=Situation of Antioch.= About 300 B.C. Seleucus I built the city of Antioch and transferred his capital from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley to this important strategic centre. The city was situated at the point where the Lebanon mountains on the south were separated from the Taurus on the north by the Orontes River. The city lay at the northern end of the great valley between the Lebanons, near the point where the Orontes bends abruptly to the southwest. It was sixteen miles from the sea and not far from the borders of the eastern desert. Here meet the great highways from the Euphrates and from central Syria and Palestine. It was, therefore, an important commercial and political centre. The city itself lay on the broad, fertile plain, which ran northward from the river up the sides of Mount Silpius. Aside from the river and the mountain, it possessed no natural defences, but was dependent upon the huge wall which surrounded it. =Causes of the Maccabean Struggle.= In 198 B.C. Antiochus the Great, in a battle near Paneion, the modern Banias, at the foot of Mount Hennon, defeated the Egyptian army and annexed Palestine to the Seleucid kingdom. The Jews gained little by this change of rulers. In 175 B.C. Antiochus Epiphanes mounted the Syrian throne. He had been brought up in the midst of the profligate and imperious young nobles of Rome, and soon proved an unprincipled tyrant. He was a great admirer of Greek art and culture and his two chief ambitions were to adorn his capital and kingdom with magnificent buildings and thoroughly to Hellenize his subjects. Many of the Jews, including certain degenerate high priests at Jerusalem, readily gave up the institutions and traditions of their race and adopted Greek costumes and customs. Through their representatives they led Antiochus to believe that the other Jews would renounce the religion of their fathers. The rank and file of the Jewish nation, however, bitterly opposed Antiochus's policy. Returning from an expedition to Egypt, he found Jerusalem in the hands of a rebel and made this an excuse to turn over the citizens of the city to his bloodthirsty soldiers and to rob the temple of its treasures. Soon after, he set about systematically to root out the worship of Jehovah and completely to Hellenize the Jews. In this endeavor he was aided by the renegade Jews, who constituted a strong Greek party in Jerusalem. In 168 B.C. he sent Apollonius, one of his generals, to put to death all who refused to worship the Olympian Zeus or who preserved copies of the Scriptures. All Jewish religious rites were prohibited, the temple was desecrated, and on its great altar sacrifices were offered to Zeus. The houses and walls of Jerusalem were torn down. The citadel of Acra, which stood either on the hill of Ophel to the south of the temple (_cf._ p. 66), or else immediately to the north on the site of the later Tower of Antonia, was garrisoned with Syrian soldiers and apostate Jews.