Attributed commentary excerpt
John Gill's Exposition on Daniel 11:18
A historical reference excerpt for this verse. Read it alongside the biblical text and other available sources.
Exposition of the Old and New Testament
John Gill (1697–1771) · 18th-century historical commentary
Source: BibleWord.ai's local reference edition of this named work.
After this he shall turn his face unto the isles, and shall take many, etc.] Finding himself disappointed in his design on the kingdom of Egypt, he turned his face, and steered his course another way, and with a large fleet sailed into the Aegean sea; and, as Jerom relates, took Rhodes, Samos, Colophon, and Phocea, and many other islands; and also several cities of Greece and Asia, which lay on the sea coasts; it being usual with the Jews to call such maritime places islands: but a prince for his own behalf shall cause the reproach offered by him to cease; the reproach that Antiochus cast upon the Romans, by seizing on their provinces, taking their cities, doing injuries to their allies, and treating their ambassadors with contempt: this the Romans wiped off by taking up arms against him, and gaining victories over him both by sea and land. The “prince” here may design the Romans in general, who, on their own behalf, or for their own honour, sent out armies and fleets against him, to put a stop to his insults over them; or some particular leader and commander of theirs, not a king, but a general or admiral, as Marcus Acilius, who beat him at the straits of Thermopylae; also Livius Salinator, who got the victory over his fleet about Phocea, where he sunk ten of his ships, and took thirteen; likewise Aemilius Regillus, who got the better of his fleet at Myonnesus, near Ephesus; and especially Lucius Scipio, who, in a land fight, beat him at Mount Siphylus, with an army of thirty thousand against seventy thousand, killed fifty thousand footmen of Antiochus’s army, and four thousand horsemen, and took fourteen hundred prisoners, with fifteen elephants and their commandersf539, and so drove him out of lesser Asia: without his own reproach he shall cause it to turn upon him; without any reproach to the Roman general; the reproach which Antiochus cast upon the Roman nation was turned upon his own head, by the many victories obtained over him by sea and land, and especially by the last and total defeat of him; for no other terms of peace could he obtain, but to pay all the expenses of the war, quit all Asia on that side Taurus, and give hostages, and his own son was one, in the Apocrypha: “10 And there came out of them a wicked root Antiochus surnamed Epiphanes, son of Antiochus the king, who had been an hostage at Rome, and he reigned in the hundred and thirty and seventh year of the kingdom of the Greeks.” (1 Maccabees 1:10)
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