Seleucid Empire

The Seleucid Empire was founded in 312 BC when Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals, retook Babylon during the wars of the Diadochi, and at its greatest extent it held everything from the Aegean to the Indus - the largest of the Hellenistic successor states and the most difficult to govern. It was a Macedonian ruling class administering Persians, Babylonians, Jews, Bactrians and Greeks across territory with no natural centre, held together by a chain of Greek city foundations planted as garrisons and administrative nodes; Antioch and Seleucia on the Tigris were among the largest cities in the world. Seleucus traded his Indian provinces to Chandragupta Maurya for five hundred war elephants and used them to win at Ipsus. The structural problem was permanent: the empire fought Ptolemaic Egypt six times over Coele-Syria while Parthia and Bactria detached themselves in the east. Antiochus III restored much of it in a seven-year eastern campaign, then lost the west to Rome at Magnesia in 190 BC and accepted the Treaty of Apamea, whose indemnity shaped policy afterwards. His son Antiochus IV's attempt to impose Hellenistic worship in Jerusalem provoked the Maccabean revolt and the loss of Judaea. Dynastic civil war then ran almost continuously for a century, with rival claimants backed by Egypt and Rome, until the state was a strip of Syria. Pompey abolished it in 63 BC and made it a Roman province. Its calendar, counting from 312 BC, was the first continuous era-reckoning in history and was still in use in parts of the Near East eighteen centuries later. Seleucus himself was assassinated in 281 BC while trying to add Macedon to his territory. The dynasty produced more claimants than reigns in its final decades.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history