Antiochus, the son of Seleucus Callinicus, and the sixth from the founder of his dynasty, surnamed by his contemporaries the Great, was perhaps eminent in energy and ability above most of his line, though certainly not comparable in this respect to his ancestor, the Conqueror. He seems to have owed that title, – which however imported little in an age so lavish of such distinctions, that his grandfather, a vile and odious prince, was surnamed the God – chiefly to the contrast between the low state into which the Syrian monarchy had fallen when he ascended the throne, and that to which he finally raised it, but especially to his expedition for the recovery of the eastern provinces which had been taken from it by the Parthian and Bactrian kings, an expedition which by its extent, duration, and dazzling success, might to a degenerate race recal the achievements of the Macedonian conqueror. He seems to have been elated with the sounding epithet, and to have forgotten how largely he was indebted for his triumphs to the imbecility of his Egyptian neighbours; and in an evil hour he conceived the project of enlarging the hounds of his empire until it should include all the conquests made by the first Seleucus after his victory over Lysimachus.