Seleucid Empire

The Seleucid Empire was the Asian half of Alexander's inheritance, the Greek dynasty that ruled from Syria to the Indus for two and a half centuries. Its founder Seleucus, commander of Alexander's Shield-bearers, took Babylon in 312 BC, the date his era counted from, then traded India's frontier to Chandragupta for five hundred elephants and built his capitals at Seleucia on the Tigris and Antioch on the Orontes. Greek immigrants, settled by the ten thousand in new poleis, formed the ruling elite over Babylonians, Persians, Jews and Syrians; the court kept Macedonian arms, the king's Friends, and the war elephants that awed every eastern battlefield. Under Antiochus III the realm recovered everything from the Aegean to India, until Rome, called in by frightened Greek cities, broke him at Magnesia in 190 BC and confined the dynasty behind the Taurus. The east then slipped away: the Parthians took Media and Babylonia, Bactria and the Indo-Greeks broke free, and the Maccabean revolt freed Judaea. What remained, a rump Syria torn by dynastic civil wars between rival Antiochi, was more trouble than tribute; in 64 BC Pompey the Great walked in, made it a Roman province, and the Seleucid age ended where the Roman Near East began.