From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

In the second council of Nicæa, which was the seventh of the Church’s general councils and which convened in 787, was condemned the doctrine of the Iconoclasts, which so long agitated the Eastern Church and which was the cause of so many relentless persecutions throughout the whole of the Byzantine Empire. Even Moslems, who regard every kind of representation of the human form as an execrable idol, could not have been more fanatical and pitiless in their dealings with anti-Iconoclasts than were Leo the Isaurian, who was suspected of favoring Islamism, and his son Constantine Copronymus. During their reigns, not to speak of those of several of their successors, the churches of the Byzantine Empire were as bare of images and statues as were the mosques of Medina and Damascus.[88]

By a peculiar combination of events it fell to the lot of two women—the Empresses Irene and Theodora—to undo the work of the Iconoclastic emperors and to put a stop to the persecutions which had caused the exile, the imprisonment, or the death of countless numbers of the noblest men and women of the empire, whose only offense was fidelity to the faith of their fathers.

Few things in Anatolia are more competent to awaken memories of the past glories of Asia Minor than a visit to the spot that on two momentous occasions witnessed the assemblage of hundreds of bishops from both the Orient and the Occident. What a contrast between the present condition of Nicæa and that at the time when the assembled fathers subscribed to that creed which has ever since been accepted as the symbol of faith of nearly the whole of Christendom!

In Asia Minor alone there were, in the fifth century, no fewer than four hundred and fifty episcopal sees. And an imperial law was enacted that every city should have its own bishop—unaquœque civitas proprium episcopum habeto.[89] But what a change has come over this once flourishing portion of the Christian Church. The famous cities—Nicæa, Chalcedon, and Ephesus—in which four general councils were held and which in Roman times were all capitals of provinces—have long since been reduced to ruins. So completely, indeed, had Ephesus disappeared from sight that little was known even about its topography until the Austrian Archæological Institute began its excavations there but little more than two decades ago.

And so it is throughout the length and the breadth of Anatolia.[90] Great and popular cities, which, in the heyday of the Roman Empire were noted for their splendid temples, baths, gymnasia, colonnades, Greek theaters, and Roman amphitheaters, which were all graced by masterpieces of art in marble and bronze—frequently replicas of matchless Greek originals—are now either entirely deserted or tenanted by a few nomadic shepherds or poor tillers of the soil whose only homes are small mud hovels that barely protect them from the elements.

Cicero’s lament over the desolate cities of Greece may everywhere be reëchoed by the traveler in ruin-covered Anatolia. This is particularly true of that part of the country once known as Ionia. In literature, art, history, philosophy, she long vied with Attica herself. For, among her distinguished sons are Homer Anacreon of Teos, Mimnermus, Apelles, Parrhasius and Herodotus, the Father of History. And in her once flourishing capital, Miletus, whose site is now occupied by the fever-stricken village of Palatia, lived that galaxy of philosophers—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here the geographers, Hecatæus and Aristagoras planned the earliest known charts. Here, too, was the birthplace of the rarely gifted Aspasia whose home in Athens, after she became the wife of Pericles, is celebrated in history as the first and most famous salon the world has ever known.[91]

In Ionia originated that brilliant and highly intellectual society which a French writer has happily named le printemps de la Grèce.

For even in the face of recent discoveries in Sparta [writes a distinguished Orientalist], it may be said without hesitation that the Greeks of western Asia Minor produced the first full-bloom of what we call pure Hellenism, that is a Greek civilization come to full consciousness of itself and destined to attain the highest possibilities of the Hellenic genius. Whatever its claim to absolute priority in culture, however, the Ionian section of the Hellenic race from the accident of geographical position served more than any other for a vital link between East and West, and imposed its individual name on Oriental terminology as the designation of the whole Greek people. All who follow the development of free social institutions must regard with peculiar interest the land where the city-State of Hellenic type first grew to adolescence. Students not only of literature, but of all the means of communication between man and man, know that it was in Ionia that the alphabet took the final shape in which the Greeks were to carry it about the civilized world. And who that belongs to, or cares for, the republic of art would ignore that “bel elan de génie duquel est né la statuaire attique”?[92]

Nor were the islands which fringed Ionia less prolific in famous men and women than was the mainland. Suffice it to mention Cos, where Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians and “The Father of Medicine,” first saw the light of day and Lesbos, the birthplace of Alcæus and Sappho, the first of whom stands in the forefront of Greek lyric poets, while the second enjoyed the unique distinction of being called “The Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.”

But where Homer, Sappho, and Alcæus lived and labored and where once their immortal works were used as textbooks in the schools of Asia Minor; where Zeuxis and Appelles and Parrhasius were surrounded by crowds of admiring pupils; where Hippocrates and Galen of Pergamon, long the supreme authorities in medical science, were born; where Hipparchus of Nicæa, founder of scientific astronomy, first became famous; where Aristarchus of Samothrace, the most celebrated critic and grammarian of antiquity, began his brilliant career, there is now little more than an intellectual wilderness and but scant knowledge even of the names of those who were once the glory of Hellas, as well as of Anatolia. The erstwhile homes of art, science, and literature in Asia Minor have shared the same fate as Olympia, Carthage, and Syracuse. Only a few broken columns and mutilated statues remain of what were once the great cultural centers of the ancient world.