The money–dealing and traffic were in Asia Minor dependent chiefly on its own products. The great foreign import and export trade of Syria and Egypt was in the main excluded, though from the eastern lands various articles were introduced into Asia Minor, e.g. a considerable number of slaves through the Galatian traders.[256] But, if the Roman merchants were to be found here apparently in every large and small town, even at places like Ilium and Assus in Mysia, Prymnessus and Traianopolis in Phrygia, in such numbers that their associations were in the habit of taking part along with the town’s burgesses in public acts; if in Hierapolis, in the interior of Phrygia, a manufacturer (ἐργαστής) caused it to be inscribed on his tomb that he had in his lifetime sailed seventy–two times round Cape Malea to Italy, and a Roman poet describes the merchant of the capital who hastens to the port, in order not to let his business–friend from Cibyra, not far distant from Hierapolis, fall into the hands of rivals, there is thus opened up a glimpse into a stirring manufacturing and mercantile life not merely at the seaports. Language also testifies to the constant intercourse with Italy; among the Latin words that became current in Asia Minor not a few proceed from such intercourse, as indeed in Ephesus even the guild of the wool–weavers gives itself a Latin name.[257] Teachers of all sorts and physicians came especially from this quarter to Italy and the other lands of the Latin tongue, and not merely gained often considerable wealth, but also brought it back to their native place; among those to whom the towns of Asia Minor owe buildings or endowments, the physicians who had become rich,[258] and literati, occupy a prominent position. Lastly, the emigration of the great families to Italy affected Asia Minor less and later than the West; it was easier for people from Vienna and Narbo to transplant themselves to the capital of the empire than from the Greek towns; nor was the government in the earlier period quite inclined to bring the municipals of mark from Asia Minor to the court, and to introduce them into the Roman aristocracy.
Literary activity.If we leave out of view the marvellous period of early bloom, in which the Ionic epos and the Aeolic lyric poetry, the beginnings of historical composition and of philosophy, of plastic art and of painting, had their rise on these shores, in science as in the practice of art the great age of Asia Minor was that of the Attalids, which faithfully cherished the memory of that still greater epoch. If Smyrna showed divine honours to its citizen Homer, struck coins for him and named them after him, there was thus expressed the feeling, which dominated all Ionia and all Asia Minor, that divine art had come down to earth in Hellas generally, and in Ionia in particular
Instruction.How early and to what extent elementary instruction was an object of public care in these regions is clearly shown by a decree of the town Teos in Lydia[259] concerning it. According to this, after the gift of capital by a rich citizen had provided the town with means, there was to be instituted in future, alongside of the inspector of gymnastics (γυμνασιάρχης), also the honorary office of a school–inspector (παιδονόμος). Further, there were to be appointed three paid teachers of writing with salaries, according to the three classes respectively, of 600, 550, and 500 drachmae, in order that all the free boys and girls might be instructed in writing; likewise two gymnastic masters, each with a salary of 500 drachmae; a teacher of music with a salary of 700 drachmae, who should instruct the boys of the last two years at school and the youths that had left school in playing the lute and the cithara; a boxing master with 300 drachmae, and a teacher for archery and throwing of the spear with a pay of 250 drachmae. The teachers of writing and music are to hold a public examination of the scholars annually in the town–hall. Such was the Asia Minor of the time of the Attalids; but the Roman republic did not continue their work. It did not cause its victories over the Galatians to be immortalised by the chisel, and the Pergamene library went shortly before the battle of Actium to Alexandria; many of the best germs perished in the devastation of the Mithradatic and the civil wars. It was only in the time of the empire that the care of art, and above all of literature, revived at least outwardly with the prosperity of Asia Minor. To a primacy proper, such as was possessed by Athens as a university–town, by Alexandria in the sphere of scientific research, and by the frivolous capital of Syria for the drama and the ballet, none of the numerous cities of Asia Minor could lay claim in any direction whatever; but general culture was probably nowhere more widely diffused and more influential. It must have been very early the custom in Asia to grant to teachers and physicians exemption from the civic offices and functions that involved expense; to this province was directed the edict of the emperor Pius ([p. 329]), which, in order to set limits to an exemption that was evidently very burdensome for the city finances, prescribes maximal numbers for it: e.g. allows towns of the first class to grant this immunity to the extent of ten physicians, five instructors in rhetoric, and five in grammar.
Addresses of the sophists.The position of Asia Minor as occupying the first rank in the literary world of the imperial period was based on the system of the rhetors, or, according to the expression later in use, the sophists of this epoch—a system which we moderns cannot easily realise. The place of written works, which pretty nearly ceased to have any significance, was taken by the public discourse, somewhat of the nature of our modern university and academic addresses, eternally producing itself anew and preserved only by way of exception, once heard and applauded, and then for ever forgotten. The contents were furnished frequently by the occasion of the birthday of the emperor, the arrival of the governor, or any analogous event, public or private; still more frequently without any occasion they talked at large on everything, which was not practical and not instructive. The political address had no existence for this age at all, not even in the Roman senate. The forensic speech was no longer for the Greeks the goal of oratory, but stood alongside of the speech for speaking’s sake as a neglected and plebeian sister, to which a master of that art might occasionally condescend. From poetry, philosophy, history, there was borrowed whatever admitted of being dealt with by way of common–place, while these all themselves, little cultivated in general, least of all in Asia Minor, and still less esteemed, languish by the side of the pure art of words and beneath its infection. The great past of the nation is regarded by these orators, so to speak, as their special property; they reverence and treat Homer in some measure as the Rabbins do the books of Moses, and even in religion they study the most zealous orthodoxy. These discourses are sustained by all the allowed and unallowed resources of the theatre, by the art of gesticulation and of modulation of the voice, by the magnificence of the orator’s costume, by the artifices of the virtuoso and the methods of partisanship, by competition, by the claque. To the boundless self–conceit of these word–artists corresponds the lively sympathetic interest of the public—which is but little inferior to that felt for race–horses—and the expression given to this sympathy quite after the fashion of the theatre; and the frequency with which such exhibitions were brought before the cultured in the larger places entitles them, just like the theatre, to rank everywhere among the customary doings of urban life. If perhaps our understanding of this extinct phenomenon may be somewhat helped by connecting it with the impression called forth in our most susceptible great cities by the discourses of their learned bodies, as they fall due, there is yet wholly wanting in the modern state of things what was by far the main matter in the ancient world—the didactic element, and the connection of the aimless public discourse with the higher instruction of youth. If the latter at present, as we say, educates the boy of the cultured class to be a professor of philology, it educated him then to be a professor of eloquence, and, in fact, of this sort of eloquence. For the school–training conduced more and more to equip the boy for holding just such discourses, as we have now described, on his own part, if possible, in two languages; and, whoever had finished the course with profit, applauded in similar performances the recollection of his own time at school.
Asia Minor leads the fashion.This production embraced East and West, but Asia Minor stood in the van and led the fashion. When in the age of Augustus the school–rhetoric gained a footing in the Latin instruction of the youth of the capital, its chief pillars alongside of Italians and Spaniards were two natives of Asia Minor, Arellius Fuscus and Cestius Pius. At that same place, where the grave forensic address maintained its ground in the better imperial period by the side of this parasite, an ingenious advocate of the Flavian age points to the enormous gulf which separates Nicetes of Smyrna and the other rhetoricians applauded in Ephesus and Mytilene from Aeschines and Demosthenes. By far the most, and most noted, of the famous rhetors of this sort are from the coast of western Asia. We have already observed how much the supply of schoolmasters for the whole empire told upon the finances of the towns of Asia Minor. In the course of the imperial period the number and the estimation of these sophists were constantly on the increase, and they gained ground more and more in the west. The cause of this lies partly doubtless in the changed attitude of the government, which in the second century—especially after the Hadrianic epoch exhibiting not so much a Hellenising as a bad cosmopolitan type—stood less averse to Greek and Oriental habits than in the first; but chiefly in the ever increasing general diffusion of higher culture, and the rapidly enlarging number of institutes for the higher instruction of youth. The sophistic system thus belongs, at all events especially, to Asia Minor, and particularly to the Asia Minor of the second and third centuries; only there may not be found in this literary primacy any special peculiarity of these Greeks and of this epoch, or even a national characteristic. The sophistic system appears everywhere alike, in Smyrna and Athens as in Rome and Carthage; the masters of eloquence were sent out like patterns of lamps, and the manufacture was organised everywhere in the same way, Greek or Latin, according to desire, the supply being raised in accordance with the need. But no doubt those Greek districts, which took precedence in prosperity and culture, furnished this article of export of the best quality and in greatest quantity; this holds true of Asia Minor for the times of Sulla and Cicero no less than for those of Hadrian and the Antonines.
Galenus.Here, however, all is not shadow. Those same regions possess, not indeed among the professional sophists, but yet among the literati of a different type, who are still found there in comparatively large numbers, the best representatives of Hellenism which this epoch has at all to show, the teacher of philosophy, Dio of Prusa in Bithynia, under Vespasian and Trajan, and the medical man Galenus of Pergamus, imperial physician in ordinary at the courts of Marcus and Severus. What is particularly pleasing in the case of Galen is the polished manner of the man of the world and the courtier, in connection with a general and philosophical culture, such as is frequently conspicuous in the physicians of this period.[260]
Dio of Prusa.In purity of sentiment and clear grasp of the position of things, the Bithynian Dio is nowise inferior to the scholar of Chaeronea; in plastic power, in elegance and apt vigour of speech, in earnest meaning underlying lightness of form, in practical energy, he is superior to him. The best of his writings—the fancies of the ideal Hellene before the invention of the city and of money; the appeal to the Rhodians, the only surviving representatives of genuine Hellenism; the description of the Hellenes of his time in the solitude of Olbia as in the luxury of Nicomedia and of Tarsus; the exhortations to the individual as to an earnest conduct of life, and to all as to their keeping together in unity—form the best evidence that even of the Hellenism of Asia Minor in the time of the empire the word of the poet holds good: “The sun even in setting is ever the same.”
END OF VOL. I.
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.