Antiochus:
inherited a collapsing empire;
recovered most of it;
lost Phoenicia and Palestine to Ptolmey;
won them back;
checked the Parthians;
campaigned as far as Greece;
gave refuge to Hannibal;
was defeated by the Romans;
left his son a large domain although less than half of what he had ruled;
made important cultural and legal innovations.
We can learn some history by reading historical fiction and time travel fiction.
The year 209 BC saw Antiochus in Bactria, where the Greco-Bactrian king Euthydemus I had supplanted the original rebel. Antiochus again met with success.[14] Euthydemus was defeated by Antiochus at the Battle of the Arius but after sustaining a famous siege in his capital Bactra (Balkh), he obtained an honourable peace by which Antiochus promised Euthydemus' son Demetrius the hand of one of his daughters.[12][15]
-copied from the Wiki article (see the above link).
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Problem was, as Anderson had one of his characters saying, the Greeks never did succeed at working out a stable socio/political system covering a really large territory. Hence the fragmentation of the Hellenistic world into quarrelsome states whose conflicts with each other weakened them, leaving them exposed to attack by the Parthians in the East and the Romans to their west.
Sean
Greek political loyalties did tend to be intensely localized. The bonds of the city-state were intense, but exclusionary -- Romans were far more liberal with their citizenship than any Greek -polis-.
Even when Hellenistic kings ruled great kingdoms, they thought more in terms of cities (of which they founded a great many). It was a world of monarchies with an anti-monarchic ideology, which eventually prevailed even in Macedonia because of the prestige of Classical culture.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Then that pinpoints why the post-Alexander the Great Hellenistic "ecumene" failed to work out a satisfactory polity: to have an anti-monarchic ideology in a monarchical world brought in a fatal internal flaw. And, despite their own difficulties with monarchy, the Romans succeeded better and longer than the Greeks, partly because they were far more generous than the Greeks at extending Roman citizenship.
Sean
The Federal leagues of Hellenistic Greece were a promising development, which unfortunately didn't last because the kings regarded them as a threat. Some of them had central assemblies, elected executives, and joint citizenship.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I suspect INTERNAL factors also played a role in why these federal leagues of Hellenistic Greece failed. It could not all have been because the king of Macedon, say, was hostile to them.
Sean
Post a Comment