Syria under Tigranes

Nor could the kingdom of the Seleucids, already in full course of dissolution, oppose greater resistance to the new great-king.  Here the south from the Egyptian frontier to Straton’s Tower (Caesarea) was under the rule of the Jewish prince Alexander Jannaeus, who extended and strengthened his dominion step by step in conflict with his Syrian, Egyptian, and Arabic neighbours and with the imperial cities.  The larger towns of Syria—­Gaza, Straton’s Tower, Ptolemais, Beroea—­attempted to maintain themselves on their own footing, sometimes as free communities, sometimes under so-called tyrants; the capital, Antioch, in particular, was virtually independent.  Damascus and the valleys of Lebanon had submitted to the Nabataean prince, Aretas of Petra.  Lastly, in Cilicia the pirates or the Romans bore sway.  And for this crown breaking into a thousand fragments the Seleucid princes continued perseveringly to quarrel with each other, as though it were their object to make royalty a jest and an offence to all; nay more, while this family, doomed like the house of Laius to perpetual discord, had its own subjects all in revolt, it even raised claims to the throne of Egypt vacant by the decease of king Alexander ii without heirs.  Accordingly king Tigranes set to work there without ceremony.  Eastern Cilicia was easily subdued by him, and the citizens of Soli and other towns were carried off, just like the Cappadocians, to Armenia.  In like manner the province of Upper Syria, withthe exception of the bravely-defended town of Seleucia at the mouth of the Orontes, and the greater part of Phoenicia were reduced by force; Ptolemais was occupied by the Armenians about 680, and the Jewish state was already seriously threatened by them.  Antioch, the old capital of the Seleucids, became one of the residences of the great-king.  Already from 671, the year following the peace between Sulla and Mithradates, Tigranes is designated in the Syrian annals as the sovereign of the country, and Cilicia and Syria appear as an Armenian satrapy under Magadates, the lieutenant of the great-king.  The age of the kings of Nineveh, ofthe Salmanezers and Sennacheribs, seemed to be renewed; again oriental despotism pressed heavily on the trading population of the Syrian coast, as it did formerly on Tyre and Sidon; again great states of the interior threw themselves on the provinces along the Mediterranean; again Asiatic hosts, said to number half a million combatants, appeared on the Cilician and Syrian coasts.  As Salmanezer and Nebuchadnezzar had formerly carried the Jews to Babylon, so now from all the frontier provinces of the new kingdom—­from Corduene, Adiabene, Assyria, Cilicia, Cappadocia—­ the inhabitants, especially the Greek or half-Greek citizens of the towns, were compelled to settle with their whole goods and chattels (under penalty of the confiscation of everything that they left behind) in the new capital, one of those gigantic cities proclaiming