TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER,A JEWISH FAMILY BY THE NAME OF THE MACCABEES BEGAN A REVOLUTION AND TRIED TO SET THE COUNTRY FREE FROM FOREIGN INFLUENCE.BUT THE STATE WHICH THE MACCABEES TRIED TO FOUND NEVER FLOURISHED AND WHEN THE ROMANS CONQUERED WESTERN ASIA THEY MADE PALESTINE A SEMI-INDEPENDENT KINGDOM AND APPOINTED ONE OF THEIR POLITICAL HENCHMEN TO BE KING OF THE UNHAPPY LAND
In the old land of Canaan there was not room for two conflicting forms of worship.
A tribe of people who accepted Jehovah as the one absolute and undisputed master of their world could not tolerate the rivalry of an indefinite Zeus who was said (by the heathen,of course)to live on the top of a savage rock somewhere in the land of the Barbarians.
Antiochus Epiphanes failed to recognise this.As a result,he wasted most of his years and all of his energy upon the unsuccessful attempt to turn his obstinate Jewish subjects into unwilling Greeks.
He was (as we have said)the eighth ruler of the family of the Seleucids,and he ought to have known better.
But when he was quite young,he had been sent to Rome as a hostage.He had spent fifteen years of his life in the city which then was the centre of the entire world,both civilised and otherwise.
Rome had grown immensely rich and the old simple virtues of the nation (if they had ever existed,which we sincerely doubt)had made room for the more amusing but less ponderous entertainment provided by a large and important colony of Greeks.
The Greeks in those days played the rle of the foreigner in modern New York.The typical American builds and buys and sells and plans and looks after the material needs of his continent.
But his orchestras are composed of Germans and Dutchmen and Frenchmen,and his theatres devote much of their time to plays written by Russians and Norwegians,and his restaurants employ French cooks and his pictures are painted for him by half a dozen European nations.
The American is too busy to attend to all those matters,and patiently (if sometimes somewhat contemptuously)he leaves them to people who can do those things better than he can do them himself,but who lack the necessary ambition for a life of political or physical creation.
It was not different in the Rome of the late Republic and the early Empire.
The Roman was first of all a soldier and a law-giver and a statesman and a taxgatherer and a road-builder and a city-planner.
He conquered and administered the entire known world from the dark and foggy coast of Wales to the endless plains of Dacia and the scorching sands of northern Africa.
That was his job.
He did it well and he liked it.
But he was too busy to bother about such details as schools and academies and theatres and churches and candy-stores.
And so Rome soon was swarming with the brilliant but none too reliable progeny of Pericles and Aeschylus and Phidias.
They were very plausible orators,those handsome blackhaired Greek teachers who talked vaguely of a thousand things of which the honest Roman had never heard,and which therefore had meant nothing in his life.
They could argue about the Gods and in the same breath they could tell a man how to dress.They could explain the mysteries of a new Oriental religion to the women and at the same time give them a few useful hints about the use of cosmetics.They were never at a loss for a jesting word,and altogether,they turned the dull and dour Roman community into something which began to resemble that famed marketplace at the foot of the Acropolis.
Young Antiochus,fresh from distant Syria,fell an easy victim to the agreeable lure of the great and wonderful city (like a youngster from a bleak farm in northern Michigan thrown into the heart of New York),and during the fifteen years of his residence,he developed into such an ardent admirer of Greek philosophy and Greek art and Greek music and everything Greek,that Alcibiades himself could not have been more devout in his love for the superior virtues of Athens than this little Asiatic crown-prince.
Of course,as soon as the young man was called back to his own kingdom,he was bitterly disappointed by what he found at home.
Jerusalem had never regained the old splendour of David and Solomon.Even in those early days,it would have ranked as a backward village when compared to such worldly-wise centres as Corinth and Athens and Rome and Carthage.
It had always been just a little off the beaten track of civilisation.It was regarded by the Babylonians and the Greeks and the Egyptians (if they ever thought of it at all)as a nice but decidedly provincial centre,inhabited by a narrow-minded and uncomfortable set of people who regarded themselves with undue seriousness and showed a very evident contempt for everything foreign.
The period of the great exile had not improved matters.Many of the Jews had preferred to remain in Babylon.Two centuries later,the greater part of the survivors had been lured away to Alexandria and Damascus,and as we have seen in the last Chapter,only the most pious had remained and they turned the intellectual life of Jerusalem into a very exclusive theological debating society.
And now Antiochus,fresh from the delights of Rome,talking and thinking of athletic feasts and Dionysian processions,was obliged to spend his days among sombre and morose scholars who were staring themselves blind upon obscure paragraphs of an ancient law for which their ruler and his friends felt and expressed a most profound dislike.
Antiochus rashly decided to become the apostle of the superior Greek culture.
But he was like a man who endeavours to hasten the natural progress of a glacier.
He accomplished very little and caused a great disaster.
At first he tried to make use of the usual dissensions among his Jewish subjects to further his own ends.
There was one small party in the country which was not entirely unfriendly towards the Greek mode of living.
