Seleucid Empire

The largest and most difficult share

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983)formation

When Alexander's officers stopped ruling on anybody's behalf and called themselves kings, Seleucus took the part nobody else wanted: Babylonia, and behind it Iran, and behind that the satrapies reaching to the Hindu Kush.

He had been given Babylon as a satrapy in 321, lost it, and came back in 312 with about eight hundred men, and it is from that return that his dynasty would afterwards count its years. Over the following decade he took the whole Iranian plateau and the eastern provinces, marched to the Indus, met Chandragupta Maurya, and made a bargain with him: the satrapies beyond the Hindu Kush for five hundred war elephants. He used them at Ipsus in 301 to destroy Antigonus, and that battle gave him Syria and made his the largest of the successor kingdoms.

The structural problem was permanent and everything else follows from it. A Macedonian and Greek ruling class of a few tens of thousands had to govern Iranian, Mesopotamian, Syrian and Anatolian populations of many millions, across a territory that took months to cross, with no historic claim to any of it.

Every other power that ever ruled Iran had an answer to the claim question. The Achaemenids were Persians ruling from Persia. The Parthians and the Sasanians after them both asserted descent from the Achaemenids. The Seleucids had nothing: their founder was one of Alexander's officers, the land was somebody else's, and the dynasty could not point at an ancestral homeland, because its ancestral homeland was Macedon and Macedon belonged to a rival.

What they did about that came in two parts. First they took a great deal more of Asia than they had been given, and then they set about making the land itself mean something.

From Phrygia to the Indus

Drafted from Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899)expansion

Seleucus got his kingdom back with about eight hundred men and ended up ruling more of Asia than anyone since Alexander. Appian, writing his Syrian Wars four centuries later, gives both the scale of it and the way it was assembled, and the two do not match in the way you would expect.

Getting Babylon

He had been satrap of Babylon and had lost it to Antigonus, fleeing to Egypt. Ptolemy sent him back with a small force — a thousand foot and a few hundred horse — and with that he took Babylonia, and in this way Seleucus became king of Babylonia.

Media came next, and Appian's phrasing is worth keeping: he acquired that kingdom slaying with his own hand in battle the satrap Antigonus had left there.

Then Ipsus in 301, where Antigonus commanded in person and fought in person although he was over eighty, and was killed. The victors divided his territory, and Syria from the Euphrates to the sea, with inland Phrygia, fell to Seleucus.

The list

What follows in Appian is not a narrative but an inventory, and the inventory is the point:

Always lying in wait for the neighbouring nations, strong in arms and persuasive in council, he acquired Mesopotamia, Armenia, the so-called Seleucid Cappadocia, the Persians, Parthians, Bactrians, Arabs, Tapyri, Sogdiani, Arachotes, Hyrcanians, and other adjacent peoples that had been subdued by Alexander, as far as the river Indus.

Strong in arms and persuasive in council. Appian puts the two in one clause and does not say which did more, because in this empire they were the same instrument: most of these peoples had been Alexander's, had spent twenty years deciding whose they now were, and were acquired by a mixture of marching and argument.

The boundaries, Appian says, were the most extensive in Asia after Alexander's.

The Indian frontier, settled by marriage

He crossed the Indus and went to war with Chandragupta, and Appian describes the outcome in a single clause that is one of the most consequential in the book: they came to an understanding with each other and contracted a marriage relationship.

That is the eastern limit of the Hellenistic world being fixed by treaty between two men who had both taken their kingdoms in the confusion after Alexander. The Seleucids gave up the Indus provinces and got five hundred war elephants, which turned up at Ipsus.

An empire named after a family

The other method of possession was nomenclature, and Seleucus used it on an industrial scale. Appian counts the foundations: sixteen Antiochs after his father, five Laodiceas after his mother, nine after himself, four after his wives — three Apameas and a Stratonicea.

The effect, Appian notes, is that towns across Syria and the barbarian regions of upper Asia carry Greek and Macedonian names: Beroea, Edessa, Pella, Amphipolis, Larissa, Chalcis, Arethusa, Apollonia; in Parthia a Hecatompylos and a Calliope; in India an Alexandropolis; in Scythia an Alexandreschata.

The Magi and the hour

The best story Appian tells about any of it concerns Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, and it is a story about local people trying to stop the empire and failing.

The Magi were ordered to name the propitious day and hour to begin the foundations. They falsified the hour — because they did not want to have such a stronghold built against themselves.

Seleucus waited in his tent for the appointed moment and the army stood ready. And then, suddenly, at the true hour, the men seemed to hear a voice ordering them on, and sprang to work with such alacrity that the heralds sent to stop them could not.

Afterwards, granted immunity, the Magi confessed:

That which is fated, O King, whether it be for better or worse, neither man nor city can change... We feared lest it should be a stronghold against ourselves, and falsified the appointed time. Destiny is stronger than crafty Magi or an unsuspecting king.

They were right about what the city was for. Seleucia-on-the-Tigris drew the population of Babylon into itself and became the great city of Mesopotamia for four hundred years — a Greek foundation planted forty miles from Babylon, deliberately, to replace it.

Making the land mean something

Drafted from Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (2014)peak

Kosmin's argument is that the Seleucid problem was ideological before it was military, and that the dynasty's characteristic activities — the founding, the naming, the constant travelling, the counting — are all attempts to solve it.

They founded cities, in numbers no other Hellenistic dynasty approached — dozens of them, from Antioch and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris to Ai-Khanoum on the Oxus, planted as garrisons and markets and administrative anchors. And they named them: Seleucia, Antioch, Laodicea, Apamea, over and over, after the founder, his father, his mother and his wife, so that a traveller crossing the empire in any direction passed through the dynasty's family repeatedly. A landscape that belonged to nobody in particular was overwritten with one that belonged to them.

They moved constantly. The Seleucid king was rarely in a capital; the anabasis — the royal progress east through the provinces, receiving submissions, appointing, campaigning and being seen — was a governing instrument rather than an emergency measure. Antiochus III's version of it ran seven years and reached the Hindu Kush, and it is the high-water mark of the dynasty.

They negotiated their edges rather than claiming everything. The treaty with Chandragupta gave away territory Alexander had taken, in exchange for something usable, and Kosmin reads the frontier arrangements and the commissioned geography as an attempt to define a bounded and therefore defensible thing rather than an unbounded and therefore fictional one.

And they counted from a fixed point, which is the most durable thing they did. The Seleucid Era runs continuously from 312 BC with no restarts — the first such count anywhere, a century and a half before Rome had one and eight hundred years before the hijri calendar. A dynasty that could not date by the reigns of ancestors it did not have dated by arithmetic instead, and the arithmetic outlived the empire by two thousand years: Syriac Christians still use it.

The anabasis

Drafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)peak

Between 212 and 205 Antiochus III marched east to recover the provinces the dynasty had lost, went as far as India, and came home having recovered almost none of them. He returned with the title the Great, and it was not a joke.

Bactria

The eastern campaign's decisive moment is a conversation, and Polybius is the only source for it.

Antiochus had beaten Euthydemus in the field and shut him up in Bactra, and the siege was going nowhere. So envoys went back and forth, and Euthydemus made an argument in two parts.

The first part was legal. He was not a rebel: he was not himself a revolted subject, but had destroyed the descendants of some who had been such, and so had obtained the kingdom of Bactria. Whoever had seceded from the Seleucids, it was not him — he had killed those people and taken their place, which in the logic of the period made him a legitimate king rather than a usurper.

The second part was a threat about a third party:

if he did not yield to this demand, neither of them would be safe: seeing that great hordes of Nomads were close at hand, who were a danger to both; and that if they admitted them into the country, it would certainly be utterly barbarised.

Two Greek kings fighting each other on the Oxus would open the frontier, and the steppe would come through it.

The terms

Antiochus, Polybius says, had been looking for a way out of the controversy for some time, and accepted at once.

Euthydemus sent his son Demetrius to confirm the treaty. Antiochus received the young man, judged from his appearance, his conversation and the dignity of his manners that he was worthy of royal power — and promised him one of his own daughters, and conceded the royal title to his father.

Then he provisioned his army, took Euthydemus's elephants, and left.

What he actually got

He crossed the Hindu Kush into India, renewed the old friendship with the Indian king Sophagasenus, took more elephants until he had a hundred and fifty, took treasure, and came home through Arachosia, Drangiana and Carmania.

Set that beside what he had gone out to do. Bactria was not recovered; its king was recognised, given a royal title and offered a Seleucid princess. India was not recovered; its king was given a treaty. What came back west was a column of elephants, a quantity of money, and a set of formal acknowledgements that the Seleucid king was the senior party.

That is what an empire of this kind looked like at its height. Antiochus had marched from the Mediterranean to the Punjab and back, and the settlement he imposed was suzerainty rather than administration — the eastern kings kept their kingdoms and conceded precedence.

Why it was still worth doing

It bought thirty years. The east stayed quiet, the elephants and the money paid for the wars in Syria and Asia Minor, and the title the Great was earned in the one way available: by being the first Seleucid since the founder to have stood on both edges of the inheritance.

And Euthydemus's warning turned out to be exactly right, on a delay. The two Greek kingdoms did not destroy each other, and the nomads came anyway — sixty years after this conversation, the Yuezhi crossed the Oxus and the kingdom of Bactria ended.

What a Greek city was for

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983)aside?What aside means

The city foundations were the empire's administrative machinery and its military reserve at once, and the second function is the one that kept the dynasty alive.

Settlers — Macedonian and Greek, and later others enrolled on the same terms — were given plots of land in and around a foundation on condition of military service. The holding was heritable so long as the obligation was met. When the king called, the katoikoi turned out as the core of the phalanx, and between campaigns they farmed, voted in their own assemblies and worshipped their own gods.

Land for service is one of the oldest arrangements there is — the Mitanni had a version of it a thousand years earlier, and Byzantium, the Seljuks and the whole apparatus of the iqta' would have versions of it long afterwards — but the Seleucid and Ptolemaic ones are the same answer to the same question, adopted within a decade of each other by men who had served in the same army. How does a small conquering elite garrison an enormous conquered country without paying for a standing army in cash? It settles the army on the country and lets the country feed it.

Hired troops were the other half and were used continuously rather than exceptionally. Seleucid armies at Raphia and Magnesia contained Greek, Thracian, Galatian, Arab and Iranian contingents on wages, and paying for them is a substantial part of why Magnesia's indemnity was ruinous.

What the system could not do was reach. A katoikia works if it is one link in a chain of them running back to the centre, and the empire's eastern chain broke. Losing the eastern provinces is treated further on, and so is what became of the far end of the chain once it broke.

Fifteen thousand talents

Drafted from Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (1899)contraction

Twenty years after the anabasis, the same king signed a treaty at Apamea that took away his navy, his elephants, half of Asia Minor and the next twelve years of his revenue. Appian preserves the terms, and they are worth reading in full because they are the most thorough dismantling of a great power in the ancient record that did not involve a conquest.

The lecture

The terms were delivered by Scipio, and Appian gives the speech, which is essentially a moral character study of the defeated king.

The grasping nature of Antiochus has been the cause of his present and past misfortunes. While he was the possessor of a vast empire, which the Romans did not object to, he seized Coele-Syria... Then he invaded Europe, which did not concern him, subjugated Thrace, fortified the Chersonese, and rebuilt Lysimacheia. He passed thence into Greece and took away the liberty of the people whom the Romans had lately freed.

Even after Thermopylae, Scipio says, he did not give up his grabbing propensity; he did not seek peace until the Romans had crossed the Hellespont; he rejected the terms offered; he raised another army and fought on determined to come to an engagement with his betters, until he plunged into this calamity.

Rome, he adds, would be entitled to punish him more severely, but is not accustomed to abuse its own prosperity.

The terms

Then the list.

Abandon Europe altogether, and all of Asia this side of the Taurus. Surrender every elephant, and keep none in future. Surrender ships, and in future keep only the number allowed — twelve warships, enough to police his own subjects, and more only if he is attacked himself. Give twenty hostages of the consul's choosing; among them was Antiochus, the king's younger son. Surrender all prisoners and deserters. Restore to Eumenes of Pergamum what had been taken from his father.

And pay. Five hundred Euboic talents immediately, two thousand five hundred more when the Senate ratified, and twelve thousand over twelve years, each yearly instalment delivered in Rome.

Fifteen thousand talents. The annual instalments had to be carried to the creditor's capital.

The written treaty added the details left indefinite: the boundary fixed at the promontories of Calycadnus and Sarpedonium, beyond which he might not sail for purposes of war; no recruiting mercenaries in Roman territory and no sheltering fugitives from it; the hostages exchanged every third year — except the king's son, who stayed.

It was engraved on bronze and deposited in the Capitol, where such treaties were kept.

What it actually removed

Look at the list as an inventory of capability rather than of humiliation.

The elephants were the dynasty's strategic arm and had been since Seleucus got five hundred of them from Chandragupta; Antiochus had refreshed the stock in India twenty years earlier. Gone, permanently, by treaty.

The fleet had made the Aegean coast and the Levantine ports usable as a single system. Reduced to twelve hulls.

Asia Minor beyond the Taurus was where the Greek cities and much of the money were. Gone.

And fifteen thousand talents, payable annually to Rome, out of a revenue that had just lost its richest province.

A state cannot be a great power without ships, elephants, Anatolia and money, and the treaty removed all four in one document — without Rome occupying a single acre of what was left.

Afterwards

Antiochus went east to find money and was killed, according to the tradition, robbing a temple in Elymais.

The dynasty lasted another century and a quarter and never again fought a war it chose. What is usually described as Seleucid decline begins here, in a set of clauses, and the clauses are more informative than any battle: the empire was not defeated out of existence. It was contractually reduced, and then it declined because the terms of the contract made anything else impossible.

Losing the east without noticing

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983)contraction

Around 250 BC the satrap of Bactria, Diodotus, stopped acknowledging the king and struck coins in his own name. Within a few years the Parni, a nomadic people from the steppe east of the Caspian, moved into the satrapy of Parthia and took it, and out of that seizure came the dynasty that would rule Iran for the next four and a half centuries.

Neither event was a catastrophe at the time and neither was treated as one. The Seleucids were fighting the Ptolemies over Coele-Syria, which was closer, richer and contested by an equal; the eastern provinces were four months away, and the imperial answer to a satrap who stopped remitting was an expedition when one could be spared.

Antiochus III spared one. Between 212 and 205 he conducted the great anabasis — east through Media, into Parthia, over the Elburz, into Bactria where he besieged Bactra for two years, then over the Hindu Kush to renew the treaty with an Indian king, then back through Arachosia and Carmania and up the Gulf. He obtained submissions, tribute, elephants and the title Great King, and he changed nothing structural: Diodotus' successor kept Bactria and the Parthians kept Parthia, both as acknowledged clients.

That is the shape of the loss. The empire never lost a decisive eastern battle, and it never got the east back either; it converted secession into vassalage and then the vassalage lapsed. It was not a conquest at any stage. It was a chain of Greek cities that stopped being connected to one another, beginning at the far end.

Then Antiochus turned west, met Rome, and lost at Magnesia in 190. After the indemnity there was no money for anabases. Mesopotamia went to the Parthians in the 140s; a Seleucid army sent to recover it in 130 was destroyed and its king killed; and the empire's eastern frontier ended up at the Euphrates, where some version of it would sit for the next six hundred years.

A Greek city on the Oxus

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983)aside?What aside means

At the confluence of the Oxus and the Kokcha, in what is now northern Afghanistan, French archaeologists excavated a city with a gymnasium, a theatre seating several thousand, Corinthian capitals, and an inscription recording that a man named Klearchos had copied the Delphic maxims and brought them from Delphi to set up in the sanctuary. It is roughly four thousand kilometres from Delphi.

Ai-Khanoum is the Seleucid settlement policy made visible. Greek and Macedonian colonists were planted across the empire in dozens of foundations, holding land in exchange for military obligation, running their own civic institutions, and functioning as garrisons, markets and administrative anchors at once. Where the network held, the empire held.

It also shows the limit. The city was abandoned around 145 BC, after Bactria had seceded and nomadic incursions from the north had begun, and the Greek presence in Central Asia continued afterwards as a series of increasingly local kingdoms minting increasingly Indian-looking coins. Distance was the enemy: a Greek city on the Oxus depended on a chain of such cities reaching back to the Mediterranean, and when the chain broke the far end did not survive as Greek for long.

The Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara — Greek drapery, Greek proportion, an artistic vocabulary from the Aegean applied to Indian subject matter — is the residue of that failure. It outlived the political project that carried it east by several centuries, and it is what a chain of Greek cities leaves behind after it stops being a chain.

The last piece of Syria

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983)end

After Magnesia the dynasty had a hundred and twenty-five years left and spent most of them fighting itself.

The pattern from about 150 BC is continuous dynastic war: rival Seleucids, some of them genuine and some of them produced by Ptolemaic Egypt or by Rome or by the cities, holding pieces of Syria against each other, with the eastern provinces gone, Judaea independent, and the Parthians taking Mesopotamia. Demetrius II was captured by the Parthians in 139 and held for ten years. Antiochus VII went east to recover Iran in 130, won two battles, and was killed with his army the following year — the last serious Seleucid attempt to be an empire.

By the 90s there were sometimes four claimants at once in a kingdom the size of Lebanon. In 83 the Syrians invited Tigranes of Armenia to take it, which he did and held for fourteen years — an Armenian king in Antioch, invited in by the inhabitants, because a foreign occupation was preferable to another round of the family's own.

Pompey ended it in 64. He declined to recognise the surviving claimant, annexed Syria as a Roman province, and the dynasty stopped without a battle.

It is difficult to find the catastrophe. Nearly two centuries of continuous contraction, and no single day on which the empire was destroyed: there is Magnesia, which cost Anatolia and a ruinous quantity of money; there is the loss of the east, which happened while nobody was looking; and there is a century and a half of a family that could not stop producing claimants. A state can be beaten to death slowly enough that no historian can name the blow.

What it left, other people used. The Parthians and then the Sasanians governed Mesopotamia through cities the Seleucids had planted, and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris sat opposite Ctesiphon for centuries. The Greek presence the foundations put into Central Asia turned into the sculpture of Gandhara. The Maccabean revolt against Antiochus IV produced a Jewish state and a body of literature that is still read. And the era they invented, counting from a general's return to Babylon with eight hundred men, is still counting.

The Cities

Drafted from Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905)afterlife

Seleucus founded a capital on the west bank of the Tigris and named it after himself, three centuries before Christ. The Arabs, arriving nine hundred years later, found the place under a different name and called it something else again: Al-Mada'in, the Cities, plural, because by then Seleucia and Ctesiphon had run together into one sprawl on both banks and nobody could sensibly call it one town.

That is the Seleucid afterlife in a phrase. The dynasty is gone, the language is gone, and the sites are still the sites.

What the Parthians and Sasanians did with them

Neither of the empires that took Mesopotamia from the Seleucids built a new capital in empty country. They built next to Seleucia. Ctesiphon went up on the opposite bank and became the seat of the Parthian and then the Sasanian kings, and when Ardashir had taken the empire he refounded the western city under his own name — Bih-Ardashir, the good town of King Ardashir, which the Arabs shortened to Bahurasir. The successor of Seleucus's capital is a Persian town called after the man from Fars, standing on the same bank, opposite the palace of the kings who had beaten the Parthians.

There is a stranger episode still. In AD 540 Khusraw I took Antioch — the Seleucid capital of Syria, the other great foundation of the dynasty, together with the Seleucia that stood on the Orontes — and did what Persian monarchs did with a captured population: he moved it. The Antiochenes were resettled in a new suburb across the Tigris from the ruins of the original Seleucia, and the suburb was called Rumiyah, the Roman town, and was reported to have been laid out on the plan of Antioch itself.

So in the sixth century AD there were, within sight of one another on the Tigris: a city founded by Seleucus, a city refounded by the Sasanian who ended the Parthians, and a copy of the Seleucid capital of Syria populated by deported Syrians. Eight hundred and fifty years after Ipsus, the map of that stretch of river was still being drawn around Seleucid foundations by kings who had never heard a word of Greek spoken at court.

And then it emptied out

The end is undramatic, which by now should be no surprise.

When al-Mansur began building Baghdad, seven leagues upriver in the eighth century, he proposed to demolish the great arched hall of the Sasanian palace and cart the materials north. His Persian vizier Khalid the Barmecide argued against it and lost the argument; the caliph was obstinate. What saved the arch was arithmetic. When the order came to be carried out, taking the thing down proved to cost more than the bricks were worth, and it was left standing. It is standing now.

Baghdad drew everything to itself. In the tenth century Al-Mada'in was still a small populous town with a Friday mosque from the conquest and markets built of burnt brick. By the fourteenth, Mustawfi reports both Al-Mada'in and Rumiyah as uninhabited ruins, with only the villages on the west bank still holding people.

Seventeen centuries after Seleucus chose the site, what is on it is a field, an arch, and a name in the plural. The dynasty that could not find a claim to the land, and answered by covering it with its own family's names, was in the end outlived by the places rather than by the names — except in one case, which is the era. The count that began with a general coming back to Babylon with eight hundred men had no ancestors in it and needed none, and it is still running.