The Parthian king Phraates II. had, at first, liberated Demetrius, to whom his sister Rhodogune was united by marriage, in order that, by appearing in Syria, he might oblige Antiochus to retreat. Antiochus having fallen, Phraates would fain have recaptured Demetrius, but he escaped. 31. The ensuing history of the Seleucidae is a picture of civil wars, family feuds, and deeds of horror, such as are scarcely to be paralleled. The utmost verge of the empire was now the Euphrates; all Upper Asia acknowledging the dominion of the Parthians. The Jews, moreover, having completely vindicated their independence, the kingdom was consequently confined to Syria and Phoenicia. So thoroughly decayed was the state, that even the Romans--whether because there was no longer anything to plunder, or because they conceived it more prudent to suffer the Seleucidae to wear themselves out in mutual quarrels--do not seem to have taken any account of it, until, at the conclusion of the last war with Mithridates, they thought proper formally to annex it to their empire as a province. War between Alexander Zebinas and the ambitious relict of Demetrius, Cleopatra, who with her own hand murders her eldest son Seleucus, B.C. 125, for pretending to the crown, which she now gives to her younger son, Antiochus Gryphus; the new king, however, soon saw himself compelled to secure his own life by the murder of his mother, 122; Alexander Zebinas having been the year before, 123, defeated and put to death. After a peaceful rule of eight years, 122-114, Antiochus Gryphus is involved in war with his half-brother Antiochus Cyzicenus, son of Cleopatra by Antiochus Sidetes: it ends, 111, in a partition of territory. But the war between the brothers soon burst out anew, and just as this hapless kingdom seemed about to crumble into pieces, Gryphus was murdered, 97.--Seleucus, the eldest of his five sons, having beaten and slain Cyzicenus, 96; the eldest son of the latter, Antiochus Eusebes, prosecuted the war against the sons of Gryphus; Eusebes being at last defeated, 90, the surviving sons of Gryphus fell to war among themselves, and the struggle continued until the Syrians, weary of bloodshed, did what they ought to have done long before, viz. made over the sovereign power to Tigranes the king of Armenia, 85. Yet Eusebes's widow, Selene, retained Ptolemais till 70; and her elder son Antiochus Asiaticus, at the time that Tigranes was beaten by Lucullus, in the Mithridatic war, took possession of some provinces in Syria, 68; these were wrested from him after the total defeat of Mithridates by Pompey, when Tigranes was obliged to give up his claim, and Syria became a province of the Roman empire, 64. Antiochus Asiaticus died 58; his brother Seleucus Cybiosactes, having married Berenice, was raised to the Egyptian throne, but murdered at her command, 57; and thus the family of the Seleucidae was completely swept away.