Antiochus III the Great

Antiochus III was born around 241 BC near Susa in Persia, the younger son of Seleucus II Callinicus and Laodice II. When his elder brother Seleucus III Ceraunus was murdered in Anatolia in 223 BC, Antiochus, aged eighteen and at the time in Babylon, succeeded to a throne in profound crisis. Parthia under the nomadic chieftain Arsaces and Greco-Bactria under the Seleucid satrap Diodotus had broken away in the previous generation; in Asia Minor his cousin Achaeus loomed dangerously powerful; in Media and Persis the governor brothers Molon and Alexander were already in open revolt; the king of Atropatene was withholding tribute; and at court the minister Hermeias held effective control of royal policy and military deployment.

His first major war ended in disaster. Misled by Hermeias and pressed against his own better judgment, he attacked Ptolemaic Syria rather than the urgent eastern rebellion. Polybius records that this strategic inversion almost cost him his throne. He was decisively defeated by Ptolemy IV at the Battle of Raphia in 217 BC, a defeat that nullified four years of southern campaigning and forced his withdrawal north of Lebanon. The eastern rebellion fortunately collapsed of its own factional weight once Antiochus took the field in person against Molon, who took his own life. Antiochus recovered politically by conspiring with his physician to have Hermeias assassinated. He then turned with new clarity against Achaeus, captured him at Sardis in 213 BC, and executed him for treason, restoring central Anatolian administration.

The Anabasis of 212 to 205 BC was one of the great long-distance operations of antiquity. He subdued Armenia under Xerxes of Sophene, defeated the Parthian king Arsaces II at the Battle of Mount Labus, fought the Greco-Bactrian king Euthydemus I at the Arius River, conducted a remarkable two-year siege of Bactra, and concluded an honourable peace that betrothed his daughter to Euthydemus's son Demetrius. He then crossed the Hindu Kush in the literal footsteps of Alexander, reached the realm of the Indian king Sophagasenus, received from him 150 war elephants, and returned via Seistan and Kerman. Polybius records the campaign with admiration. On his return he was acclaimed "Basileus Megas," the Great King, the title borne by the Persian emperors, and he claimed to have restored Seleucid suzerainty over an empire stretching from the Aegean to the Indus. Modern historians stress that this suzerainty was lighter and more nominal than the conquests of Seleucus I, but for his contemporaries the achievement was openly Alexandrine.

When the infant Ptolemy V succeeded in 204 BC, Antiochus concluded a secret pact with Philip V of Macedon to partition the Ptolemaic possessions, and after several years of campaigning won the Fifth Syrian War with a decisive victory at the Battle of Panium near the headwaters of the Jordan in 198 BC. The settlement annexed Coele Syria, Phoenicia, and Judea to the Seleucid Empire. Josephus records that he confirmed Jewish religious autonomy, exempted the Jerusalem priesthood from taxation, granted subventions to the Temple, and resettled two thousand Jewish families from Babylonia into Phrygia and Lydia. The Books of Maccabees would later contrast this pro-Jewish policy bitterly with the persecution carried out by his son Antiochus IV Epiphanes a generation later.

From 196 BC his armies advanced from Asia Minor across the Hellespont into Thrace, alarming the Roman Republic, which after the Second Punic War now styled itself the defender of Greek freedom. The exile Hannibal of Carthage arrived at his court and pressed him toward a continental strategy of war against Rome. In 192 BC, at the invitation of the Aetolian League, Antiochus crossed into mainland Greece with a force of ten thousand men, proclaiming himself "champion of Greek freedom against Roman domination." The campaign collapsed almost immediately under the weight of his slim force. In 191 BC the consul Manius Acilius Glabrio routed him at the pass of Thermopylae; in 190 BC the Cornelii Scipiones defeated him decisively at the Battle of Magnesia ad Sipylum, while Hannibal lost the parallel sea battle off Side. The Treaty of Apamea in 188 BC compelled Antiochus to abandon Asia Minor north and west of the Taurus mountains, to pay an indemnity of fifteen thousand talents over twelve years, to reduce his navy to ten warships, to surrender his war elephants, and to send his son — the future Antiochus IV Epiphanes — as a hostage to Rome. The treaty ended the Seleucid empire's claim to be a Mediterranean power.

Almost every gain of the Anabasis dissolved within years of Apamea. Parthia and Bactria resumed independence; Armenia drifted away; the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum, Rome's chief ally, absorbed much of Asia Minor. In 187 BC, financially crushed by the Roman indemnity, Antiochus marched east to Luristan and attempted to plunder the temple of Bel at Elymaïs. The local population rose against him and killed him on the spot. Ancient historians treated his end as a moral parable: a king who had once been called Alexander reborn was struck down trying to rob a provincial temple in order to pay tribute to Rome. He was succeeded by his son Seleucus IV Philopator, and within a generation his grandson Antiochus IV Epiphanes would precipitate the Maccabean revolt that fatally shattered Seleucid prestige in the eastern Mediterranean.