Antiochus IV
Antiochus IV nearly took Egypt, was turned back by a Roman envoy who drew a circle round him in the sand, and then tried to abolish the religion of the Jews, which is why there is a festival of Hanukkah. He was the younger son of Antiochus III, surrendered to Rome as a hostage after his father's defeat at Magnesia, and spent twelve years in Rome and Athens learning how a republic worked and how a Greek city liked to be flattered. He took the throne in 175 BC over the head of his nephew, called himself Epiphanes, god manifest - the wits of Antioch said Epimanes, the madman, because he drank with commoners in the baths and voted in the city assembly like a citizen - and he spent on the capital as no Seleucid had, finishing the temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens after three centuries. In 170 he invaded Egypt, beat the Ptolemaic army, took Memphis and had himself crowned pharaoh. In 168, back for a second campaign and outside Alexandria, he was met by the Roman ambassador Popillius Laenas, who handed him the Senate's demand to withdraw. Laenas drew a circle round him in the sand with his staff and told him to answer before he stepped out of it. He withdrew. The humiliation is the usual explanation for what followed in Judea, though the sources are hostile and the order of events uncertain: a dispute between rival high priests in Jerusalem was read as revolt and the city was stormed. In 167 the king's decree forbade the Sabbath, circumcision and the Law, and set up an altar to Zeus in the Temple, the abomination of desolation. The rising that answered it under Mattathias and his son Judas Maccabeus won back the Temple in 164 and rededicated it, which is the festival, and won the Jews a state for a century. Antiochus was in the east by then, campaigning against Parthia and robbing temples for money, and died at Tabae in Persia in 164, of illness by the Greek accounts and of divine punishment by the book that made him the type of the persecuting king.
- Lived: 215 BCE – 164 BCE
- Nationality: Seleucid
- Roles: king, monarch, head_of_state
