The Provinces of the Roman Empire 19

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 19

But amidst all this luxury the Muses did not find themselves at

home; science in earnest and not less earnest art were never truly

cultivated in Syria and more especially in Antioch. However complete

was the analogy in other respects between Egypt and Syria as to

their development, their contrast in a literary point of view was

sharp; the Lagids alone entered on this portion of the inheritance

of Alexander the Great. While they fostered Hellenic literature and

promoted scientific research in an Aristotelian sense and spirit, the

better Seleucids doubtless by their political position opened up the

East to the Greeks--the mission of Megasthenes to king Chandragupta

in India on the part of Seleucus I., and the exploring of the Caspian

Sea by his contemporary the admiral Patrocles, were epoch-making in

this respect--but of immediate interposition in literary interests on

the part of the Seleucids the history of Greek literature has nothing

more to tell than that Antiochus the Great, as he was called, made the

poet Euphorion his librarian. Perhaps the history of Latin literature

may make a claim to serious scientific work on the part of Berytus,

the Latin island in the sea of Oriental Hellenism. It is perhaps

no accident that the reaction against the modernising tendency in

literature of the Julio-Claudian epoch, and the reintroduction of the

language and writings of the republican time into the school as into

literature, originated with a Berytian belonging to the middle class,

Marcus Valerius Probus, who in the schools that were left in his remote

home moulded himself still on the old classics, and then, in energetic

activity more as a critical author than as strictly a teacher, laid

the foundation for the classicism of the later imperial period. The

same Berytus became later, and remained through the whole period of

the empire, for all the East, the seat of the study of jurisprudence

requisite towards an official career. As to Hellenic literature no

doubt the poetry of the epigram and the wit of the _feuilleton_ were

at home in Syria; several of the most noted Greek minor poets, like

Meleager, Philodemus of Gadara, and Antipater of Sidon, were Syrians

and unsurpassed in sensuous charm as in refined versification; and

the father of the _feuilleton_ literature was Menippus of Gadara. But

these performances lie for the most part before, and some of them

considerably before, the imperial period.

 

[Sidenote: Minor literature.]

 

In the Greek literature of this epoch no province is so poorly

represented as Syria; and this is hardly an accident, although,

considering the universal position of Hellenism under the empire,

not much stress can be laid on the home of the individual writers.

On the other hand the subordinate authorship which prevailed in

this epoch--such as stories of love, robbers, pirates, procurers,

soothsayers, and dreams, destitute of thought or form, and fabulous

travels--had probably its chief seat here. Among the colleagues of

the already-mentioned Jamblichus, author of the Babylonian history,

his countrymen must have been numerous; the contact of this Greek

literature with the Oriental literature of a similar kind doubtless

took place through the medium of Syrians. The Greeks indeed had no

need to learn lying from the Orientals; yet the no longer plastic

but fanciful story-telling of their later period has sprung from

Scheherazade’s horn of plenty, not from the pleasantry of the Graces.

It is perhaps not accidentally that the satire of this period, when it

views Homer as the father of lying travels, makes him a Babylonian with

the proper name of Tigranes. Apart from this entertaining reading, of

which even those were somewhat ashamed who spent their time in writing

or reading it, there is hardly any other prominent name to be mentioned

from these regions than the contemporary of that Jamblichus, Lucian of

Commagene. He, too, wrote nothing except, in imitation of Menippus,

essays and fugitive pieces after a genuinely Syrian type, witty and

sprightly in personal banter, but where this is at an end, incapable

of saying amid his laughter the earnest truth or of even handling the

plastic power of comedy.

 

[Sidenote: Daily life and amusements.]

 

This people valued only the day. No Greek region has so few

memorial-stones to show as Syria; the great Antioch, the third city

in the empire, has--to say nothing of the land of hieroglyphics and

obelisks--left behind fewer inscriptions than many a small African

or Arabian village. With the exception of the rhetorician Libanius

from the time of Julian, who is more well-known than important, this

town has not given to literature a single author’s name. The Tyanitic

Messiah of heathenism, or his apostle speaking for him, was not wrong

in terming the Antiochenes an uncultivated and half-barbarous people,

and in thinking that Apollo would do well to transform them as well

as their Daphne; for “in Antioch, while the cypresses knew how to

whisper, men knew not how to speak.” In the artistic sphere Antioch

had a leading position only as respected the theatre and sports

generally. The exhibitions which captivated the public of Antioch were,

according to the fashion of this time, less strictly dramatic than

noisy musical performances, ballets, animal hunts, and gladiatorial

games. The applauding or hissing of this public decided the reputation

of the dancer throughout the empire. The jockeys and other heroes

of the circus and theatre came pre-eminently from Syria.[132] The

ballet-dancers and the musicians, as well as the jugglers and buffoons,

whom Lucius Verus brought back from his Oriental campaign--performed,

so far as his part went, in Antioch--to Rome, formed an epoch in the

history of Italian theatricals. The passion with which the public in

Antioch gave itself up to this pleasure is characteristically shown by

the fact, that according to tradition the gravest disaster which befell

Antioch in this period, its capture by the Persians in 260 (p. 101),

surprised the burgesses of the city in the theatre, and from the top of

the mount, on the slope of which it was constructed, the arrows flew

into the ranks of the spectators. In Gaza, the most southerly town of

Syria, where heathenism possessed a stronghold in the famous temple

of Marnas, at the end of the fourth century the horses of a zealous

heathen and of a zealous Christian ran at the races, and, when on that

occasion “Christ beat Marnas,” St. Jerome tells us, numerous heathens

had themselves baptised.

 

[Sidenote: Immorality.]

 

All the great cities of the Roman empire doubtless vied with each other

in dissoluteness of morals; but in this the palm probably belongs to

Antioch. The decorous Roman, whom the severe moral-portrait-painter

of Trajan’s time depicts, as he turns his back on his native place,

because it had become a city of Greeks, adds that the Achaeans

formed the least part of the filth; that the Syrian Orontes had long

discharged itself into the river Tiber, and flooded Rome with its

language and its habits, its street-musicians, female harp-players

and triangle-beaters, and the troops of its courtesans. The Romans of

Augustus spoke of the Syrian female flute-player, the _ambubaia_,[133]

as we speak of the Parisian _cocotte_. In the Syrian cities, it is

stated even in the last age of the republic by Posidonius, an author of

importance, who was himself a native of the Syrian Apamea, the citizens

have become disused to hard labour; the people there think only of

feasting and carousing, and all clubs and private parties serve for

this purpose; at the royal table a garland is put on every guest, and

the latter is then sprinkled with Babylonian perfume; flute-playing

and harp-playing sound through the streets; the gymnastic institutes

are converted into hot baths--by the latter is meant the institution

of the so-called Thermae, which probably first emerged in Syria and

subsequently became general; they were in substance a combination of

the gymnasium and the hot-bath. Four hundred years later matters went

on after quite a similar fashion in Antioch. The quarrel between Julian

and these townsmen arose not so much about the emperor’s beard, as

because in this city of taverns, which, as he expresses himself, has

nothing in view but dancing and drinking, he regulated the prices

for the hosts. The religious system of the Syrian land was also, and

especially, pervaded by these dissolute and sensuous doings. The cultus

of the Syrian gods was often an appanage of the Syrian brothel.[134]

 

[Sidenote: Antiochene ridicule.]

 

It would be unjust to make the Roman government responsible for this

state of affairs in Syria; it had been the same under the government

of the Diadochi, and was merely transmitted to the Romans. But in

the history of this age the Syro-Hellenic element was an essential

factor, and, although its indirect influence was of far more weight,

it still in many ways made itself perceptible directly in politics.

Of political partisanship proper there can be still less talk in the

case of the Antiochenes of this and every age, than in the case of the

burgesses of the other great cities of the empire; but in mocking and

disputation they apparently excelled all others, even the Alexandrians

that vied with them in this respect. They never made a revolution,

but readily and earnestly supported every pretender whom the Syrian

army set up, Vespasian against Vitellius, Cassius against Marcus,

Niger against Severus, always ready, where they thought that they had

support in reserve, to renounce allegiance to the existing government.

The only talent which indisputably belonged to them--their mastery

of ridicule--they exercised not merely against the actors of their

stage, but no less against the rulers sojourning in the capital of the

East, and the ridicule was quite the same against the actor as against

the emperor; it applied to personal appearance and to individual

peculiarities, just as if their sovereign appeared only to amuse them

with his part. Thus there existed between the public of Antioch and

their rulers--particularly those who spent a considerable time there,

Hadrian, Verus, Marcus, Severus, Julian--so to speak, a perpetual

warfare of sarcasm, one document of which, the reply of the last named

emperor to the “beard-mockers” of Antioch, is still preserved. While

this imperial man of letters met their sarcastic sayings with satirical

writings, the Antiochenes at other times had to pay more severely

for their evil speaking and their other sins. Thus Hadrian withdrew

from them the right of coining silver; Marcus withdrew the right of

assembly, and closed for some time the theatre. Severus took even from

the town the primacy of Syria, and transferred it to Laodicea, which

was in constant neighbourly warfare with the capital; and, if these two

ordinances were soon again withdrawn, the partition of the province,

which Hadrian had already threatened, was carried into execution, as we

have already said (p. 118), under Severus, and not least because the

government wished to humble the turbulent great city. This city even

made a mockery of its final overthrow. When in the year 540 the Persian

king Chosroes Nushirvan appeared before the walls of Antioch he was

received from its battlements not merely with showers of arrows but

with the usual obscene sarcasms; and, provoked by this, the king not

merely took the town by storm, but carried also its inhabitants away to

his New-Antioch in the province of Susa.

 

[Sidenote: Culture of the soil.]

 

The brilliant aspect of the condition of Syria was the economic one;

in manufactures and trade Syria takes, alongside of Egypt, the first

place among the provinces of the Roman empire, and even claims in a

certain respect precedence over Egypt. Agriculture throve under the

permanent state of peace, and under a sagacious administration which

directed its efforts particularly to the advancement of irrigation, to

an extent which puts to shame modern civilisation. No doubt various

parts of Syria are still at the present day of the utmost luxuriance;

the valley of the lower Orontes, the rich garden round Tripolis with

its groups of palms, groves of oranges, copses of pomegranates and

jasmine, the fertile coast-plain north and south of Gaza, neither the

Bedouins nor the Pashas have hitherto been able to make desolate. But

their work is nevertheless not to be estimated lightly. Apamea in the

middle of the Orontes valley, now a rocky wilderness without fields and

trees, where the poor flocks on the scanty pasturages are decimated

by the robbers of the mountains, is strewed far and wide with ruins,

and there is documentary attestation that under Quirinius the governor

of Syria, the same who is named in the Gospels, this town with its

territory included numbered 117,000 free inhabitants. Beyond question

the whole valley of the Orontes abounding in water--already at Hemesa

it is from 30 to 40 mètres broad and one and a half to three mètres

deep--was once a great seat of cultivation. But even of the districts,

which are now mere deserts, and where it seems to the traveller of

the present day impossible for man to live and thrive, a considerable

portion was formerly a field of labour for active hands. To the east of Hemesa, where there is now not a green leaf nor a drop of water, the heavy basalt-slabs of former oil-presses are found in quantities.