A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East

After Alexander’s death, even though the satrapies of the Near East were assigned to men of lower rank (such as Laomedon of Mytilene in Syria), it soon became obvious that anyone claiming succession would have to control this necessary point of passage between the upper satrapies and the Mediterranean. Starting in 319 BCE, Ptolemy undertook a systematic conquest of Syria, considered as an advanced defense of Egypt, but he had to evacuate most of it when faced in 316 BCE with the offensive of Antigonus Monophthalmos (“One-Eyed”), who captured Syria as well as Mesopotamia. However, after the heavy defeat of Demetrius, son of Antigonus, at Gaza (312 BCE), Ptolemy reoccupied Syria while Seleucus, unable to take control of North Syria, attacked Mesopotamia. Ptolemy soon had to evacuate the country faced with a counter-offensive launched by Demetrius, but the peace of 311 BCE stabilized the situation. When the new war, starting in 302 BCE, pitted the new kings against Antigonus, Ptolemy reoccupied Syria (302–301 BCE). After the defeat of Antigonus at Ipsus (301 BCE), the combined forces gave Syria in its entirety to Seleucus, but he was only able to establish himself in the northern part because Ptolemy, his friend and his ally, occupied the southern part. Seleucus refused to go to war against the man who had allowed him to conquer Mesopotamia but he also was determined to assert his legitimate rights over all of Syria: his successors consistently considered that their inheritance consisted of all of Syria.

For a century, the sharing of Syria between Seleucids and Ptolemy’s dynasty, the Lagids, stayed the same, with only slight variations. Despite several attempts of the Seleucids to reunite it all under their power, it was instead the Lagids who almost succeeded. One can discount the First Syrian War (274–271 BCE), of which almost nothing is known, and even the second one (260–253 BCE), which took place almost entirely in Asia Minor, because they had no lasting result. On the other hand, the death of Antiochus II in 246 BCE widowed the sister of the Lagid Ptolemy III, and left a newborn heir. However, the grown son of his first wife Laodice, Seleucus (II) proclaimed himself king and succeeded in ending the Lagid attempt at total dominance of Syria and Seleucid Mesopotamia (Third Syrian War or Laodicean War, 246–241 BCE). However, he could not prevent the Lagid garrisons from setting up camp in Seleucia Pieria, port of Antioch, and close to Laodicea by the Sea (Ras Ibn Hani). A new attempt to conquer Lagid Syria by Antiochus III in 219 BCE (Fourth Syrian War) was at first victorious, then failed miserably after the defeat of this king at Raphia in 217 BCE; the only positive result was the expulsion of the Lagid garrisons from Northern Syria. It was not until a new Syrian War, the fifth, in 202–199 BCE, that the entire country was finally reunited under one single authority. Despite the disputes and attempts at reconquest, the Syro-Mesopotamian Near East was finally placed under a single and unified royal authority, that of the Seleucids. With Antiochus III, Alexander’s empire seemed to be almost established again and the Syro-Mesopotamian whole formed the heart of an immense kingdom, stretching from the Aegean Sea to the borders of India and Central Asia. Yet in a few years, because of the king’s failures in Europe and then in Asia Minor when faced with Rome (the defeat at Magnesia in 190 BCE, the peace treaty of Apamea in Phrygia in 188 BCE), the kingdom was seriously diminished and weakened. When Antiochus III died in 187 BCE, the kingdom only included Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Iran. The heart of the kingdom had become almost the entire kingdom!

The reunification of Syria that the Seleucids finally achieved and the possession of Mesopotamia were soon threatened from all directions, from outside as well as inside the kingdom. To the east, ever since the middle of the third century, a people from the North, the Parni, soon to be called the Parthians, occupied the Iranian plateau, cutting the immense Seleucid Empire in two and isolating Central Asia from the whole of Syro-Mesopotamia. By the beginning of the second century, the Parthians controlled a large part of the Iranian plateau, with the exception of the western areas. The campaigns of Antiochus III (187 BCE) and then Antiochus IV (164 BCE) in southwestern Iran cost the lives of their leaders and perhaps slowed down the advance of the Parthians, but the principal cause of the Parthians’ slowed progress toward the west was probably their difficulties in the east of their own empire. The rise to power of an energetic sovereign, Mithridates I (throne name Arsaces V), around 171 BCE was quickly followed by more aggressive politics, which no doubt explains Antiochus IV’s expedition. The difficulties that arose in Iran and the problem of taking control of vast territories to the east of Iran again slowed the progress of the Parthians toward the west, but in July of 141 BCE the documents are dated by the Parthian king in Babylon, proving that the city was under his administration. The Seleucid Demetrius II, dealing with a usurper within Syria itself, Diodorus Tryphon, quickly responded to the call for help from the Greek cities of Mesopotamia (140–139 BCE), not without success, since he led a campaign into Iran, Media, and Persis. But once defeated, he was taken prisoner (138 BCE) and Mithridates took back the lost territories. The brother and successor of Demetrius II, Antiochus VII, launched his own expedition of reconquest in 130–129 BCE, which allowed him to recover Babylon and Media. But firstly Phraates II, the successor of Mithridates I, freed Demetrius II in the hope of producing a rival to Antiochus VII, and secondly the campaign of 129 BCE ended in disaster. With Antiochus VII gone, the Parthians reoccupied first Iran, then Babylon, and soon all of Mesopotamia (122 BCE); in all likelihood, the Parthians were in Dura-Europos in 113 BCE, and around 92 BCE they were at the gates of Commagene.

Within the Seleucid kingdom, essentially reduced from this point on to Syria proper and its Cilician annexes, royal authority continued to decline. Since the middle of the third century, a dynasty of Iranian origin governed Commagene under the authority of the Seleucids, but around 163–162 BCE, its leader Ptolemy asserted his independence by proclaiming himself king, with a capital city of Samosata on the Euphrates, while Arsameia on the Nymphaios close to the royal necropolis of Mount Nemrud developed later. To the south, the Nabataeans of Petra continued to expand their kingdom to the north and toward the Mediterranean; they gradually occupied a large part of Transjordan, and before the end of the second century, they possessed solid bases in South Syria (Bosra) and were moving in the direction of Gaza, which they failed to take around 100 BCE.

The autonomy of new powers progressed rapidly to the detriment of the Seleucid royal authority. In Judaea, a long and violent crisis, known as the Maccabean Revolt, led to a de facto independence of the country. In 178 BCE, after Seleucus IV had instituted a new and stricter form of royal control over the temple finances in Syria, the high priest Onias opposed this reform. At the time of the king’s death in 175 BCE Onias was in Antioch to justify himself, but the new king, Antiochus IV, dismissed him and appointed his relative Jason instead. The latter obtained the right to create a Greek city ( polis ) in Jerusalem in exchange for a higher tribute. A few years later, in 171 BCE, Jason was replaced by Menelas and the tribute was increased again. A popular revolt broke out in Judaea, quickly organized by the Maccabees. The suppression of the revolt by the king was very harsh, although it never aimed to annihilate Judaism, contrary to the later assertions of the authors of the two books of the Maccabees. Faced with the resistance of the rebels (who retook the Temple in December of 165 BCE) and after the death of Antiochos IV (in October 164 BCE), negotiations between the Jewish rebels and the Seleucids took place, despite the continuation of the fighting. A new state gradually emerged first around Jerusalem (around 157–152 BCE) under the authority of Jonathan, brother and successor of Judah, and then soon after to include all of Judaea and beyond (Idumaea, Peraea in Transjordan, the Golan, South Lebanon). This new kingdom, led by an ethnarch and high priest who took a royal title around 104–103 BCE, asserted its independence, despite several attempts to recapture it by the Seleucids. This was no longer contested after the short-lived conquest of Jerusalem in 131 BCE by Antioch VII.