Seleucus I Founds the Seleucid Empire
Seleucus took the largest share of Alexander's empire and it was the hardest to keep. He had commanded the elite infantry in India, received Babylon in the division of 321 BC, was driven out by a rival, and came back in 312 BC with about a thousand men — the date from which his dynasty counted its era, the first continuous numbered chronology anyone used. Over the following two decades he took everything from the Mediterranean to the Indus. The eastern provinces were the first thing he gave away. Chandragupta Maurya had taken northern India, and Seleucus ceded the territory in about 303 BC in exchange for a marriage alliance and 500 war elephants, which he used at Ipsus in 301 BC to destroy Antigonus. That is one of the better trades in ancient history. The empire he governed was too large and too varied to be held by one court. It contained Greeks, Macedonians, Babylonians, Persians, Jews, Armenians and Bactrians, and it was administered by founding cities — some sixty of them, settled with Greek and Macedonian veterans, which is how Greek became the language of the Near East for a thousand years. Antioch was the western capital and Seleucia on the Tigris the eastern. Bactria and Parthia broke away in the third century, the Maccabees revolted in the second, and Rome took Syria in 64 BC. The Seleucids also supply the clearest case of the limits of Hellenistic rule. The cities were Greek and the countryside was not, the army was recruited from settlers who could not be replaced, and every province that broke away did so with a local dynasty and a local language intact.
- Year: 305 BCE
- Category: Political
