The Provinces of the Roman Empire 20

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 20

While at the present day olives scantily grow only in the valleys of

the Lebanon abounding in springs, the olive woods must formerly have

stretched far beyond the valley of the Orontes. The traveller now from

Hemesa to Palmyra carries water with him on the back of camels, and all

this part of the route is covered with the remains of former villas and

hamlets.[135] The march of Aurelian along this route (p. 110) no army

could now undertake. Of what is at present called desert a good portion

is rather the laying waste of the blessed labour of better times. “All

Syria,” says a description of the earth from the middle of the fourth

century, “overflows with corn, wine, and oil.” But Syria was not even

in antiquity an exporting land, in a strict sense, for the fruits of

the earth, like Egypt and Africa, although the noble wines were sent

away, _e.g._ that of Damascus to Persia, those of Laodicea, Ascalon,

Gaza, to Egypt and from thence as far as Ethiopia and India, and even

the Romans knew how to value the wine of Byblus, of Tyre, and of Gaza.

 

[Sidenote: Manufactures.]

 

Of far more importance for the general position of the province

were the Syrian manufactures. A series of industries, which came

into account for export, were here at home, especially of linen,

purple, silk, glass. The weaving of flax, practised from of old in

Babylonia, was early transplanted thence to Syria; as that description

of the earth says: “Scytopolis (in Palestine), Laodicea, Byblus,

Tyrus, Berytus, send out their linen into all the world,” and in the

tariff-law of Diocletian accordingly there are adduced as fine linen

goods those of the three first-named towns alongside of those of the

neighbouring Tarsus and of Egypt, and the Syrian have precedence over

all. That the purple of Tyre, however many competitors with it arose,

always retained the first place, is well known; and besides the Tyrian

there were in Syria numerous purple dyeworks likewise famous on the

coast above and below Tyre at Sarepta, Dora, Caesarea, even in the

interior, in the Palestinian Neapolis and in Lydda. The raw silk came

at this epoch from China and especially by way of the Caspian Sea, and

so to Syria; it was worked up chiefly in the looms of Berytus and of

Tyre, in which latter place especially was prepared the purple silk

that was much in use and brought a high price. The glass manufactures

of Sidon maintained their primitive fame in the imperial age, and

numerous glass-vases of our museums bear the stamp of a Sidonian

manufacturer.

 

[Sidenote: Commerce.]

 

To the sale of these wares, which from their nature belonged to the

market of the world, fell to be added the whole mass of goods which

came from the East by the Euphrates-routes to the West. It is true

that the Arabian and Indian imports at this time turned away from

this road, and took chiefly the route by way of Egypt; but not merely

did the Mesopotamian traffic remain necessarily with the Syrians;

the emporia also at the mouth of the Euphrates stood in regular

caravan-intercourse with Palmyra (p. 98), and thus made use of the

Syrian harbours. How considerable this intercourse was with the eastern

neighbours is shown by nothing so clearly as by the similarity of the

silver coinage in the Roman East and in the Parthian Babylonia; in the

provinces of Syria and Cappadocia the Roman government coined silver,

varying from the imperial currency, after the sorts and the standards

of the neighbouring empire. The Syrian manufactures themselves, _e.g._

of linen and silk, were stimulated by the very import of the similar

Babylonian articles of commerce, and, like these, the leather and skin

goods, the ointments, the spices, the slaves of the East, came during

the imperial period to a very considerable extent by way of Syria to

Italy and the West in general. But this always remained characteristic

of these primitive seats of commercial intercourse, that the men of

Sidon and their countrymen, in this matter very different from the

Egyptians, not merely sold their goods to those of other lands, but

themselves conveyed them thither, and, as the ship-captains in Syria

formed a prominent and respected class,[136] so Syrian merchants and

Syrian factories in the imperial period were to be found nearly as much

everywhere as in the remote times of which Homer tells. The Tyrians

had such factories in the two great import-harbours of Italy, Ostia

and Puteoli, and, as these themselves in their documents describe

their establishments as the greatest and most spacious of their kind,

so in the description of the earth which we have often quoted, Tyre

is named the first place of the East for commerce and traffic[137];

in like manner Strabo brings forward as a specialty at Tyre and at

Aradus the unusually high houses, consisting of many stories. Berytus

and Damascus, and certainly many other Syrian and Phoenician commercial

towns, had similar factories in the Italian ports.[138] Accordingly we

find, particularly in the later period of the empire, Syrian merchants,

chiefly Apamean, settled not merely in all Italy but likewise in all

the larger emporia of the West, at Salonae in Dalmatia, Apulum in

Dacia, Malaca in Spain, but above all in Gaul and Germany, _e.g._

at Bordeaux, Lyons, Paris, Orleans, Treves, so that these Syrian

Christians also, like the Jews, live according to their own customs and

make use of their Greek in their meetings.[139]

 

The state of things formerly described among the Antiochenes and the

Syrian cities generally becomes intelligible only on this basis. The

world of rank there consisted of rich manufacturers and merchants, the

bulk of the population of the labourers and the mariners;[140] and, as

later the riches acquired in the East flowed to Genoa and Venice, so

then the commercial gains of the West flowed back to Tyre and Apamea.

With the extensive field of traffic that lay open to these traders on

a great scale, and with the on the whole moderate frontier and inland

tolls, the Syrian export trade, embracing a great part of the most

lucrative and most transportable articles, already brought enormous

capital sums into their hands; and their business was not confined to

native goods.[141] What comfort of life once prevailed here we learn,

not from the scanty remains of the great cities that have perished, but

from the more forsaken than desolated region on the right bank of the

Orontes, from Apamea on to the point where the river turns towards the

sea. In this district of about a hundred miles in length there still

stand the ruins of nearly a hundred townships, with whole streets still

recognisable, the buildings with the exception of the roofs executed

in massive stone-work, the dwelling-houses surrounded by colonnades,

embellished with galleries and balconies, windows and portals richly

and often tastefully decorated with stone arabesques, with gardens

and baths laid out, with farm-offices in the ground-story, stables,

wine and oil presses hewn in the rocks,[142] as also large burial

chambers likewise hewn in the rock, filled with sarcophagi, and with

the entrances adorned with pillars. Traces of public life are nowhere

met with; it is the country-dwellings of the merchants and of the

manufacturers of Apamea and Antioch, whose assured prosperity and solid

enjoyment of life are attested by these ruins. These settlements, of

quite a uniform character, belong throughout to the late times of the

empire, the oldest to the beginning of the fourth century, the latest

to the middle of the sixth, immediately before the onslaught of Islam,

under which this prosperous and flourishing life succumbed. Christian

symbols and Biblical language are everywhere met with, and likewise

stately churches and ecclesiastical structures. The development of

culture, however, did not begin merely under Constantine, but simply

grew and became consolidated in those centuries. Certainly those

stone-buildings were preceded by similar villa and garden structures of

a less enduring kind. The regeneration of the imperial government after

the confused troubles of the third century has its __EXPRESSION__ in the

upward impulse which the Syrian mercantile world then received; but up

to a certain degree this picture of it left to us may be referred also

to the earlier imperial period.

 

* * * * *

 

[Sidenote: Jewish traffic.]

 

The relations of the Jews in the time of the Roman empire were so

peculiar and, one might say, so little dependent on the province

which was named in the earlier period after them, in the later rather

by the revived name of the Philistaeans or Palaestinenses, that, as

we have already said, it appeared more suitable to treat of them in a

separate section. The little which is to be remarked as to the land

of Palestine, especially the not unimportant share of its maritime

and partly also of its inland towns in Syrian industry and Syrian

trade, has already been mentioned in the exposition given above of

these matters. The Jewish Diaspora had already, before the destruction

of the temple, extended in such a way that Jerusalem, even while it

still stood, was more a symbol than a home, very much as the city of

Rome was for the so-called Roman burgesses of later times. The Jews of

Antioch and Alexandria, and the numerous similar societies of lesser

rights and minor repute took part, as a matter of course, in the

commerce and intercourse of the places where they dwelt. Their Judaism

comes into account in the case only perhaps so far as the feelings

of mutual hatred and mutual contempt, which had become developed or

rather increased since the destruction of the temple, and the repeated

national-religious wars between Jews and non-Jews must have exercised

their effect also in these circles. As the Syrian merchants resident

abroad met together in the first instance for the worship of their

native deities, the Syrian Jew in Puteoli cannot well have belonged to

the Syrian merchant-guilds there; and, if the worship of the Syrian

gods found more and more an echo abroad, that which benefited the other

Syrians drew one barrier the more between the Syrians believing in

Moses and the Italians. If those Jews who had found a home outside of

Palestine, attached themselves beyond it not to those who shared their

dwelling-place but to those who shared their religion, as they could

not but do, they thereby renounced the esteem and the toleration which

the Alexandrians and the Antiochenes and the like met with abroad, and

were taken for what they professed to be--Jews. The Palestinian Jews of

the West, however, had for the most part not originated from mercantile

emigration, but were captives of war or descendants of such, and

in every respect homeless; the Pariah position which the children

of Abraham occupied, especially in the Roman capital--that of the

mendicant Jew, whose household furniture consisted in his bundle of hay

and his usurer’s basket, and for whom no service was too poor and too

menial--linked itself with the slave-market. Under these circumstances

we can understand why the Jews during the imperial period played in

the West a subordinate part alongside of the Syrians. The religious

fellowship of the mercantile and proletarian immigrants told heavily on

the collective body of the Jews, along with the general disparagement

connected with their position. But that Diaspora, as well as this, had little to do with Palestine.