His was a strange blend. Various epochs met in him, and it is not surprising that many incongruities resulted from that fact. First of all he was in every sense a Macedonian despot. Macedonians had always been accustomed to the concentration of supreme power in the hands of a single individual. For four or five generations Antiochus’ immediate ancestors had wielded such power over a rabble of nations stretching from the Aegean to the frontiers of India.[128] The emotional reactions which the existence and the possession of this power must have, were present in him. One constant result of it, the absence of any real social life, is an especially fertile source of deterioration, but the worst effects are noticed chiefly in those born to the purple. Antiochus’ exile saved him from them. Yet nothing could save him from the consciousness that he might, if he chose, gratify every whim, and yield to every impulse, and his associates found quickly enough that his _bonhomie_ and engaging simplicity were moods, which might be succeeded by bursts of quite incalculable and murderous rage. There was the additional fact that the monarchy founded by Alexander was in legal contemplation the reign of a god made flesh. Seleucus, we may remember, entered almost at once into the titularies of Sumer and Akkad.[129] The second Antiochus was styled “the God,” Θεός, _tout simple_. Our Antiochus called himself Epiphanes—which, it need scarcely be said, is to be translated “the Manifest Deity,” and not “the Illustrious.”[130] And, at any rate at certain moments, the designation was doubtless a real one to him and not a conscious pose. Worship of the king, the foundation of the later Augustus-cult, was an apparent unifying element in the hopeless jumble of gods and rituals. For that purpose it might be encouraged even by hard-headed peasants like Vespasian, or philosophers like Marcus, who had no illusions about the character of their divinity. But that Alexander in all sincerity believed himself to be god can scarcely be questioned, and Epiphanes may often have similarly impressed himself.