He became still more significant through the position in which history had placed him thanthrough his individual character.

As the forerunner of the national reaction of the Orientals against the Occidentals, he opened the new conflict of the east against the west; and the feeling remained with the vanquished as with the victors, that his death was not so much the end as the beginning.
Pompeius Proceeds to Syria Meanwhile Pompeius, after his warfare in 689 with the peoples of the Caucasus, had returned to the kingdom of Pontus, and there reduced the last castles still offering resistance; these were razed in order to check the evils of brigandage, and the castle wells were rendered unserviceable by rolling blocks of rock into them.

Thence he set out in the summer of 690 for Syria, to regulate its affairs.
State of Syria It is difficult to present a clear view of the state of disorganization which then prevailed in the Syrian provinces.

It is true that in consequence of the attacks of Lucullus the Armenian governor Magadates had evacuated these provinces in 685,( 7) and that the Ptolemies, gladly as they would have renewed the attempts of their predecessors to attach the Syrian coast to their kingdom, were yet afraid to provoke the Roman government by the occupation of Syria; the more so, as that government had not yet regulated their more than doubtful legal title even in the case of Egypt, and had been several times solicited by the Syrian princes to recognize them as the legitimate heirs of the extinct house of the Lagids.

But, though the greater powers all at the moment refrained from interference in the affairs of Syria, the land suffered far more than it would have suffered amidst a great war, through the endless and aimless feuds of the princes, knights, and cities.
Arabian Princes The actual masters in the Seleucid kingdom were at this time the Bedouins, the Jews, and the Nabataeans.