The Provinces of the Roman Empire 18

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 18

In the mountains of the Libanus and the Anti-Libanus, where in Hemesa

(Homs), Chalcis, Abila (both between Berytus and Damascus) small

princely houses of native origin ruled till towards the end of the

first century after Christ, the native language had probably the

sole sway in the imperial period, as indeed in the mountains of the

Druses so difficult of access the language of Aram has only in recent

times yielded to Arabic. But two thousand years ago it was in fact

the language of the people in all Syria.[124] That in the case of the

double-named towns the Syrian designation predominated in common life

just as did the Greek in literature, appears from the fact that at the

present day Beroea-Chalybon is named Haleb (Aleppo), Epiphaneia-Amathe

Hamat, Hierapolis-Bambyce-Mabog Membid, Tyre by its Aramaean name Sur;

that the Syrian town known to us from documents and authors only as

Heliopolis still bears at the present day its primitive native name

Baalbec, and, in general, the modern names of places have come, not

from the Greek, but from the Aramaean.

 

[Sidenote: Worship.]

 

In like manner the worship shows the continued life of Syrian

nationality. The Syrians of Beroea bring their votive gifts with Greek

legend to Zeus Malbachos, those of Apamea to Zeus Belos, those of

Berytus as Roman citizens to Jupiter Balmarcodes--all deities, in which

neither Zeus nor Jupiter had real part. This Zeus Belos is no other

than the Malach Belos adored at Palmyra in the Syriac language (p. 96,

note 1). How vivid was, and continued to be, the hold of the native

worship of the gods in Syria, is most clearly attested by the fact that

the lady of Hemesa, who by her marriage-relationship with the house of

Severus obtained for her grandson the imperial dignity at the beginning

of the third century, not content with the boy’s being called supreme

Pontifex of the Roman people, urged him also to entitle himself before

all Romans the chief priest of the native sun-god Elagabalus. The

Romans might conquer the Syrians; but the Roman gods had in their own

home yielded the field to those of Syria.

 

[Sidenote: Jamblichus.]

 

No less are the numerous Syrian proper names that have come to us

mainly non-Greek, and double names are not rare; the Messiah is

termed also Christus, the apostle Thomas also Didymus, the woman

of Joppa raised up by Peter “the gazelle,” Tabitha or Dorcas. But

for literature, and presumably also for business-intercourse and

the intercourse of the cultured, the Syrian idiom was as little

in existence as the Celtic in the West; in these circles Greek

exclusively prevailed, apart from the Latin required also in the East

for the soldiers. A man of letters of the second half of the second

century, whom Sohaemus the king of Armenia formerly mentioned (p.

76) brought to his court, has inserted in a romance, which has its

scene in Babylon, some points of the history of his own life that

illustrate this relation. He is, he says, a Syrian, not, however, one

of the immigrant Greeks, but of native lineage on the father’s and

mother’s side, Syrian by language and habits, acquainted also with

the Babylonian language and with Persian magic. But this same man,

who in a certain sense declines the Hellenic character, adds that he

had appropriated Hellenic culture; and he became an esteemed teacher

of youth in Syria, and a notable romance-writer of the later Greek

literature.[125]

 

[Sidenote: Later Syriac literature.]

 

If subsequently the Syrian idiom again became a written language

and developed a literature of its own, this is to be traced not to

an invigoration of national feeling, but to the immediate needs of

the propagation of Christianity. That Syriac literature, which began

with the translation of the writings of the Christian faith into

Syriac, remained confined to the sphere of the specific culture of

the Christian clergy, and hence took up only the small fragments of

general Hellenic culture which the theologians of that time found

conducive to, or compatible with, their ends;[126] this authorship did

not attain, and doubtless did not strive after, any higher aim than

the transference of the library of the Greek monastery to the Maronite

cloisters. It hardly reaches further back than to the second century

of our era, and had its centre, not in Syria, but in Mesopotamia,

particularly in Edessa,[127] where the native language had not become

so entirely a dialect as in the older Roman territory.

 

[Sidenote: Syro-Hellenic mixed culture.]

 

[Sidenote: Tomb of Antiochus of Commagene.]

 

Among the manifold bastard forms which Hellenism assumed in the course

of its diffusion at once civilising and degenerating, the Syro-Hellenic

is doubtless that in which the two elements are most equally balanced,

but perhaps at the same time that which has most decisively influenced

the collective development of the empire. The Syrians received, no

doubt, the Greek urban organisation and appropriated Hellenic language

and habits; nevertheless they did not cease to feel themselves as

Orientals, or rather as organs of a double civilisation. Nowhere is

this perhaps more sharply expressed than in the colossal tomb-temple,

which at the commencement of the imperial period Antiochus king of

Commagene erected for himself on a solitary mountain-summit not far

from the Euphrates. He names himself in the copious epitaph a Persian;

the priest of the sanctuary is to present to him the memorial-offering

in the Persian dress, as the custom of his family demands; but he calls

the Hellenes also, like the Persians, the blessed roots of his race,

and entreats the blessing of all the gods of Persis as of Macetis, that

is of the Persian as well as of the Macedonian land, to rest upon his

descendants. For he is the son of a native king of the family of the

Achaemenids and of a Greek prince’s daughter of the house of Seleucus;

and, in keeping with this, the images on the one hand of his paternal

ancestors back to the first Darius, on the other hand of his maternal

back to Alexander’s marshal, embellished the tomb in a long double

row. But the gods, whom he honours, are at the same time Persian and

Greek, Zeus Oromasdes, Apollon Mithras Helios Hermes, Artagnes Herakles

Ares, and the effigy of this latter, for example, bears the club of

the Greek hero and at the same time the Persian tiara. This Persian

prince, who calls himself at the same time a friend of the Hellenes,

and as loyal subject of the emperor a friend of the Romans, as not

less that Achaemenid called by Marcus and Lucius to the throne of

Armenia, Sohaemus, are true representatives of the native aristocracy

of imperial Syria, which bears in mind alike Persian memories and the

Romano-Hellenic present. From such circles the Persian worship of

Mithra reached the West. But the population, which was placed at the

same time under this great nobility Persian or calling itself Persian,

and under the government of Macedonian and later of Italian masters,

was in Syria, as in Mesopotamia and Babylonia, Aramaean; it reminds

us in various respects of the modern Roumans in presence of the upper

ranks of Saxons and Magyars. Certainly it was the most corrupt and most

corrupting element in the conglomerate of the Romano-Hellenic peoples.

Of the so-called Caracalla, who was born at Lyons as son of an African

father and a Syrian mother, it was said that he united in himself the

vices of three races, Gallic frivolity, African savageness, and Syrian

knavery.

 

[Sidenote: Christianity and Neoplatonism.]

 

This interpenetration of the East and Hellenism, which has nowhere

been carried out so completely as in Syria, meets us predominantly in

the form of the good and noble becoming ruined in the mixture. This,

however, is not everywhere the case; the later developments of religion

and of speculation, Christianity and Neoplatonism, have proceeded from

the same conjunction; if with the former the East penetrates into the

West, the latter is the transformation of the Occidental philosophy in

the sense and spirit of the East--a creation in the first instance of

the Egyptian Plotinus (204-270) and of his most considerable disciple

the Syrian Malchus or Porphyrius (233 till after 300), and thereafter

pre-eminently cultivated in the towns of Syria. For a discussion of

these two phenomena, so significant in the history of the world, this

is not the place; but they may not be forgotten in estimating the

position of matters in Syria.

 

[Sidenote: Antioch.]

 

The Syrian character finds its eminent __EXPRESSION__ in the capital of

the country and, before Constantinople was founded, of the Roman East

generally--inferior as respects population only to Rome and Alexandria,

and possibly also to the Babylonian Seleucia--Antioch, on which it

appears requisite to dwell for a moment. The town, one of the youngest

in Syria and now of small importance, did not become a great city by

the natural circumstances of commerce, but was a creation of monarchic

policy. The Macedonian conquerors called it into life, primarily from

military considerations, as a fitting central place for a rule which

embraced at once Asia Minor, the region of the Euphrates, and Egypt,

and sought also to be near to the Mediterranean.[128] The like aim

and the different methods of the Seleucids and the Lagids find their

true __EXPRESSION__ in the similarity and the contrast of Antioch and

Alexandria; as the latter was the centre for the naval power and the

maritime policy of the Egyptian rulers, so Antioch was the centre for

the continental Eastern monarchy of the rulers of Asia. The later

Seleucids at different times undertook large new foundations here, so

that the city, when it became Roman, consisted of four independent

and walled-in districts, all of which again were enclosed by a common

wall. Nor were immigrants from a distance wanting. When Greece proper

fell under the rule of the Romans, and Antiochus the Great had vainly

attempted to dislodge them thence, he granted at least to the emigrant

Euboeans and Aetolians an asylum in his capital. In the capital of

Syria, as in that of Egypt, a commonwealth in some measure independent

and a privileged position were conceded to the Jews, and the position

of the towns as centres of the Jewish Diaspora was not the weakest

element in their development. Once made a residency and the seat of

the supreme administration of a great empire, Antioch remained even

in Roman times the capital of the Asiatic provinces of Rome. Here

resided the emperors, when they sojourned in the East, and regularly

the governor of Syria; here was struck the imperial money for the East,

and here especially, as well as in Damascus and Edessa, were found

the imperial manufactories of arms. It is true that the town had lost

its military importance for the Roman empire; and under the changed

circumstances the bad communication with the sea was felt as a great

evil, not so much on account of the distance, as because the port--the

town of Seleucia, planned at the same time with Antioch--was little

fitted for large traffic. The Roman emperors from the Flavians down to

Constantius expended enormous sums to hew out of the masses of rocks

surrounding this locality the requisite docks with their tributary

canals, and to provide sufficient piers; but the art of the engineers,

which at the mouth of the Nile had succeeded in throwing up the highest

mounds, contended vainly in Syria with the insurmountable difficulties

of the ground. As a matter of course the largest town of Syria took an

active part in the manufactures and the commerce of this province, of

which we shall have to speak further on; nevertheless it was a seat of

consumers more than of producers.

 

[Sidenote: Daphne.]

 

In no city of antiquity was the enjoyment of life so much the main

thing, and its duties so incidental, as in “Antioch upon Daphne,”

as the city was significantly called, somewhat as if we should say

“Vienna upon the Prater.” For Daphne[129] was a pleasure-garden, about

five miles from the city, ten miles in circumference, famous for its

laurel-trees, after which it was named, for its old cypresses which

even the Christian emperors ordered to be spared, for its flowing and

gushing waters, for its shining temple of Apollo, and its magnificent

much-frequented festival of the 10th August. The whole environs of the

city, which lies between two wooded mountain-chains in the valley of

the Orontes abounding in water, fourteen miles upward from its mouth,

are even at the present day, in spite of all neglect, a blooming garden

and one of the most charming spots on earth. No city in all the empire

excelled it in the splendour and magnificence of its public structures.

The chief street, which to the length of thirty-six stadia, nearly four

and a half miles, with a covered colonnade on both sides, and a broad

carriage-way in the middle, traversed the city in a straight direction

along the river, was imitated in many ancient towns, but had not its

match even in imperial Rome. As the water ran into every good house

in Antioch,[130] so the people walked in those colonnades through the

whole city at all seasons protected from rain as from the heat of the sun, and during the evening also in lighted streets, of which we have no record as to any other city of antiquity.