Seleucus and his Court were, practically, Grecian. Antioch, the capital of Syria (several of the Seleucid kings were called Antiochus), was practically a Greek city. The influence of Greek thought began to flow into Judæa and Jerusalem more and more from Syria and the north, and we have seen already how it flowed in from Egypt and Alexandria. It brought in strange knowledge, strange speculations and, so far as the Greeks troubled themselves about religion, a strange religion. We have seen from of old how intensely the Jews were devoted to their own religion, and how they retained it in exile and in persecution. A very large number of them held to it fiercely now against all these new ideas that the Greeks were bringing in. So, all through the hundred years that follow, the {204} story of the Jews is the story of a series of struggles for the mastery in Jerusalem between the party that favoured the Greek new ways and the party faithful to the old Jewish ways. The latter came to be called Pharisees and the former are represented by the Sadducees, as you read of them in the Bible. Besides this cause of unrest, there was still constantly trouble between Syria and Egypt. The fact that both were overshadowed equally by the growing power of Rome did not prevent them quarrelling about their own claims in Palestine. And Judæa, as ever of old, lay between the two rivals. Judæa knew little peace in these days of the so-called _Pax Romana_. [Sidenote: Fortitude of the Jews] The insults which the national religion and laws suffered from the "Gentiles," as the Jews called the Greeks and all who were not of their own race and way of thinking, roused their great resentment. The fighting between the parties was fierce. There was one moment in the story when the Jews under those great fighters, the Maccabees, became really the strongest power, so long as Rome did not care to exert her power, in all that region--stronger than Syria, of which she had lately been a mere province. She had power as extensive as Solomon had wielded when king of Israel and Judah united. But it did not endure. The rivalry between the two parties within Judæa itself weakened her. At the date of Pompey's coming to Syria, about a hundred years later than the first coming of the legions, Judæa was again in subjection to Syria, and Syria herself was made into a Roman province. Judæa, like the rest of the world, turned her eyes to Rome as mistress of them all; but, of them all, the eyes of Judæa expressed, probably, the least obedience and submission, the strongest purpose of resistance. {205}