Page:PhilipK.Hitti-SyriaAShortHistory.djvu/65

Rh surnamed Nicator (victor), had expanded his realm as far as the Oxus and the Indus, making it for a time much the most extensive and powerful of all the states which arose from the fragments of Alexander's ephemeral empire. While seeking to add Macedonia to his holdings, he was assassinated there in 280.

The most enduring accomplishment of Seleucus I, however, was not his territorial conquests, but the Greek cities he had founded in an effort to further the Hellenization policy projected by Alexander. These numbered over thirty, of which the most important inside Syria were the political and cultural capital Antioch, the military base and treasury at Apamea on the middle Orontes, and the port of Latakia (Laodicea). All sites for new cities were chosen with care, at strategic spots which were both readily accessible and yet easily defended. In many cases native hamlets or fortresses were transformed into Greco-Macedonian cities, both by Seleucus and his successors in the north, and by the Egyptian Ptolemies in the south. Old towns with Semitic names, which were recolonized and renamed, included Acre (Ptolemais), Beth-shean (Scythopolis), Hamah (Epiphania), Shayzar (Larissa) and Aleppo (Beroea). None of the new names survived, except Tripoli. In these recolonized cities the native element was allowed a larger place than in the new settlements, and in consequence the colonists themselves often went native, so that in due course these cities shed their thin veneer of Hellenism along with the Greek nomenclature and reasserted their Semitic character. Likewise most districts, mountains and rivers which were given Greek names eventually reverted to Semitic forms.

The new Greek city-colonies were laid out according to a preconceived plan characterized by straight streets intersecting at right angles, and were provided with forums, theatres, gymnasiums, baths and other institutions. In them the constitutional form of the Greek city-state was maintained with ample provision for the self-realization of the Rh