Finally there was an ultra-modern side in him. Antiochus was also a cultivated gentleman, to whom skepticism was an index of education and sacrilege a concrete instance of skepticism. He lived in a very unsettling age. As has been said before, the Greek culture that found its way into Rome after the Hannibalic wars was a sophisticated, disintegrating culture, to which the ancient institutions had at best a practical utility, and which acknowledged theoretically no binding principles in the physical or moral world. It was in this culture that the young Antiochus was reared. He was not alone in it. Many of the incidents of this period show a revolting cynicism on the part of the actors. One Greek commander erected altars to “Impiety and Illegality.” A Spartan brigand called himself “Hybristas,” “the Outrager.”[135] Indeed it was as a wanton desecrater of shrines that Antiochus gained an unenviable notoriety. His pillaging of the temple at Jerusalem was only one of a series of similar acts. At Hierapolis, as well as at many other Syrian shrines, and finally at Elymaea, he coolly appropriated the temple treasures, which in most cases involved violence on his part. But it needed his outrageous “marriage” to Diana to set the seal upon his derisive attitude toward his fellow-gods. The sober Polybius attributes his death to his impiety, a conclusion which naturally is warmly supported by Josephus.[136] It is idle to attempt to reconcile this sort of cynicism with the pretensions to actual divinity which he probably made in all seriousness. The two are of course quite irreconcilable, and represent merely the shifting moods of a complex and slightly abnormal personality. Under almost any king such an outbreak as the Hasmonean revolt might have taken place. Perhaps the conflict was inevitable. But the form the conflict took, the high degree of religious and national enthusiasm which it evoked, and the powerful aid that enthusiasm gave to the propaganda which was preparing itself, were directly consequent upon the character of Antiochus the God Manifest. The rigor and thoroughness with which he strove to suppress the Jewish cult were characteristic of him. His indifference to sacred traditions made his violation of the temple almost a casual act on his part, his Hellenism justified his plans, and his despotic nature, raging under the humiliating rebuff he had received from Rome, found an outlet in the punishment of a disobedient province.