At the close of the war with Philip, the Ætolians were filled with the most envenomed resentment. This bitterness of feeling was by no means softened down in the course of time; for the Ætolians made too great pretensions, and the Romans were unfair towards them. Yet even without that, they would have moved heaven and earth to drive the Romans out of Greece. They therefore turned their eyes towards Antiochus. Antiochus is one of those princes, who unjustly bear in history the surname of the Great. The Seleucidæ were poorer in great men than any of the dynasties which succeeded Alexander; even Seleucus himself hardly deserved to be so called: the Asiatic degeneracy shows itself in them much earlier than among the Ptolemies. Antiochus got that surname because his reign was happy: compared with the princes of his house who had the same name, Antiochus Soter, and the utterly infamous Theos, his grandfather and great-grandfather, he may have been the better man. He certainly restored his empire, which had come to him almost in a state of dissolution from his brother Seleucus; but he did this without any grand achievement of his own, as he only put forth against his cowardly enemies the comparatively great might of his dominion. He had no real difficulties in his way, and those, which he had to face, he did not overcome like a great man. He might have called himself εὐτυχής; for before his war with the Romans he had a more extensive monarchy than the kings of Syria had ever possessed. He ruled from the Hellespont to the borders of India, over Phrygia, Cilicia, Syria, Palæstine, Cœle-Syria, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Media, Persia as far as Sidgistan and Cabool; he had made treaties with Indian princes, and his riches were immense: but with all this, there was nowhere the vigour of a warlike state, but Asiatic effeminacy throughout. His strength had not been put to the proof. The descendants of the Macedonians and Greeks in the colonies of Alexander and Seleucus, had become quite unwarlike; just as the _Pullani_ (the offspring of the crusaders) in the Holy Land, a set of people with all the vices of the east without its virtues. Yet, as he possessed the whole extent of the Persian empire, Antiochus was looked upon in Asia as the μέγας βασιλεύς, and in Europe, as the terrible adversary of the Romans: the Ætolians therefore built great hopes on him.