Administration of justice.The administration of justice on the part as well of the civic authorities as of the governors left at this epoch much to be desired; yet the emergence of the imperial rule marks a turn in it for the better. The interference of the supreme power had under the republic confined itself to the penal control of the public officials, and exercised this, especially in later times, feebly and factiously, or rather not at all. Now not merely were the reins drawn tighter in Rome, inasmuch as the strict superintendence of its own officers was inseparable from the unity of military government, and even the imperial senate was induced to watch more sharply over the administration of its mandatories; but it became now possible to set aside the miscarriages of the provincial courts by way of the newly introduced appeal, or else, where an impartial trial could not be expected in the province, to carry the process to Rome before the bar of the emperor.[251] Both of these steps applied also to the senatorial provinces, and were to all appearance predominantly felt as a benefit.
The constitution of towns in Asia Minor.As in the case of the Hellenes of Europe, so in Asia Minor the Roman province was essentially an aggregate of urban communities. Here, as in Hellas, the traditional received forms of democratic polity were in general retained, e.g. the magistrates continued to be chosen by the burgesses, but everywhere the determining influence was placed in the hands of the wealthy, and no free play was allowed to the pleasure of the multitude any more than to serious political ambition. Among the limitations of municipal autonomy it was peculiar to the towns of Asia Minor, that the already mentioned Eirenarch, the police–master of the city, was subsequently nominated by the governor from a list of ten names proposed by the council of the city.Logistae. The government–trusteeship of civic finance–administration—the imperial appointment of one not belonging to the city itself as a guardian of property (curator rei publicae, λογιστής), whose consent the civic authorities had to procure in the more important dealings with property—was never generally ordained, but only for this or that city according to need; in Asia Minor, however, in keeping with the importance of its urban development, it was introduced specially early, i.e. from the beginning of the second century, and on a specially comprehensive scale. At least in the third century here, as elsewhere, other important decrees of the communal administration had to be laid before the governor to be confirmed. The Roman government did not insist anywhere, and least of all in the Hellenic lands, on uniformity of municipal constitution; in Asia Minor there prevailed great variety, according, it may be conjectured, in many cases with the pleasure of the individual burgess–bodies, although for the communities belonging to the same province the law organising each province prescribed general rules. Whatever institutions of this sort may be looked upon as diffused in Asia Minor, and predominantly peculiar to the land, bear no political character, but are merely significant as regards social relations, such as the unions spread over all Asia Minor, partly of the older, partly of the younger citizens, Gerusia, Neoi. the Gerusia and the Neoi, clubs for the two classes of age with corresponding places of gymnastic exercise and festivals.[252] Of autonomous communities there were from the outset far fewer in Asia Minor than in Hellas proper; and, in particular, the most important towns of Asia Minor never had this doubtful distinction, or at any rate early lost it, such as Cyzicus under Tiberius ([p. 348]), Samos through Vespasian. Asia Minor was just old subject–territory and, under its Persian as under its Hellenic rulers, accustomed to monarchic organisation; here less than in Hellas did useless recollections and vague hopes carry men away beyond the limited municipal horizon of the present, and there was not much of this sort to disturb the peaceful enjoyment of such happiness in life as was possible under the existing circumstances.
Urban life.Of this happiness of life there was abundance in Asia Minor under the Roman imperial government. “No province of them all,” says an author living in Smyrna under the Antonines, “has so many towns to show as ours, and none such towns as our largest. It has the advantage of a charming country, a favourable climate, varied products, a position in the centre of the empire, a girdle of peaceful people all round, good order, rarity of crime, gentle treatment of slaves, consideration and goodwill from the rulers.” Asia was called, as we have already said, the province of the five hundred towns; and, if the arid interior, in part fitted only for pasture, of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, and Cappadocia was even at that time but thinly peopled, the rest of the coast was not far behind Asia. The enduring prosperity of the regions capable of cultivation in Asia Minor did not extend merely to the cities of illustrious name, such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Laodicea, Apamea; wherever a corner of the country, neglected under the desolation of the fifteen hundred years which separate us from that time, is opened up to investigation, there the first and the most powerful feeling is that of astonishment, one might almost say of shame, at the contrast of the wretched and pitiful present with the happiness and splendour of the past Roman age.
Cragus, Sidyma.On a secluded mountain–top not far from the Lycian coast, where according to the Greek fable dwelt the Chimaera, lay the ancient Cragus, probably built only of beams and clay tiles, and having for that reason no trace of it left excepting the Cyclopian fortress–walls at the foot of the hill. Below the summit spreads a pleasant fertile valley with fresh Alpine air and southern vegetation, surrounded by mountains rich in woods and game. When under the emperor Claudius Lycia became a province, the Roman government transferred the mountain–town—the “green Cragus” of Horace—to this plain; in the market–place of the new town, Sidyma, the remains still stand of the tetrastyle temple then dedicated to the emperor, and of a stately colonnade, which a native of the place who had acquired means as a physician built in his early home. Statues of the emperors and of deserving fellow–citizens adorned the market; there were in the town a temple to its protecting gods, Artemis and Apollo, baths, gymnastic institutions (γυμνάσια) for the older as for the younger citizens; from the gates along the main road, which led steeply down the mountain side to the harbour Calabatia, there stretched on both sides rows of stone sepulchral monuments, more stately and more costly than those of Pompeii, and for the most part still erect, while the houses presumably built, like those of the ancient city, from perishable materials, have disappeared. We may draw an inference as to the position and habits of the former inhabitants from a municipal decree recently found there, probably drawn up under Commodus, as to constituting the club for the elder citizens; it was composed of a hundred members, taken one half from the town–council and the other from the rest of the citizens, including not more than three freedmen and one person of illegitimate birth, all the rest begotten in lawful wedlock and belonging in part to demonstrably old and wealthy burgess–houses. Some of these families attained to Roman citizenship, one even to the senate of the empire. But even abroad this senatorial house, as well as different physicians of Sidyma employed in other lands and even at the imperial court, remained mindful of their home, and several of them closed their lives there; one of these distinguished denizens has put together the legends of the town and the prophecies concerning it in a compilation not exactly excellent, but very learned and very patriotic, and caused these memorabilia to be publicly exhibited. This Cragus–Sidyma did not vote among towns of the first class at the diet of the small Lycian province, was without a theatre, without honorary titles, and without those general festivals which in the world, as it then was, marked a great town; was even, according to the conception of the ancients, a small provincial town and thoroughly a creation of the Roman imperial period. But in the whole Vilajet Aïdin there is at the present day no inland place which can be even remotely placed by the side of this little mountain–town, such as it was, as regards civilised existence. What still stands vividly to–day before our eyes in this secluded village has disappeared, with the exception of slight remains, or even without a trace, in an untold number of other towns under the devastating hand of man. The coinage of the imperial period, freely given to the towns in copper, allows us a certain glance at this abundance; no province can even remotely vie with Asia in the number of mints and the variety of the representations.
Defects of municipal administration.No doubt this merging of all interests in the petty town of one’s birth was not without its reverse side in Asia Minor, any more than among the European Greeks. What was said of their communal administration holds good in the main also here. The urban finance–system, which knows itself to be without right control, lacks steadiness and frugality and often even honesty; as to buildings—sometimes the resources of the town are exceeded, sometimes even what is most needful is left undone; the humbler citizens become accustomed to the largesses of the town–chest, or of men of wealth, to free oil in the baths, to public banquets and popular recreations out of others’ pockets; the good houses become used to the clientage of the multitude, with its abject demonstrations of homage, its begging intrigues, its divisions; rivalries exist, as between town and town ([p. 329]), so in every town between the several circles and the several houses; the government in Asia Minor dares not to introduce the formation of poor–clubs and of voluntary fire–brigades, such as everywhere existed in the west, because the spirit of faction here at once takes possession of every association. The calm sea easily becomes a swamp, and the lack of the great pulsation of general interest is clearly discernible also in Asia Minor.
Prosperity.Asia Minor, especially in its anterior portion, was one of the richest domains of the great Roman state. It is true that the misgovernment of the republic, the disasters of the Mithradatic time thereby produced, thereafter the evil of piracy, and lastly the many years of civil war which had financially affected few provinces so severely as these, had doubtless so utterly disorganised the means of the communities and of individuals there, that Augustus resorted to the extreme expedient of striking off all claims of debt; all the Asiatics, with the exception of the Rhodians, made use of this dangerous remedy. But the peaceful government which again set in made up for much. Not everywhere—the islands of the Aegean Sea, for example, never thereafter revived—but in most places, already when Augustus died, the wounds as well as the remedies were forgotten; and in this state the land remained for three centuries down to the epoch of the Gothic wars. The sums at which the towns of Asia Minor were assessed, and which they themselves, certainly under control of the governor, had to allocate and raise, formed one of the most considerable sources of income for the imperial exchequer. How the burden of taxation stood related to the ability of the taxed to pay, we are unable to ascertain; but permanent overburdening in the strict sense is not compatible with the circumstances in which we find the land down to the middle of the third century. The remissness of the government, still more perhaps than its intentional forbearance, may have kept within bounds the fiscal restriction of traffic and the application of a tax–screw which was inconvenient not merely for the taxed. In great calamities, particularly on occasion of the earthquakes which under Tiberius fearfully devastated twelve flourishing cities of Asia, especially Sardis, and under Pius a number of Carian and Lycian towns and the islands of Cos and Rhodes, private and above all imperial help was rendered with great liberality, and bestowed upon the natives of Asia Minor the full blessing of a great state—the collective guarantee of all for all. The construction of roads, which the Romans had taken in hand on the first erection of the province of Asia by Manius Aquillius (iii. 59)iii. 56., was seriously prosecuted during the imperial period in Asia Minor only where larger garrisons were stationed, particularly in Cappadocia and the neighbouring Galatia, after Vespasian had instituted a legionary camp on the middle Euphrates.[253] In the other provinces not much was done for it, partly, doubtless, in consequence of the laxity of the senatorial government; wherever roads were here constructed on the part of the state, it was done on imperial ordinance.[254]
This prosperity of Asia Minor was not the work of a government of superior insight and energetic activity. The political institutions, the incitements of trade and commerce, the initiative in literature and art belong throughout Asia Minor to the old free towns or to the Attalids. What the Roman government gave to the land, was essentially the permanence of a state of peace, the toleration of inward prosperity, the absence of that governing wisdom which regards every sound pair of arms and every saved piece of money as rightfully subservient to its immediate aims—negative virtues of personages far from prominent, but often more conducive to the common weal than the great deeds of the self–constituted guardians of mankind.
Trade and commerce.The prosperity of Asia Minor was in beautiful equipoise, dependent as much on agriculture as on industry and commerce. The favours of nature were bestowed in richest measure, especially on the regions of the coast; and there are many evidences with how laborious diligence, even under more difficult circumstances, every at all useable piece of ground was turned to account, e.g. in the rocky valley of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia by the citizens of Selga. The products of the industry of Asia Minor are too numerous and too manifold to be dwelt upon in detail;[255] we may mention that the immense pastures of the interior, with their flocks of sheep and goats, made Asia Minor the headquarters of woollen manufactures and of weaving generally—it suffices to recall the Milesian and the Galatian, that is, the Angora, wool, the Attalic gold–embroideries, the cloths prepared in the workshops of Phrygian Laodicea after the Nervian, that is the Flemish, style. It is well–known that an insurrection had almost broken out in Ephesus because the goldsmiths dreaded injury to their sale of sacred images from the new Christian faith. In Philadelphia, a considerable town of Lydia, we know the names of two out of the seven districts: they are those of the wool–weavers and the shoemakers. Probably there is here brought to light what in the case of the other towns is hidden under older and more genteel names, that the more considerable towns of Asia included throughout not merely a multitude of labourers, but also a numerous manufacturing population.