Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/615

 EMPIRE.] PERSIA 587 the Indus. The kings swore to this treaty and became lasting allies. Instead of the twenty-one Asiatic satrapies of the parti tions Seleucus divided his empire into seventy-two, thus diminishing the dangerous strength of the individual . governors. But the old arrangement was restored later, and at the beginning of the reign of Antiochus III. we find Media, Persia, Susiana, and the district of the Ery thraean Sea (separated off from Babylonia) standing each under one head (Polyb., v. 40-54). Apparently an eparch came to be appointed with military command over all the sections of each old satrapy, and gradually drew to himself all the functions of the satraps in the old regime, so that he could be spoken of indifferently as satrap or strategus. Seleucus had built for himself a new capital, Seleucia on the Tigris, but in process of time his chief attention came to be more and more engrossed by the affairs of the west, and the seat of power was shifted to Antioch in Syria. A kingdom like that of Seleucus could hardly be governed from Syria, which lay so far from its natural centre, and about 293 or a little later Seleucus found it advisable to make over the upper satrapies to Antiochus, his son by his first marriage with Apama, daughter of Spitamenes, giving him Seleucia as his capital and his stepmother Stratonice as wife. Seleucus, like Antigonus, dreamed of regaining the whole monarchy of Alexander, and fancied himself within reach of his goal after the fall of Lysimachus, at when he was himself removed by assassination. Antiochus hl1 - Soter (280-261) was prudent enough to be content with what he possessed and acquiesce in the actual division of the empire into three realms, practically corresponding to the three continents. No one had been so zealous as Seleucus in extending Alexander s schemes of colonization ; he is said to have founded seventy-five cities. Among such of these as we know an unusual proportion lies in Media the breast of Iran, as the Orientals call it where it was doubly import ant to strengthen the Macedonian element. A Greek settle ment in Ecbatana and the cities of Laodicea, Apamea near Rhagae, and Europus were his foundations ; Alexandria Eschata, in the extreme north-east, was strengthened by new recruits ; and even beyond this city, as *it seems, in the land of the Scythians, an Antioch was founded. These last undertakings probably came after the association in the empire of Antiochus, who, through his grandfather Spitamenes, had special reasons for interest in these parts. It was then that Demodamas crossed the Jaxartes and raised altars beyond it to the Apollo of Didyma, the patron god of the dynasty. Then, too, Alexander s plan of explor ing the Caspian was resumed; the admiral Patrocles made a voyage of discovery, and got only just far enough to be confirmed in the false notion of a north-east passage to India, probably, therefore, to the extremity of the penin sula of Mangishlak. It was seen, on the other hand, that the Caspian was not connected with the Mseotis ; but Seleucus shortly before his death still entertained a plan for a canal from the Caspian to the Cimmerian Bosphorus. Antiochus carried on his father s work of founding cities, and built Laodicea in the east of Persis ; but he gave more attention to eastern Iran. A wall of 1 500 stadia (about 172 miles) was carried round the oasis of Merv, and there, at the confluence of the Margus and the Zothales, the ruined city Syriana was rebuilt as Antioch, with a circuit of 8 miles. In Aria Antiochus Soter founded Sotira, his general Achseus Achaia ; the older chief towns Artacabane and Alexandria on the Arius received new walls, the latter with a circuit of from 3 to 6 miles. Alexandropolis in Arachosia had been similarly strengthened by Seleucus. With all these efforts, however, Hellenism made no such deep im pression on Iran as on the west, nor did the loosely-jointed empire attain to anything higher than a Hellenistic repro- 280-250. duction of the kingdom of the Achsemenians. Even in the fragmentary records that we possess we hear from the first of rebellions little favourable to consolidation of the realm ; Seleucus, like Alexander, still had an army of Macedonians and Persians together, while the later Seleucids, at least in their western wars, used natives sparingly and only as bow men, slingers, or the like, and preferred for these services the wild desert and mountain tribes of Iran. 1 Of the Persian troops of Seleucus we read that 3000 rebelled, and were mastered and destroyed only by treachery ; another and seemingly connected story speaks of a rising of 3000 Macedonians (Polyaenus, vii. 39, 40). Antiochus himself executed his eldest son, Seleucus, on suspicion of conspiracy against his life ; the heir of the kingdom was his second son, Antiochus II. Theos (261-246), a drunken and dissolute Anti- prince, who neglected his realm in the society of unworthy ochus n - favourites. This king is mentioned in a remarkable contemporary Indian inscription. The Seleucids were constant allies of the great Maurya (Magadha) kingdom. Between 311 and 302 Megasthenes repeatedly went as ambassador from Seleucus to Chandragupta, and Daimachus went in like manner from Antiochus to the court of Chandragupta s successor, Ami- traghata (280-276). The next king, Asoka, became a Buddhist about 263. He then founded hospitals for men and beasts throughout his realm, planted places where nothing had grown before, and provided wells and grew trees along the roads for the refreshment of man and beast. Further, he tells us, he caused his example in these things to be followed by his neighbours, whether southern or western. Among the latter Antiochus, king of the Greeks, has the first place. Under the weak Antiochus II. north-eastern Iran was lost to the empire. While the Seleucids were busy elsewhere, probably in the long war with Ptolemy Philadelphia, which occupied Antiochus s later years, Diodotus, viceroy of Bactria, took the title of king. The new kingdom included Sogdiana and Margiana from the first, while the rest of the East, with a single exception scarcely noticed at the time, adhered to the Seleucids. 2 Now the formation of a strong local kingdom, heartily supported by the Greek colonies, and likely to control the neighbouring nomads and protect its own frontiers with strictness, was by no means agreeable to the chiefs of the desert tribes who, like the modern Turcomans, had been wont to pillage the settled lands, and raise blackmail with little hindrance from the weak and distant central authority at Antioch. 3 Accord ingly two brothers, Arsaces and Tiridates, whose tribe, Arsaces the Parnians, a subdivision of the Dahse, had hitherto 1 - pastured their flocks in Bactria, on the banks of the Ochus, moved west into Seleucid territory near Parthia. An in sult offered to the younger brother by the satrap Pherecles moved them to revolt ; Pherecles was slain, and Parthia freed from the Macedonians. Arsaces was then proclaimed first king of Parthia (250 B.C.). Such is the later official tradition, and we possess no other account of the beginnings of the Arsacid dynasty. But when the official account transforms Arsaces, who, according to genuine tradition, was the leader of a robber horde and of uncertain descent, into a Bactrian, the descendant of Phriapites, son of Artaxerxes II. (who was called Arsaces before his accession), and makes him conspire with his brother and five others, like the seven 1 See the accounts of the army of Antiochus III. in Polyb., v. 79, and Livy, xxxvii. 40. 2 Justin, xli. 4, 5, exaggerates rhetorically, on the basis of some such expression as that used by Strabo, in speaking of the event. 3 These brigands had destroyed two of Alexander s cities, Alexandria in Margiana and Heraclea in Media, before the time of Antiochus I. ; Pliny, X. II., vi. 47, 48.