Antiochus III

Antiochus III spent the first half of a 36-year reign rebuilding the Seleucid Empire, which had been falling apart when he inherited it, and earned the title "the Great" for marching his armies to the edge of India. The second half ended in collision with Rome, whose victories cost his dynasty Asia Minor and marked the start of its long decline.

Antiochus was born around 241 BCE, near Susa in Persia, a son of King Seleucus II and Laodice II. He came to the throne at about eighteen, in 223 BCE, after his elder brother Seleucus III was murdered in Anatolia. The empire he received was crumbling: Bactria and Parthia had broken away in the east, much of Asia Minor was lost, and in 222 BCE the governors of Media and Persis, the brothers Molon and Alexander, rose in revolt. That same year he married Laodice, a princess of Pontus.

Guided at first by his minister Hermeias, the young king attacked the Ptolemaic province of southern Syria instead of facing the rebels, and the campaign failed. In 221 BCE he marched east himself and the revolt of Molon collapsed; he then arranged the murder of Hermeias. A new war for southern Syria went well until 217 BCE, when Ptolemy IV beat him heavily at Raphia and forced him back north of Lebanon. He then turned on his cousin Achaeus, who had declared himself king in Asia Minor, drove him into Sardis, captured him and had him executed by 213 BCE.

From 212 BCE Antiochus set out to recover the far provinces. He forced the king of Sophene to pay tribute, and in 209 BCE invaded Parthia, taking its capital Hecatompylos, after which the Parthian king seems to have made peace. In Bactria he defeated the Greek king Euthydemus but, after failing to take Bactra by siege, made an honourable peace that let him keep his crown and promised a Seleucid princess to his son. He then crossed the Hindu Kush into the Kabul valley, where, according to Polybius, he renewed ties with an Indian king called Sophagasenus and received more elephants, bringing his herd to 150. After returning west through Seistan and Kerman and raiding the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf, he was hailed as the Great and took the old Persian royal title of Great King.

When the child Ptolemy V came to the Egyptian throne around 204 BCE, Antiochus reportedly agreed with Philip V of Macedon to divide the Ptolemaic overseas possessions between them. He invaded southern Syria again, and in 198 BCE his victory at Panium, near the sources of the Jordan, ended Ptolemaic rule over Judea. According to Josephus, he treated the Jews of Jerusalem generously, cutting their taxes and allowing them to live by their ancestral laws. In 193 BCE his daughter Cleopatra married Ptolemy V.

Antiochus next moved to secure the coasts of Asia Minor and, in 196 BCE, gained a foothold in Thrace, alarming Greek cities that appealed to Rome. The fugitive Carthaginian general Hannibal joined his court. In 192 BCE Antiochus landed in Greece with about 10,000 men, as an ally of the Aetolian League and posing as a defender of Greek freedom. The Roman Republic routed him at Thermopylae in 191 BCE, followed him into Asia and crushed him at Magnesia in 190 BCE. By the Treaty of Apamea in 188 BCE he gave up all his lands north and west of the Taurus Mountains, most of which Rome handed to its allies Rhodes and Pergamon.

The defeat loosened his hold on the provinces he had won back. He led a new expedition east, and in 187 BCE he was killed while plundering a temple of Bel in Elymais, in Persia. His son Seleucus IV succeeded him, followed by another son, Antiochus IV, whose policies in Judea provoked the Maccabean revolt.

Our 200 BCE map shows the Seleucid Empire near its restored height under Antiochus, after Panium, beside a shrunken Ptolemaic Kingdom and the rising Parthian Empire in Iran.