Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/283

 Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age 231 of Rome was able to thrust back permanently from the Euphra- tes. Behind the Parthians other Indo-European tribes absorbed the easternmost dominions of the Seleucids to the frontiers of Fig. 10 1. Restoration of the Public Buildings of Pergamum, A Hellenistic City of Asia Minor. (After Thiersch) Pergamum, on the west coast of Asia Minor (see map, p. 80), became a flourishing city-kingdom in the third century B.C. under the successors of Alexander the Great (p. 229). The dwelUngs of the citizens were all lower down, in front of the group of buildings shown here. These public buildings stand on three terraces —lower, middle, and upper. The large lower terrace, where we see the groups of people, was the main market place, adorned with a vast square marble altar of Zeus, having colonnades on three sides, beneath which was a long sculptured band (frieze) of warring gods and giants (Fig. 112). The middle terrace (at the right) contained a temple of Athena, and the colonnades behmd it adorned the famous library of Pergamum, where the stone bases of library shelves still survive. The tipper terrace once contamed the palace of the king ; the temple now there (directly above the Athena tem- ple) was built by the Roman Emperor Trajan in the first century a.d. India. Thus the Seleucid empire shrank to the region between the Taurus and the Euphrates, commonly called Syria. At the same time the Antigonids, the kings of Macedon, found ^nUgonids^,^ it difficult to maintain their control of Greece, as the fleet of the and Greece Ptolemies pushed into the ^gean. In war after war the three