James Baquet

When Alexander the Great died at 32 in 323 B.C., he left behind an empire that his father could never have imagined. It was so large that it could not be sustained, stretching all the way to northwestern India, and — with Egypt — embracing parts of three continents. The collapse began within Alexander’s lifetime, but within a few decades of his death four stable blocs emerged: the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt (of which Cleopatra was once queen); Attalid Anatolia or Pergamum (including part of Asia Minor); the Antigonids back home in Macedon; and by far the largest area, the Seleucid Empire (Mesopotamia and Central Asia).

It is this last that interests us today. As mentioned in the story on the siege at Masada, the Roman general Pompey the Great took Palestine in 63 B.C. But long before that, in 190 B.C., Rome dealt a decisive blow to the ambitions of Antiochus III the Great of the Seleucid Empire. (All these “Greats!”)

A year or so earlier, Antiochus had been driven out of Greece at the Second Battle of Thermopylae (not to be confused with the one fought between the Greeks and Persians nearly 300 years earlier, sometimes called “Thermopylae I”). After their victory, the Romans — under Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus; his younger brother, the better-know Scipio Africanus; and Rome’s ally, the then ruler of the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum, Eumenes II — crossed the Hellespont (at the boundary between Europe and Asia) and engaged the Seleucids near Magnesia ad Sipylum, about 65 kilometers northeast of modern Izmir, Turkey.

The battle was brief. Afterward, at the Treaty of Apamea in 188 (after some mopping up by the Romans and their allies in Asia Minor), Antiochus III gave up any claims in Europe, as well as all of his Asian territory west of the Taurus Mountains — essentially all of his holdings in Asia Minor, some of which went to Pergamum. This confined the Seleucids to what was called Syria. They also had to pay a large indemnity to Rome, and by a century later their empire was collapsing. Pompey’s actions in 63 finished them off.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. more likely to last, and not fail

2. assertions of ownership

3. finishing the details

4. held together

5. attack, strike

6. payment in compensation for damage or loss

7. group united in common interest

8. dealt the final blows

9. certain, definite

10. limited, restricted