Syrian troops.Syria may also be compared with Gaul, in so far as this district of imperial administration was divided more sharply than most into pacified regions and border-districts needing protection. While the extensive coast of Syria and the western regions generally were not exposed to hostile attacks, and the protection on the desert frontier against the roving Bedouins devolved on the Arabian and Jewish princes, and subsequently on the troops of the province of Arabia as also on the Palmyrenes, more than on the Syrian legions, the Euphrates-frontier required, particularly before Mesopotamia became Roman, a watch against the Parthians similar to that on the Rhine against the Germans. But if the Syrian legions came to be employed on the frontier, they could not be dispensed with in western Syria as well.[122] The troops of the Rhine were certainly there also on account of the Gauls; yet the Romans might say with justifiable pride that for the great capital of Gaul and the three Gallic provinces a direct garrison of 1200 men sufficed. But for the Syrian population, and especially for the capital of Roman Asia, it was not enough to station legions on the Euphrates. Not merely on the edge of the desert, but also in the retreats of the mountains there lodged daring bands of robbers, who roamed in the neighbourhood of the rich fields and large towns—not to the same extent as now, but constantly even then—and, often disguised as merchants or soldiers, pillaged the country houses and the villages. But even the towns themselves, above all Antioch, required like Alexandria garrisons of their own. Beyond doubt this was the reason why a division into civil and military districts, like that enacted for Gaul by Augustus, was never even so much as attempted in Syria, and why the large self-subsistent camp-settlements, out of which e.g. originated Mentz on the Rhine, Leon in Spain, Chester in England, were altogether wanting in the Roman East. But beyond doubt this was also the reason why the Syrian army was so much inferior in discipline and spirit to that of the Western provinces; why the stern discipline, which was exercised in the military standing camps of the West, never could take root in the urban cantonments of the East. When stationary troops have, in addition to their more immediate destination, the task of police assigned to them, this of itself has a demoralising effect; and only too often, where they are expected to keep in check turbulent civic masses, their own discipline in fact is thereby undermined. The Syrian wars formerly described furnish the far from pleasant commentary on this; none of them found an army capable of warfare in existence, and regularly there was need to bring up Occidental troops in order to give the turn to the struggle.
Hellenising of Syria.Syria in the narrower sense and its adjoining lands, the Plain Cilicia and Phoenicia, never had under the Roman emperors a history properly so called. The inhabitants of these regions belonged to the same stock as the inhabitants of Judaea and Arabia, and the ancestors of the Syrians and the Phoenicians were settled in a remote age at one spot with those of the Jews and the Arabs, and spoke one language. But while the latter clung to their peculiar character and to their language, the Syrians and the Phoenicians became Hellenised even before they came under Roman rule. This Hellenising took effect throughout in the formation of Hellenic polities. The foundation for this had indeed been laid by the native development, particularly by the old and great mercantile cities on the Phoenician coast. But above all the formation of states by Alexander and the Alexandrids, just like that of the Roman republic, had as its basis not the tribe, but the urban community; it was not the old Macedonian hereditary principality, but the Greek polity that Alexander carried into the East; and it was not from tribes, but from towns that he designed, and the Romans designed, to constitute their empire. The idea of the autonomous burgess-body is an elastic one, and the autonomy of Athens and Thebes was a different thing from that of the Macedonian and Syrian city, just as in the Roman circle the autonomy of free Capua had another import than that of the Latin colonies of the republic or even of the urban communities of the empire; but the fundamental idea is everywhere that of self-administering citizenship sovereign within its own ring-wall. After the fall of the Persian empire, Syria, along with the neighbouring Mesopotamia, was, as the military bridge of connection between the West and the East, covered more than any other land with Macedonian settlements. The Macedonian names of places transferred thither to the greatest extent, and nowhere else recurring in the whole empire of Alexander, show that here the flower of the Hellenic conquerors of the East was settled, and that Syria was to become for this state the New-Macedonia; as indeed, so long as the empire of Alexander retained a central government, this had there its seat. Then the troubles of the last Seleucid period had helped the Syrian imperial towns to greater independence.
These arrangements the Romans found existing. Of non-urban districts administered directly by the empire there were probably none at all in Syria according to the organisation planned by Pompeius, and, if the dependent principalities in the first epoch of the Roman rule embraced a great portion of the southern interior of the province, these were withal mostly mountainous and poorly inhabited districts of subordinate importance. Taken as a whole, for the Romans in Syria not much was left to be done as to the increase of urban development—less than in Asia Minor. Hence there is hardly anything to be told from the imperial period of the founding of towns in the strict sense as regards Syria. The few colonies which were laid out here, such as Berytus under Augustus and probably also Heliopolis, had no other object than those conducted to Macedonia, namely, the settlement of veterans.
Continuance of the native language and habits under Hellenism.How the Greeks and the older population in Syria stood to one another, may be clearly traced by the very local names. The majority of districts and towns here bear Greek names, in great part, as we have observed, derived from the Macedonian home, such as Pieria, Anthemusias, Arethusa, Beroea, Chalcis, Edessa, Europus, Cyrrhus, Larisa, Pella, others named after Alexander or the members of the Seleucid house, such as Alexandria, Antioch, Seleucis and Seleucia, Apamea, Laodicea, Epiphaneia. The old native names maintain themselves doubtless side by side, as Beroea, previously in Aramaean Chalep, is also called Chalybon, Edessa or Hierapolis, previously Mabog, is called also Bambyce, Epiphaneia, previously Hamat, is also called Amathe. But for the most part the older appellations give way before the foreign ones, and only a few districts and larger places, such as Commagene, Samosata, Hemesa, Damascus, are without newly-formed Greek names. Eastern Cilicia has few Macedonian foundations to show; but the capital Tarsus became early and completely Hellenised, and was long before the Roman time one of the centres of Hellenic culture. It was somewhat otherwise in Phoenicia; the mercantile towns of old renown, Aradus, Byblus, Berytus, Sidon, Tyrus, did not properly lay aside the native names; but how here too the Greek gained the upper hand, is shown by the Hellenising transformation of these same names, and still more clearly by the fact that New-Aradus is known to us only under the Greek name Antaradus, and likewise the new town founded by the Tyrians, the Sidonians, and the Aradians in common on this coast only under the name Tripolis, and both have developed their modern designations Tartus and Tarabulus from the Greek. Already in the Seleucid period the coins in Syria proper bear exclusively, and those of the Phoenician towns most predominantly, Greek legends; and from the beginning of the imperial period the sole rule of Greek is here an established fact.[123] The oasis of Palmyra alone, not merely separated by wide stretches of desert, but also preserving a certain political independence, formed, as we saw ([p. 95]), an exception in this respect. But in intercourse the native idioms were retained. In the mountains of the Libanus and the Anti-Libanus, where in Hemesa (Homs), Chalcis, Abila (both between Berytus and Damascus) small princely houses of native origin ruled till towards the end of the first century after Christ, the native language had probably the sole sway in the imperial period, as indeed in the mountains of the Druses so difficult of access the language of Aram has only in recent times yielded to Arabic. But two thousand years ago it was in fact the language of the people in all Syria.[124] That in the case of the double-named towns the Syrian designation predominated in common life just as did the Greek in literature, appears from the fact that at the present day Beroea-Chalybon is named Haleb (Aleppo), Epiphaneia-Amathe Hamat, Hierapolis-Bambyce-Mabog Membid, Tyre by its Aramaean name Sur; that the Syrian town known to us from documents and authors only as Heliopolis still bears at the present day its primitive native name Baalbec, and, in general, the modern names of places have come, not from the Greek, but from the Aramaean.
Worship.In like manner the worship shows the continued life of Syrian nationality. The Syrians of Beroea bring their votive gifts with Greek legend to Zeus Malbachos, those of Apamea to Zeus Belos, those of Berytus as Roman citizens to Jupiter Balmarcodes—all deities, in which neither Zeus nor Jupiter had real part. This Zeus Belos is no other than the Malach Belos adored at Palmyra in the Syriac language ([p. 96], note 1). How vivid was, and continued to be, the hold of the native worship of the gods in Syria, is most clearly attested by the fact that the lady of Hemesa, who by her marriage-relationship with the house of Severus obtained for her grandson the imperial dignity at the beginning of the third century, not content with the boy’s being called supreme Pontifex of the Roman people, urged him also to entitle himself before all Romans the chief priest of the native sun-god Elagabalus. The Romans might conquer the Syrians; but the Roman gods had in their own home yielded the field to those of Syria.
Jamblichus.No less are the numerous Syrian proper names that have come to us mainly non-Greek, and double names are not rare; the Messiah is termed also Christus, the apostle Thomas also Didymus, the woman of Joppa raised up by Peter “the gazelle,” Tabitha or Dorcas. But for literature, and presumably also for business-intercourse and the intercourse of the cultured, the Syrian idiom was as little in existence as the Celtic in the West; in these circles Greek exclusively prevailed, apart from the Latin required also in the East for the soldiers. A man of letters of the second half of the second century, whom Sohaemus the king of Armenia formerly mentioned (p. 76) brought to his court, has inserted in a romance, which has its scene in Babylon, some points of the history of his own life that illustrate this relation. He is, he says, a Syrian, not, however, one of the immigrant Greeks, but of native lineage on the father’s and mother’s side, Syrian by language and habits, acquainted also with the Babylonian language and with Persian magic. But this same man, who in a certain sense declines the Hellenic character, adds that he had appropriated Hellenic culture; and he became an esteemed teacher of youth in Syria, and a notable romance-writer of the later Greek literature.[125]
Later Syriac literature.If subsequently the Syrian idiom again became a written language and developed a literature of its own, this is to be traced not to an invigoration of national feeling, but to the immediate needs of the propagation of Christianity. That Syriac literature, which began with the translation of the writings of the Christian faith into Syriac, remained confined to the sphere of the specific culture of the Christian clergy, and hence took up only the small fragments of general Hellenic culture which the theologians of that time found conducive to, or compatible with, their ends;[126] this authorship did not attain, and doubtless did not strive after, any higher aim than the transference of the library of the Greek monastery to the Maronite cloisters. It hardly reaches further back than to the second century of our era, and had its centre, not in Syria, but in Mesopotamia, particularly in Edessa,[127] where the native language had not become so entirely a dialect as in the older Roman territory.
Syro-Hellenic mixed culture.
Among the manifold bastard forms which Hellenism assumed in the course of its diffusion at once civilising and degenerating, the Syro-Hellenic is doubtless that in which the two elements are most equally balanced, but perhaps at the same time that which has most decisively influenced the collective development of the empire. The Syrians received, no doubt, the Greek urban organisation and appropriated Hellenic language and habits; nevertheless they did not cease to feel themselves as Orientals, or rather as organs of a double civilisation. Nowhere is this perhaps Tomb of Antiochus of Commagene.more sharply expressed than in the colossal tomb-temple, which at the commencement of the imperial period Antiochus king of Commagene erected for himself on a solitary mountain-summit not far from the Euphrates. He names himself in the copious epitaph a Persian; the priest of the sanctuary is to present to him the memorial-offering in the Persian dress, as the custom of his family demands; but he calls the Hellenes also, like the Persians, the blessed roots of his race, and entreats the blessing of all the gods of Persis as of Macetis, that is of the Persian as well as of the Macedonian land, to rest upon his descendants. For he is the son of a native king of the family of the Achaemenids and of a Greek prince’s daughter of the house of Seleucus; and, in keeping with this, the images on the one hand of his paternal ancestors back to the first Darius, on the other hand of his maternal back to Alexander’s marshal, embellished the tomb in a long double row. But the gods, whom he honours, are at the same time Persian and Greek, Zeus Oromasdes, Apollon Mithras Helios Hermes, Artagnes Herakles Ares, and the effigy of this latter, for example, bears the club of the Greek hero and at the same time the Persian tiara. This Persian prince, who calls himself at the same time a friend of the Hellenes, and as loyal subject of the emperor a friend of the Romans, as not less that Achaemenid called by Marcus and Lucius to the throne of Armenia, Sohaemus, are true representatives of the native aristocracy of imperial Syria, which bears in mind alike Persian memories and the Romano-Hellenic present. From such circles the Persian worship of Mithra reached the West. But the population, which was placed at the same time under this great nobility Persian or calling itself Persian, and under the government of Macedonian and later of Italian masters, was in Syria, as in Mesopotamia and Babylonia, Aramaean; it reminds us in various respects of the modern Roumans in presence of the upper ranks of Saxons and Magyars. Certainly it was the most corrupt and most corrupting element in the conglomerate of the Romano-Hellenic peoples. Of the so-called Caracalla, who was born at Lyons as son of an African father and a Syrian mother, it was said that he united in himself the vices of three races, Gallic frivolity, African savageness, and Syrian knavery.
Christianity and Neoplatonism.This interpenetration of the East and Hellenism, which has nowhere been carried out so completely as in Syria, meets us predominantly in the form of the good and noble becoming ruined in the mixture. This, however, is not everywhere the case; the later developments of religion and of speculation, Christianity and Neoplatonism, have proceeded from the same conjunction; if with the former the East penetrates into the West, the latter is the transformation of the Occidental philosophy in the sense and spirit of the East—a creation in the first instance of the Egyptian Plotinus (204–270) and of his most considerable disciple the Syrian Malchus or Porphyrius (233 till after 300), and thereafter pre-eminently cultivated in the towns of Syria. For a discussion of these two phenomena, so significant in the history of the world, this is not the place; but they may not be forgotten in estimating the position of matters in Syria.