Anthony Everitt - The Rise of Rome

I observed the powerful Heracles—his image, that is, but he himself banquets at ease among the immortal gods.

Some monarchs reserved their divinity à la Heracles until after their death, but alive they were at least isotheoi , or godlike. Others put in a claim to deification before the tomb. A king of Macedon in the previous century was greeted on his entry into Athens by a choir singing a specially written hymn:

This attitude, which combined rational skepticism with divine worship, was widespread in the sophisticated East among rulers such as Antiochus and his subjects.

On his accession, the energetic and ambitious Antiochus set about rebuilding his empire. He failed to take back from the Ptolemies Syrian lands into which they had encroached, but he had more success in pressing his cause in Asia Minor. Then he decided to follow in Alexander’s footsteps and marched east into Parthia and Bactria. He crossed into the Kabul Valley and descended into India, where he made friends with an Indian king, Subhashsena, from whom he procured elephants for his army. After a short expedition down the Persian Gulf, he returned home to general applause. He had restored his father’s empire and on his return acquired the complimentary title of “the Great.” He took to styling himself the Great King, after the long-gone Persian monarchs.

Antiochus’s reputation was at its height, and from Rome’s viewpoint he presented a serious threat. He was apparently an able general and now commanded a supply of manpower that outmatched that of the Republic. In fact, though, his seven-year anabasis (“journey up-country”) had as much to do with public relations as with actual conquest. We do not know whether the Senate had any inkling of this, but the king had managed only to win friendly allies rather than to impose satrapies or annex provinces. He controlled nothing much beyond Persepolis. What he had done, admittedly with some skill, was to erect a sword-and-sandals film set, impressive from a distance but lath and plasterboard in close-up.

Having won the coastal cities of Asia Minor, the spoils of his mutual aggression pact with Philip, he decided to fit into place the last piece of the Seleucid imperial jigsaw—Thrace, Greece’s unruly, semi-barbarous neighbor. To secure this, he crossed the Bosphorus onto European soil in 196. It was a truly momentous mistake, made from nostalgia rather than necessity.

Understandably, the Romans were displeased. In their view, Thrace was the essential no-man’s-land between their sphere of influence and that of Antiochus. But the Syrian king located his neutral buffer zone somewhere west—the liberated Balkans. The sooner the Senate pulled back its troops from there, the better. This mismatch of understandings led inexorably to war.

The king opened negotiations with the Romans, but to little purpose. His embassies were rebuffed and he was infuriated by the Senate’s patronizing assumption that it had the right to tell him how to govern in his own lands. Meanwhile, Pergamum, as alarmed by Syrian expansionism as it had been by that of Philip, dripped poison about his hostile intentions into the Senate’s receptive ear. It was against its better judgment that it had endorsed the evacuation of Greece.

In 193 Flamininus, now back in Rome and speaking with the full authority of the Senate, at last offered Antiochus, through his envoys, a clear if cynical deal: “If he wishes us to take no interest in the concerns of the [Greek] cities of Asia, he on his part must keep his hands off any part of Europe.” In other words, provided that Antiochus gave up Thrace, Rome would give him a free hand in Asia Minor (so much for the liberty of the Greeks!). But this was the one thing he would not do, so dear to him was his dream of reassembling Seleucus’s vast domain.

It was at this awkward moment that the leaders of the Aetolian League moved to avenge themselves on an ungrateful Rome. They looked about for allies, and first of all they made overtures to King Philip. But bitter experience had taught him to stay in the Senate’s good books, and he declined to join any insurrection. Finally, the Aetolians invited Antiochus to liberate Greece from the Romans. Most observers would have thought that it was not the Republic that posed any threat (after all, the legions had left), but, rather, the Aetolians themselves, ambitious to fill the space left by the Romans and a reduced Macedon.

While waiting for an answer, they set about making trouble. They assassinated the—admittedly annoying—Spartan king. The league then tried to capture Chalcis, one of the fetters, but was told sharply by its inhabitants that since Chalcis was already free it did not need freeing. The port of Demetrias, whose citizens were nervous that Rome might hand them back to Philip as a reward for his loyalty, was another of the fetters, and here the Aetolians were successful.

After a pause for thought, the Great King accepted the invitation. What persuaded him to take such a foolhardy step? Surely he could see that the Aetolians were unreliable, and that the Romans, who had already defeated the Hellenic phalanx, would return to Greece in force. In the autumn of 192, his fleet arrived at Demetrias and a small body of only ten thousand men and six of his famous elephants disembarked. This would hardly frighten off the Romans. It seems that all he wanted was respect.

Antiochus spent a lazy winter enjoying his recent marriage to a pretty local girl from Chalcis, and a more trying spring being unceremoniously chased out of Greece. A Roman army thrashed the invaders so overwhelmingly at that most symbolic of locations, Thermopylae, that the king lost no time in setting sail for home. If he hoped that the legions would now leave him be in his eastern empire, he was to be disappointed.

The Senate intended to teach him a lesson. Lucius Scipio, consul, with his much more famous brother Africanus as his deputy, or legatus , headed an army of about thirty thousand men. They were assisted by Philip, who, as a token of gratitude, had his war indemnity reduced and his son Demetrius, a hostage in Rome, sent back to Macedon. Pergamum and Rhodes were, of course, on Rome’s side. Despite some setbacks, the legions crossed over into Asia for the first time and in December 190 met Antiochus’s host, twice their number, at Magnesia, a city in Lydia not far from Smyrna.

The Great King, on his army’s right wing, led a successful cavalry charge and galloped off in hot pursuit of the enemy. Meanwhile, the Romans routed and methodically butchered the phalanx. Antiochus only turned around when he met resistance at the Roman camp. He presumed that he was the victor and rode back in a haughty frame of mind. But when he saw the battlefield strewn with the dead bodies of his own men, horses, and elephants and his camp captured, he precipitately fled. Darkness fell, but still he rode on, reaching the Lydian capital, Sardis, and safety at midnight.

This was the end of Syria as a great power. Rome set an indemnity at fifteen thousand talents, the highest ever recorded. Antiochus was barred from Greece and most of Asia Minor, and was compelled to abandon his ancestral claim to Thrace. But, as with Philip, he was left on his throne. At this time, the Senate preferred to neutralize a fallen enemy, rather than to totally destroy him. In that way, it ensured the region’s stability without being obliged to govern it itself.

That said, the message of Magnesia was unmistakable. The Successors to Alexander were no longer free agents. Rome insisted on obedience to its wishes, so they had to think twice before doing anything that might disturb the always uneasy equilibrium in the region.