The Seleucids learned a terrible lesson on the battle-fields of Thermopylæ and Magnesia: the fatality was that all the peoples in Asia learned it also. That Antiochus the Great consented to surrender all his possessions in Asia Minor and to pay to the Romans an indemnity of one thousand talents a year for twelve years; to hand over his battleships and to limit his fleet to ten decked vessels and a few small craft; to give up all his war elephants and to keep no others in the future; to take no Italians into his service as mercenaries, and to throw open his empire to the merchants and traders from Rhodes, proclaimed only too clearly to the Orientals that the days of the lordship of the Macedonians in the world were past. * * * * * It was not, however, till after the untimely death of his son, Antiochus IV, surnamed Epiphanes, or the "God Manifest," in 164 B.C. that the storm broke in all its fury. The forces then set in motion for the destruction of the Seleucid empire were of two kinds, external and internal. Of the external forces we have already considered one--the advance of the Roman power toward the East. The Roman Senate had at this time only one concern in its dealings with Syria, namely, to make the Seleucids harmless. This it accomplished in a variety of ways. Immediately after the death of Antiochus IV, it sent commissioners into Syria who executed an unenforced article of the treaty struck after the battle of Magnesia: they burnt the Seleucid battleships found in the cities of Phoenicia and hamstrung the war elephants which they discovered in the royal arsenals. By jealously restricting the military establishment of the Seleucids the Senate broke their power in all respects. Not content, however, with binding the feet of its victim, the Senate held out an encouraging hand to all rebels against his authority. A case in point is that of the Jews. Again and again, between 164 and 120 B.C., Judas and Jonathan Maccabæus and Hyrcanus I sought and obtained Roman recognition in their struggle against their overlords. They had national causes for their repeated outbreaks and religious stimuli to resist desperately, but it is doubtful whether they could have carried their war of independence to a successful termination without the assurance that Rome sympathized with their enterprise. The Senate helped on the disruption of the Seleucid realm by still another unfriendly act: it joined with Pergamum and Egypt in lighting the fire of dynastic war in Syria in 153 B.C. and in adding fuel to it from time to time thereafter, with the result that the realm was devastated by civil war almost continuously from that date till the end of the dynasty, ninety years later. Then, the blackened hulk, manned by a mutinous crew, lay helpless in a sea infested with pirates, when Pompey picked it up and towed it into a Roman harbor.