The evil genius of the Seleucid empire during the century when it was a great power was a woman--Laodice, the wife of Antiochus II and mother of his successor, Seleucus II, surnamed Callinicus, or the Glorious Victor (246-226 B.C.). Her power as queen is attested by other evidences, and also by the fact that she was associated with the king in the worship accorded by the satrapies of the realm to their rulers, every satrapy being required by Theos to establish a chief-priesthood in her especial honor.[102] None the less, she had to yield her place to Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy Philadelphus, when that crafty monarch seduced her husband from his alliance with Macedon by giving to him along with his daughter a prodigious dowry and extensive territorial concessions (249 B.C.). She retired to Asia Minor, where she owned large estates secured in earlier days at the expense of the royal domain, and where she could live in almost regal state. For the death of her former husband, which occurred three years later, she was probably not responsible,--though rumor held her guilty,--since Theos had already, on his deathbed apparently, and for reasons of sound dynastic policy, designated her oldest son, then a "youth nearing manhood," as his successor, to the exclusion of the boy with whom his Egyptian queen had recently presented him. Nor is she to be condemned harshly for having had her rival and her son's rival put out of the way; for she acted not only in self-defense, but also to save the Seleucid empire from becoming simply an appanage of Egypt during the long minority of Berenice's child. For conducting to a successful termination, despite initial disasters, the campaign against Ptolemy III, by which she put her son in possession of his throne, she is deserving of high credit. It was when this was accomplished, and her son was king, that her ambition led her into maternal and political crime; for, in order to retain the government, which her oldest son, now arrived at years of discretion, threatened to take from her, she set up against him her younger son Antiochus, surnamed the Hawk, for whom she got the administration of Asia Minor. The Seleucids became thereby divided against themselves, and for twenty years (242-223 B.C.) they were so weakened by a dynastic feud that they not only neglected vital questions of foreign policy, but had to permit the total loss of certain frontier satrapies and the rebellion of almost all the rest. Antiochus III, surnamed the Great, opened his reign with an error--the attempt to deal with the foreign situation before he had put his house in order; and he ended it with a great disaster--his irreparable defeat by the Romans at Magnesia in 190 B.C.; but in between he restored his authority over what Bevan in his _House of Seleucus_ calls "the essential body of the Empire" and his suzerainty over its "outside sphere." The latter he accomplished by an impressive campaign, in