The Provinces of the Roman Empire 21

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 21

There remains still a frontier territory to be looked at, which is not

often mentioned, and which yet well deserves consideration; it is the

Roman province of Arabia. It bears its name wrongly; the emperor who

erected it, Trajan, was a man of big deeds but still bigger words. The

Arabian peninsula, which separates the region of the Euphrates from

the valley of the Nile, lacking in rain, without rivers, on all sides

surrounded by a rocky coast poor in harbours, was little fitted for

agriculture or for commerce, and in old times by far the greater part

of it remained the undisputed heritage of the unsettled inhabitants of

the desert. In particular the Romans, who understood how to restrict

their possession in Asia as in Egypt better than any other of the

changing powers in the ascendant, never even attempted to subdue the

Arabian peninsula. Their few enterprises against its south-eastern

portion, the most rich in products, and from its relation to India the

most important also for commerce, will be set forth when we discuss the

business-relations of Egypt. Roman Arabia, even as a Roman client-state

and especially as a Roman province, embraced only a moderate portion of

the north of the peninsula, but, in addition, the land to the south

and east of Palestine between this and the great desert till beyond

Bostra. At the same time with this let us take into account the country

belonging to Syria between Bostra and Damascus, which is now usually

named after the Haurân mountains, according to its old designation

Trachonitis and Batanaea.

 

[Sidenote: Conditions of culture in eastern Syria.]

 

These extensive regions were only to be gained for civilisation under

special conditions. The steppe-country proper (Hamâd) to the eastward

from the region with which we are now occupied as far as the Euphrates,

was never taken possession of by the Romans, and was incapable of

cultivation; only the roving tribes of the desert, such as at the

present day the Haneze, traverse it, to pasture their horses and camels

in winter along the Euphrates, in summer on the mountains south of

Bostra, and often to change the pasture-ground several times in the

year. The pastoral tribes settled westward of the steppe, who pursue in

particular the breeding of sheep to a great extent, stand already at a

higher degree of culture. But there is manifold room for agriculture

also in these districts. The red earth of the Haurân, decomposed lava,

yields in its primitive state much wild rye, wild barley, and wild

oats, and furnishes the finest wheat. Individual deep valleys in the

midst of the stone-deserts, such as the “seed-field,” the Ruhbe in

the Trachonitis, are the most fertile tracts in all Syria; without

ploughing, to say nothing of manuring, wheat yields on the average

eighty and barley a hundredfold, and twenty-six stalks from one grain

of wheat are not uncommon. Nevertheless no fixed dwelling-place was

formed here, because in the summer months the great heat and the want

of water and pasture compel the inhabitants to migrate to the mountain

pastures of the Haurân. But there was not wanting opportunity even

for fixed settlement. The garden-quarter around the town of Damascus,

watered by the river Baradâ in its many arms, and the fertile even now

populous districts which enclose it on the east, north, and south,

were in ancient as in modern times the pearl of Syria. The plain round

Bostra, particularly the so-called Nukra to the west of it, is at the

present day the granary for Syria, although from the want of rain on

an average every fourth harvest is lost, and the locusts often invading

it from the neighbouring desert remain a scourge of the land which

cannot be exterminated. Wherever the water-courses of the mountains are

led into the plain, fresh life flourishes amidst them. “The fertility

of this region,” says one who knows it well, “is inexhaustible; and

even at the present day, where the Nomads have left neither tree nor

shrub, the land, so far as the eye reaches, is like a garden.” Even on

the lava-surfaces of the mountainous districts the lava-streams have

left not a few places (termed Kâ’ in the Haurân), free for cultivation.

 

This natural condition has, as a rule, handed over the country to

shepherds and robbers. The necessarily nomadic character of a great

part of the population leads to endless feuds, particularly about

places of pasture, and to constant seizures of those regions which

are suited for fixed settlement; here, still more than elsewhere,

there is need for the formation of such political powers as are in a

position to procure quiet and peace on a wider scale, and for these

there is no right basis in the population. There is hardly a region

in the wide world in which, so much as in this case, civilisation has

not grown up spontaneously, but could only be called into existence by

the ascendency of conquest from without. When military stations hem in

the roving tribes of the desert and force those within the limit of

cultivation to a peaceful pastoral life, when colonists are conducted

to the regions capable of culture, and the waters of the mountains are

led by human hands into the plains, then, but only then, a cheerful and

plentiful life thrives in this region.

 

[Sidenote: Greek influence in eastern Syria.]

 

The pre-Roman period had not brought such blessings to these lands.

The inhabitants of the whole territory as far as Damascus belong to

the Arabian branch of the great Semitic stock; the names of persons

at least are throughout Arabic. In it, as in northern Syria, Oriental

and Occidental civilisation met; yet up to the time of the empire the

two had made but little progress. The language and the writing, which

the Nabataeans used, were those of Syria and of the Euphrates-lands,

and could only have come from thence to the natives. On the other hand

the Greek settlement in Syria extended itself, in part at least, also

to these regions. The great commercial town of Damascus had become

Greek with the rest of Syria. The Seleucids had carried the founding

of Greek towns even into the region beyond the Jordan, especially into

the northern Decapolis; further to the south at least the old Rabbath

Ammon had been converted by the Lagids into the city of Philadelphia.

But further away and in the eastern districts bordering on the desert

the Nabataean kings were not much more than nominally obedient to

the Syrian or Egyptian Alexandrids, and coins or inscriptions and

buildings, which might be attributed to pre-Roman Hellenism, have

nowhere come to light.

 

[Sidenote: Arrangements of Pompeius.]

 

When Syria became Roman, Pompeius exerted himself to strengthen the

Hellenic urban system, which he found in existence; as indeed the towns

of the Decapolis subsequently reckoned their years from the year 690-91

{64-63. B.C.}, in which Palestine had been added to the empire.[143]

But in this region the government as well as the civilisation continued

to be left to the two vassal-states, the Jewish and the Arabian.

 

[Sidenote: The territory of Herod beyond the Jordan.]

 

Of the king of the Jews, Herod and his house, we shall have to speak

elsewhere; here we have to mention his activity in the extending of

civilisation toward the east. His field of dominion stretched over

both banks of the Jordan in all its extent, northwards as far at

least as Chelbon north-west from Damascus, southward as far as the

Dead Sea, while the region farther to the east between his kingdom

and the desert was assigned to the king of the Arabians. He and his

descendants, who still bore sway here after the annexation of the

lordship of Jerusalem down to Trajan, and subsequently resided in

Caesarea Paneas in the southern Lebanon, had endeavoured energetically

to tame the natives. The oldest evidences of a certain culture in these

regions are doubtless the cave-towns, of which there is mention in

the Book of Judges, large subterranean collective hiding-places made

habitable by air-shafts, with streets and wells, fitted to shelter men

and flocks, difficult to be found and, even when found, difficult to

be reduced. Their mere existence shows the oppression of the peaceful

inhabitants by the unsettled sons of the steppe. “These districts,”

says Josephus, when he describes the state of things in the Haurân

under Augustus, “were inhabited by wild tribes, without towns and

without fixed fields, who harboured with their flocks under the earth

in caves with narrow entrance and wide intricate paths, but copiously

supplied with water and provisions were difficult to be subdued.”

Several of these cave-towns contained as many as 400 head. A remarkable

edict of the first or second Agrippa, fragments of which have been

found at Canatha (Kanawât), summons the inhabitants to leave off their

“animal-conditions” and to exchange their cavern-life for civilised

existence. The non-settled Arabs live chiefly by the plundering partly

of the neighbouring peasants, partly of caravans on the march; the

uncertainty was increased by the fact that the petty prince Zenodorus

of Abila to the north of Damascus, in the Anti-Libanus, to whom

Augustus had committed the superintendence over the Trachon, preferred

to make common cause with the robbers and secretly shared in their

gains. Just in consequence of this the emperor assigned this region

to Herod, and his remorseless energy succeeded, in some measure,

in repressing this brigandage. The king appears to have instituted

on the east frontier a line of military posts, fortified and put

under royal commanders (ἔπαρχοι). He would have achieved still more

if the Nabataean territory had not afforded the robbers an asylum;

this was one of the causes of variance between him and his Arabian

colleague.[144] His Hellenising tendency comes into prominence in this

domain as strongly and less unpleasantly than in his government at

home. As all the coins of Herod and the Herodians are Greek, so in the

land beyond the Jordan, while the oldest monument with an inscription

that we know--the Temple of Baalsamin at Canatha--bears an Aramaean

dedication, the honorary bases erected there, including one for Herod

the Great,[145] are bilingual or merely Greek; under his successors

Greek rules alone.

 

[Sidenote: The kingdom of Nabat.]

 

By the side of the Jewish kings stood the formerly-mentioned (iv. 140)

{iv. 134.} “king of Nabat,” as he called himself. The residence of

this Arabian prince was the city, known to us only by its Greek name

Petra, a rock-fastness situated midway between the Dead Sea and the

north-east extremity of the Arabian Gulf, from of old an emporium for

the traffic of India and Arabia with the region of the Mediterranean.

These rulers possessed the northern half of the Arabian peninsula;

their power extended on the Arabian Gulf as far as Leuce Come opposite

to the Egyptian town of Berenice, in the interior at least as far

as the region of the old Thaema.[146] To the north of the peninsula

their territory reached as far as Damascus, which was under their

protection,[147] and even beyond Damascus[148], and enclosed as with

a girdle the whole of Palestinian Syria. The Romans, after taking

possession of Judaea, came into hostile contact with them, and Marcus

Scaurus led an expedition against them. At that time their subjugation

was not accomplished; but it must have ensued soon afterwards.[149]

Under Augustus their king Obodas was just as subject to the empire[150]

as Herod the king of the Jews, and rendered, like the latter, military

service in the Roman expedition against southern Arabia. Since that

time the protection of the imperial frontier in the south as in the

east of Syria, as far up as to Damascus, must have lain mainly in

the hands of this Arabian king. With his Jewish neighbour he was at

constant feud. Augustus, indignant that the Arabian instead of seeking

justice at the hand of his suzerain against Herod, had encountered the

latter with arms, and that Obodas’s son, Harethath, or in Greek Aretas,

after the death of his father, instead of waiting for investiture, had

at once entered upon the dominion, was on the point of deposing the

latter and of joining his territory to the Jewish; but the misrule of

Herod in his later years withheld him from this step, and so Aretas was

confirmed (about 747 U.C.) {7 B.C.}. Some decades later he began again

warfare at his own hand against his son-in-law, the prince of Galilee,

Herod Antipas, on account of the divorce of his daughter in favour of

the beautiful Herodias. He retained the upper hand, but the indignant

suzerain Tiberius ordered the governor of Syria to proceed against

him. The troops were already on the march, when Tiberius died (37);

and his successor, Gaius, who did not wish well to Antipas, pardoned

the Arabian. King Maliku or Malchus, the successor of Aretas, fought

under Nero and Vespasian in the Jewish war as a Roman vassal, and

transmitted his dominion to his son Dabel, the contemporary of Trajan,

and the last of these rulers. More especially after the annexation of

the state of Jerusalem and the reducing of the respectable dominion of

Herod to the far from martial kingdom of Caesarea Paneas, the Arabian

was the most considerable of the Syrian client-states, as indeed it

furnished the strongest among the royal contingents to the Roman army

besieging Jerusalem. This state even under Roman supremacy refrained

from the use of the Greek language; the coins struck under the rule of its kings bear, apart from Damascus, an Aramaic legend. But there appear the germs of an organised condition and of civilised government.