. Formal secession
3. Political control
III The Eastern ~uestion during the reign of Antiochus III 35
IV Antiochus III and the West 62
v
From Seleucus IV until the death of Antiochus IV 94
VI The Seleucid East: Parthia and Bactria 128
1. The Nomad problem at 163
2. The rise of Bactria as a Kingdom
VII The Seleucid Decline 156
VIII The End of the Seleucids 184
Addendum on archaeology and artefacts
Excursus on Poleis in the Hellenistic World:
Development and Influence 211
Conclusion 240
Chronological Table of Seleucid rulers (dating from Alexander III)
247
Inscriptions: Laodicea-Nihavend 248
Gorgan 249
Kandahar (1958~ 249
Kandahar (1963 250
Coin Plates: Bactrian Coinage I
Bactrian Coinage II
Seleucid Coinage I
Seleucid Coinage II
Seleucid Coinage III
Bibliography
Preamble and acknowledgements
A connected account of the decline of Greek power in the
Hellenistic East can be justified nowadays by noting the relative
antiquity of available works on the subject when archaeological and
numismatic work has continued and has rendered dated such works as those
by Bevan and Bouche-Leclerq although still valuable The excavation of
e
Ai Khanum and Shahr-i-Qumis alone should provoke a reassessment of
Seleucid objectives and so of Seleucid history. We are grateful to Getzel
Cohen for a recent coherent study of the process of the colonisation
movement in these Eastern parts. Recent events in Afghanistan and Iran
should encourage historians of the central Asian land mass to study
pressures which in the past affected these countries from the north, and
in particular to pay attention to the cultural dimension of such contacts.
There has been a tendency to omit the Seleucid enterprise from thorough
1
study, and to give Livy the benefit of the doubt in his comment that
2
'no power was despised so much by the Romans'. Such omissions and this
attitude could be seen as a current emphasis on Hellenism as a Western and
not an Eastern phenomenon, thus leaving - quite wrongly in my view -
Bactrian and Indian history in the Hellenistic Age to be seen simply as the
purview of Indian Historians and Indian History.3
This work is an account of Seleucid history from 280 to
roughly 100 B.C., with a summary account of the end of Seleucid Rule down
$
to its extinction under Pompey for the sake of completeness. It tries to
~
take in most modern work on the subject in the fields of archaeology,
numismatics and literary comment on what scant sources we have. Being an
account of Seleucid history it is valid to term the process it records
'The oriental context for the end of Greek Rule in the Hellenistic Age.'
I do recognise the blurred edges of the Graeco-Macedonian partnership,
if it can be called that, and this is discussed, as is the Macedonian-
Iranian partnership of Seleucus and Apama.
Proper names are used as they normally occur: Greek proper
names are latinized if that has become the general usage: e.g. Seleucus
not Seleukos. Mithridates of Parthia is differentiated by the 'il in his
name from Mithradates of Pontus for the sake of convenience. The usage
in the matter of proper names in authors I have quoted is their own, not
mine.
I am most grateful for facilities accorded me for Study
abroad by the British School in Athens and the British Institutes in
Teheran and Kabul, and acknowledge the invaluable assistance of museum
curators in this country and abroad, in particular the Iran Bastan Museum
(to whom I am indebted for the inscription frontispiece), and the
British Museum Coin Department. The coin portraits were photographed in
Hull University by its photographic service and the casts involved were
provided by the Ashmolean Museum: to Dr. Metcalf and above all to
Colin Kraay, my thanks. Valuable comment is acknowledged from David MacDowall,
David Selwood and David Bivar. Derek Waite's splendid maps deserve
grateful comment.
Past and present professors of Classics in the University
of Hull have given time and effort to the perusal of what I have written.
To them too I am grateful.
NOTES.
1. Current general works on Hellenistic history in English (at present
in print), e.g. Cary: 'Greek History from 323 to 146', and P. ~mal:
'Hellenism and the rise of Rome', represent respectively a very
pro-Tarn view of the East and omit it almost completely. Neither is
remotely satisfactory now although both have excellent sections on
other hellenistic issues. E. Will is first class but has a very wide
area to cover and is a source book rather than a monograph. We await
Walbank's forthcoming work with great interest.
2. Livy: Book XXXVII, 39, 3.
3. As Narain assumes it is and Tarn assumed it wasn't.
CHAPTER 10
The establishment of Seleucid Rule.
In an attempt to chart the process of the disintegration
(
of the Seleucid empire and to indentify some of the causes of that decline, eft
L.-
a narrative account must also note those episodes outside the Seleucid
Empire which were part of that process.
When Seleuclls Nicator crushed the aspirations of
Lysimachus at Corupedion in Lydia in 280 he established himself as the
natural successor on the Asian continent to Antigonus Monophthalmos, and
so, it could be said, to Alexander himself, whose kingdom Antigonus - and
all the diadochoi - had so much wanted to inherit. By the time of Corupedion,
Seleucus' own kingdom had been securely established (311) with its centres
at Seleucia-on-Tigris and Antioch-on-the-Orontes; and the eastern
boundary had been trimmed by the tactically expensive but strategically
1
sensible barter of territory in north-west India to Chandragupta the Maurya
(305) in exchange for elephants, due to which heavy cavalry accession
Antigonus had been defeated in the crucial battle at Ipsus in Phrygiain 301
by the coalition of Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus and Cassander.
Seleucus I lived only a short time to enjoy his new-found
hegemony as the last of the Diadochoi. His death at the hands of Ptolemy
Keraunos only months after Corupedion meant that his son Antiochus
succeeded him in a good position to strengthen the resources and structure
of an empire whose eastern section he had already been ruling as Eastern
Viceroy for seven years2. This wise allocation of duty by Seleucus I had
~-
potentially ensured that loyal and secure government would be available,
3
as Bengtson had described , to the eastern provinces of what Seleucus I had
'"',
demonstrated was a long empire with long lines of communication. What
would now have to be proved was the resilience of this arrangement, given
the chance that future appointees would not implement it with the same
loyalty and competence that Antiochus seems to have displayed; for
Seleucus' and Antiochus' judgement was correct: their eastern territory
was vulnerable, for reasons which they might not then have fully understood4,
and the erosion of Seleucid power was to come at least as menacingly from
the nomad east as from the as-yet distant Roman west. In a phrase the
east was possibly more uncertain than the Seleucids, even with their
Iranian marriage ties, had imagined. Other less well-known political and
military forces were gathering. And whereas one would wish to give full
value, when examining the relationship of Graeco-Macedonian control to its
eastern provinces, to the links between Iran and Macedon deriving from
Seleucus' marriage to Apama the daughter of Spitamenes, this is a different
matter from proceeding on the assumption that the insecurity of these
provinces had bJen notably strengthened by that marriage or that their
tenuous retention was simply a fiction designed to make Seleucid problems
seem more drastic than they were.
It is however noticeable that, from all we can discover,
attitudes adopted towards the 'Greeks' in the east were qualitatively
different from attitudes expressed in (e.g.) Coele-Syria and Egypt where
from about 200 B.C. native revolts were a continuing problem. The wellknown
reversal of a previous antagonism between the Greeks in newly-independent
Bactria and the rising Parthian state of Arsaces II, which took place
under Diodotus II, suggests that this alliance between Barbarian and Greek
was not too difficult to achieve; and one might speculate that a half-Iranian
Seleucid royal house should have therefore been able to establish a stronger
hold upon the eastern provinces than seems actually to have been the case.
That, of course, would make the presumption that a royal lead on the issue
of cooperation with Iranians in the broad sense was acceptable to ruling
circles in Macedonian and Iranian society, and that too is conjecture.
To the problems of administration and defence in the
Seleucid Empire was added the problem of its Graeco-Macedonian population of
settlers and soldiers, importing into the military and civilian structure
of the dangerously-extended state the rivalries and incompatibility which
had been demonstrated on the Greek mainland since the days of Philip and
5
Demosthenes. In many instances, including the dissimilar sources of
Trogus and Arrian, the Greek settlers are referred to as 'the Macedonians,.6
In Indian writing we find 'Greeks' referred to as 'Yavanas,7 - a straight
derivation from 'Ionians', which many of them, including one of their most
distinguished kings Euthydemus of Magnesia, were in fact. It is not our
object to make out that all the dynastic quarrels of the Seleucid State
were attributable to this continuing resistance to the Imperium Macedonicum:
it would be idle to ignore the feuding of the Diadochoi and the running sore
of the Lagid-Seleucid conflict in Coele-Syria; but it is true that in
Strabo, Arrian and Trogus (as preserved in Justin's Epitome), Macedonians
are the people from whom others revolt, while, at least in the
Milindapanha, Greeks are those with whom one holds a philosophical dialogue,
even although the Greeks themselves might be 'viciously valiant ,.8
The attempt of Antiochus III in his European campaign
to 'reclaim', as he put it, the empire of his ancestors is another instance
of the distance politically between a great Macedonian king and the Greeks
he was claiming, by invading their country, to free. As John Briscoe
points out clearly, Antiochus' argument to the Romans, who contested his
right to be in Europe at all, was that he was entitled 'to all the lands
which had belonged to Lysimachus' and passed to Antiochus' great grandfather
,
Seleucus' by his victory at Corupedion. 'The conflict', Briscoe continues,
'is one of different legal conceptions'. Rome did not recognise rights
d erl.v e d f rom suc hV·lC t orl. es. 9 What we do not detect in Livy1s narrative
is the assessment Antiochus (should have) made as to whether he would be
likely to succeed in drawing Greeks into his imposed freedom. It is
Badian who comments that Antiochus would have been received by the Greeks,
had he won at Thermopylae, with the same 'cowed resignation' that the Romans
10
received from these same Greeks. The whole question of the Graeco-
· b·· 11 b
Ma ce donlan sym lOSlS can e regarded as a part of the cultural back-
cloth against which the decline of Greek power in the east was enacted.
In the matter of establishing an administrative centre in
Iran, Altheim is quite clear that the Seleucids were affected by a
renunciation of the policy of racial fusion upon which Alexander appeared
12
to have embarked. I would not want to argue that Seleucus I went about
establishing his power as a crusader for 'equal opportunities' for Greeks,
Macedonians and Iranians, for example. But it does seem clear to me that
Antiochus I could not help being the son of his Iranian mother as well as
his Macedonian father; and that one cannot easily leave this fact out of
the reckoning when considering the policies for stabilisation that he seems
to have followed, and which we glance at in the next chapter. We do not
know that the eternal antagonism of the Greek towards the barbarian was the
natural attitude of the Seleucids towards the steppe people or to the
Iranian town-dwellers, and the point made by Tarn that the subject peoples
13
of the empire showed loyalty to the reigning Seleucid needs little defence.
A striking instance was the return to loyalty after the revolt of Molon
early in Antiochus Ill's reign.
Seleucus I had made a home base in the 'Seleucist round
about Apamea-on-the-Orontes; and although we may note grounds on which to
14
disapprove of this choice, the reasons at the time seemed very good.
There was access to the Mediterranean for trade and for contact with the
Greek homeland, and there was the possibility of participation on the
power-politics of the Mediterranean seaboard, to have abandoned which would
certainly have led to erosion of western Seleucid influence in the
15
relationship with Egypt. By 280 Seleucus and Ptolemy had still managed
to maintain their peaceful co-existence between friends, despite differences
over policy and an incipient conflict over Coele-Syria. Also Egypt was at
that time a formidable naval power in the Mediterranean upon which a