Friendship With Rome and Sparta
As Demetrius II did not keep his promise, Jonathan thought it better to support the new king when Diodotus Tryphon and Antiochus VI seized the capital, especially as the latter confirmed all his rights and appointed his brother Simeon strategos of the seacoast, from the "Ladder of Tyre" to the frontier of Egypt.
Jonathan and Simeon were now entitled to make conquests; Ashkelon submitted voluntarily while Gaza was forcibly taken. Jonathan vanquished even the strategi of Demetrius II far to the north, in the plain of Hazar, while Simeon at the same time took the strong fortress of Beth-zur on the pretext that it harbored supporters of Demetrius.
Like Judah in former years, Jonathan sought alliances with foreign peoples. He renewed the treaty with the Roman Republic, and exchanged friendly messages with Sparta and other places. However one should note that the documents referring to those diplomatic events are questionable in authenticity.
Read more about this topic: Jonathan Apphus
Famous quotes containing the words friendship and/or rome:
“A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remotest parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.... A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts: it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called “eternal.” What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)