The Parthian empire, under Mithridates, has regained…

Timarchus seems to have treated Demetrius' accession as an excuse to declare himself an independent king.

Little is known of his reign, except the short—and stereotypical—note by Appian that Timarchus was a tyrant.

Fated to be one of the last Hellenistic monarchs in Iran, Timarchus has managed to extend his realm into Babylonia, where records of his reign are inscribed into the astronomical calendars.

His forces are however not enough for the legal Seleucid king: Demetrius defeats and kills Timarchus in 160 BCE.

Demetrius acquires his surname of Soter, or Savior, from the Babylonians, whom he has delivered from the tyranny of Timarchus.

Judas scores a considerable victory over Nicanor, the Seleucid general, in which Nicanor is killed.

Within two months, however, Demetrius I, the new Seleucid king, sends Bacchides to take up a position near Jerusalem, and, in the engagement that follows, Judas loses his life in the Battle of Elasa.

Bacchides proceeds with crushing rigor against the Maccabean party while at the same time a famine breaks out in the land.

The Jewish rebels require a new leader and Jonathan Apphus, the youngest of Judas’s four brothers, is chosen.

The Maccabees soon find a modus vivendi with Hellenism: Jonathan, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, negotiates a treaty of friendship with Sparta. (In the Hellenistic First Book of Maccabees, written during the high priesthood of John Hyrcanus I (135/134-104 BCE), the idea will be seriously put forward that the Jews and Spartans are somehow kin.)

Eumenes II, a brilliant statesman, has brought his small kingdom to the peak of its power and done more than any other Attalid monarch to make Pergamon a great center of Greek culture in the East.

He is responsible for the construction of nearly all the main public buildings—together with their splendid sculptures—on the acropolis at Pergamon.

At his death in 160/159 BCE, his sixty-year-old brother succeeds him as Attalus II Philadelphus (“Brotherly”).

Terence has had four more plays produced by 160 BCE, some of them with great success: Eunuchus (The Eunuch), Phormio (the name of the principal character, a glad-handing freeloader), Adelphi (The Brothers), and Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law).

More refined but less original than Plautus, Terence nevertheless excels at crafting suspenseful plots and re-imagining stock characters familiar to Greek and Roman audiences.

He dies in about 159 BCE.

Demetrius also dethrones Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia.

The Seleucid empire is temporarily united again.

Demetrius may had married his sister Laodice V, by whom he had three sons Demetrius II Nicator, Antiochus VII Sidetes and Antigonus.

Ariarathes V, king of Capadocia, is distinguished by the excellence of his character and his cultivation of philosophy and the liberal arts.

According to Livy, he had been educated at Rome; but this account may perhaps refer to another Ariarathes, while Ariarathes Eusebes had probably studied in his youth in Athens, where he seems to have become a friend of the future

Pergamene king Attalus II Philadelphus.

In consequence of rejecting, at the wish of the Romans, a marriage with Laodice V the sister of Demetrius I Soter, the latter makes war upon him, and brings forward Orophernes of Cappadocia, his brother and one of the supposititious sons of the late king, as a claimant of the throne.

Ariarathes is deprived of his kingdom, and flees to Rome about 157 BCE.

He is restored by the Romans, who, however, allow Orophernes to reign jointly with him (as is expressly stated by Appian, and implied by Polybius).

The Roman Senate sends envoys to negotiate with the Dalmatians in 157 BCE, but they return complaining that they had been received in an unfriendly manner, and that they would have been killed if they had not effected a secret escape.

One factor that leads to the Dalmatian war of 156-155 according to Polybius (32.13.6–7) was the Romans’ concern lest ‘the Italians should be made effeminate by the long peace, it being now the twelfth year since the war with Perseus’.

Attalus' frequent ambassadorial missions to Rome have earned him a favorable reputation there, and he has maintained close ties with the Romans since becoming king.

They help him hold his own in his struggle (156-154) against Prusias II, the aggressive king of Bithynia in northern Anatolia.

Orophernes will not long hold the Kingdom of Cappadocia, and it is alleged that his reign was signalized by a departure from the more simple customs of his ancestors and by the introduction of systematic debauchery.

To supply his lavish extravagance, he oppresses and pillages his subjects, putting many to death and confiscating their property.

He deposits four hundred talents with the citizens of Priene as a resource in case of a reversal of fortune, but the Priennians later return the money.

Seleucid king Demetrius incurs the enmity of Philometor in 155 by conspiring with Euergetes to seize Cyprus.

Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, Roman consul for the second time in 155, in this year ends the Dalmatian war and celebrates a triumph.

The fall of the Dalmatian capital, Delminium, brings Roman civilization to the country.

The Romans' success is incomplete, however, they must now subdue the neighbouring Illyrians and Celts if they wish to control the whole of Dalmatia.