the name of Heraclia; and, lastly, Seleucus, who largely augmented it, gave it the appellation by which it has ever since been known. Under the Seleucidæ it became the capital of their great kingdom, and the most powerful city of the east. The population was much increased by the Jews of Palestine, to whom Seleucus not only conceded liberty of worship, but an equality of civil privileges with the other citizens.
But at the beginning of the evangelic era, Antioch had already undergone a comparative decadence, which had followed on the termination of the Seleucidian power, and the conquest of their metropolis by the Romans. It regained its liberty from Pompey and Cæsar by ransom, Augustus confirming its ancient rights; and as it had been the chief city of the Syrian kingdom, so it continued under the Roman sway to be regarded as the capital of the East.
[A good idea of the locality of Antioch may be formed from the graphical description of it, even so late as the eleventh century, by Raymond d'Agiles, a contemporary historian of the crusades:—"Among the mountains of Libanus," says he, "there is a certain plain, the breadth of which takes the traveller a day to cross, and the length a day and a half. This place is bounded on the west by a marsh, and on the east by a river, (the Orontes,) which, sweeping round a part, runs towards the mountains situated to the southern side, so that there is no passage [or, rather, but a narrow one, along which ran the Roman road] between the stream and the mountains, and thus it flows into the Mediterranean Sea, which is near to Antioch. In the straits, which the river makes in running under the mountains, Antioch is situated; so that to the west there is left not more than an arrow's flight of ground between the lower wall and the river. The town, thus situated, rises to the east, and in the
