Produce and manufactures of the district.
At the same time, along with these destructive agencies, the fertility of the district was and is unusually great. Its rich pastures fed large flocks of sheep, whose fleeces were of a superior quality; and the trade in dyed woollen goods was the chief source of prosperity to these towns. For the bounty of nature was not confined to the production of the material, but extended also to the preparation of the fabric. The mineral streams had chemical qualities, which were highly valued by the dyer[[10]]. Hence we find that all the three towns, with which we are concerned, were famous in this branch of trade. At Hierapolis, as at Thyatira, the guild of the dyers appears in the inscriptions as an important and influential body[[11]]. Their colours vied in brilliancy with the richest scarlets and purples of the farther east[[12]]. Laodicea again was famous for the colour of its fleeces, probably a glossy black, which was much esteemed[[13]]. Here also we read of a guild of dyers[[14]]. And lastly, Colossæ gave its name to a peculiar dye, which seems to have been some shade of purple, and from which it derived a considerable revenue[[15]].
1. Laodicea.
Its name and history.
1. Of these three towns Laodicea, as the most important, deserves to be considered first. Laodice was a common name among the ladies of the royal house of the Seleucidæ, as Antiochus was among the princes. Hence Antiochia and Laodicea occur frequently as the designations of cities within the dominions of the Syrian kings. Laodicea on the Lycus[[16]], as it was surnamed to distinguish it from other towns so called, and more especially perhaps from its near neighbour Laodicea Catacecaumene, had borne in succession the names of Diospolis and Rhoas[[17]]; but when refounded by Antiochus Theos (B.C. 261–246), it was newly designated after his wife Laodice[[18]]. It is situated[[19]] on an undulating hill, or group of hills, which overhangs the valley on the south, being washed on either side by the streams of the Asopus and the Caprus, tributaries of the Lycus[[20]]. Behind it rise the snow-capped heights of Cadmus, the lofty mountain barrier which shuts in the south side of the main valley[[21]]. |Its growing prosperity.| A place of no great importance at first, it made rapid strides in the last days of the republic and under the earliest Cæsars, and had become, two or three generations before St Paul wrote, a populous and thriving city[[22]]. Among its famous inhabitants are mentioned the names of some philosophers, sophists, and rhetoricians, men renowned in their day but forgotten or almost forgotten now[[23]]. More to our purpose, as illustrating the boasted wealth and prosperity of the city, which appeared as a reproach and a stumblingblock in an Apostle’s eyes[[24]], are the facts, that one of its citizens, Polemo, became a king and a father of kings, and that another, Hiero, having accumulated enormous wealth, bequeathed all his property to the people and adorned the city with costly gifts[[25]]. To the good fortune of her principal sons, as well as to the fertility of the country around, the geographer Strabo ascribes the increase and prosperity of Laodicea. The ruins of public buildings still bear testimony by their number and magnificence to the past greatness of the city[[26]].
Its political rank, as the capital of a conventus.
Not less important, as throwing light on the Apostolic history, is the political status of Laodicea. Asia Minor under the Romans was divided into districts, each comprising several towns and having its chief city, in which the courts were held from time to time by the proconsul or legate of the province, and where the taxes from the subordinate towns were collected[[27]]. Each of these political aggregates was styled in Latin conventus, in Greek διοίκησις—a term afterwards borrowed by the Christian Church, being applied to a similar ecclesiastical aggregate, and thus naturalised in the languages of Christendom as diocese. At the head of the most important of these political dioceses, the ‘Cibyratic convention’ or ‘jurisdiction,’ as it was called, comprising not less than twenty-five towns, stood Laodicea[[28]]. Here in times past Cicero, as proconsul of Cilicia, had held his court[[29]]; hither at stated seasons flocked suitors, advocates, clerks, sheriffs’-officers, tax-collectors, pleasure-seekers, courtiers—all those crowds whom business or leisure or policy or curiosity would draw together from a wealthy and populous district, when the representative of the laws and the majesty of Rome appeared to receive homage and to hold his assize[[30]]. To this position as the chief city of the Cibyratic union the inscriptions probably refer, when they style Laodicea the ‘metropolis[[31]].’ And in its metropolitan rank we see an explanation of the fact, that to Laodicea, as to the centre of a Christian diocese also, whence their letters would readily be circulated among the neighbouring brotherhoods, two Apostles address themselves in succession, the one writing from his captivity in Rome[[32]], the other from his exile at Patmos[[33]].
Its religious
worship.
On the religious worship of Laodicea very little special information exists. Its tutelary deity was Zeus, whose guardianship had been recognised in Diospolis, the older name of the city, and who, having (according to the legend) commanded its rebuilding, was commemorated on its coins with the surname Laodicenus[[34]]. Occasionally he is also called Aseis, a title which perhaps reproduces a Syrian epithet of this deity, ‘the mighty.’ If this interpretation be correct, we have a link of connexion between Laodicea and the religions of the farther East—a connexion far from improbable, considering that Laodicea was refounded by a Syrian king and is not unlikely to have adopted some features of Syrian worship[[35]].
2. Hierapolis.