Antioch.The Syrian character finds its eminent expression in the capital of the country and, before Constantinople was founded, of the Roman East generally—inferior as respects population only to Rome and Alexandria, and possibly also to the Babylonian Seleucia—Antioch, on which it appears requisite to dwell for a moment. The town, one of the youngest in Syria and now of small importance, did not become a great city by the natural circumstances of commerce, but was a creation of monarchic policy. The Macedonian conquerors called it into life, primarily from military considerations, as a fitting central place for a rule which embraced at once Asia Minor, the region of the Euphrates, and Egypt, and sought also to be near to the Mediterranean.[128] The like aim and the different methods of the Seleucids and the Lagids find their true expression in the similarity and the contrast of Antioch and Alexandria; as the latter was the centre for the naval power and the maritime policy of the Egyptian rulers, so Antioch was the centre for the continental Eastern monarchy of the rulers of Asia. The later Seleucids at different times undertook large new foundations here, so that the city, when it became Roman, consisted of four independent and walled-in districts, all of which again were enclosed by a common wall. Nor were immigrants from a distance wanting. When Greece proper fell under the rule of the Romans, and Antiochus the Great had vainly attempted to dislodge them thence, he granted at least to the emigrant Euboeans and Aetolians an asylum in his capital. In the capital of Syria, as in that of Egypt, a commonwealth in some measure independent and a privileged position were conceded to the Jews, and the position of the towns as centres of the Jewish Diaspora was not the weakest element in their development. Once made a residency and the seat of the supreme administration of a great empire, Antioch remained even in Roman times the capital of the Asiatic provinces of Rome. Here resided the emperors, when they sojourned in the East, and regularly the governor of Syria; here was struck the imperial money for the East, and here especially, as well as in Damascus and Edessa, were found the imperial manufactories of arms. It is true that the town had lost its military importance for the Roman empire; and under the changed circumstances the bad communication with the sea was felt as a great evil, not so much on account of the distance, as because the port—the town of Seleucia, planned at the same time with Antioch—was little fitted for large traffic. The Roman emperors from the Flavians down to Constantius expended enormous sums to hew out of the masses of rocks surrounding this locality the requisite docks with their tributary canals, and to provide sufficient piers; but the art of the engineers, which at the mouth of the Nile had succeeded in throwing up the highest mounds, contended vainly in Syria with the insurmountable difficulties of the ground. As a matter of course the largest town of Syria took an active part in the manufactures and the commerce of this province, of which we shall have to speak further on; nevertheless it was a seat of consumers more than of producers.
Daphne.In no city of antiquity was the enjoyment of life so much the main thing, and its duties so incidental, as in “Antioch upon Daphne,” as the city was significantly called, somewhat as if we should say "Vienna upon the Prater." For Daphne[129] was a pleasure-garden, about five miles from the city, ten miles in circumference, famous for its laurel-trees, after which it was named, for its old cypresses which even the Christian emperors ordered to be spared, for its flowing and gushing waters, for its shining temple of Apollo, and its magnificent much-frequented festival of the 10th August. The whole environs of the city, which lies between two wooded mountain-chains in the valley of the Orontes abounding in water, fourteen miles upward from its mouth, are even at the present day, in spite of all neglect, a blooming garden and one of the most charming spots on earth. No city in all the empire excelled it in the splendour and magnificence of its public structures. The chief street, which to the length of thirty-six stadia, nearly four and a half miles, with a covered colonnade on both sides, and a broad carriage-way in the middle, traversed the city in a straight direction along the river, was imitated in many ancient towns, but had not its match even in imperial Rome. As the water ran into every good house in Antioch,[130] so the people walked in those colonnades through the whole city at all seasons protected from rain as from the heat of the sun, and during the evening also in lighted streets, of which we have no record as to any other city of antiquity.[131]
Intellectual interests.But amidst all this luxury the Muses did not find themselves at home; science in earnest and not less earnest art were never truly cultivated in Syria and more especially in Antioch. However complete was the analogy in other respects between Egypt and Syria as to their development, their contrast in a literary point of view was sharp; the Lagids alone entered on this portion of the inheritance of Alexander the Great. While they fostered Hellenic literature and promoted scientific research in an Aristotelian sense and spirit, the better Seleucids doubtless by their political position opened up the East to the Greeks—the mission of Megasthenes to king Chandragupta in India on the part of Seleucus I., and the exploring of the Caspian Sea by his contemporary the admiral Patrocles, were epoch-making in this respect—but of immediate interposition in literary interests on the part of the Seleucids the history of Greek literature has nothing more to tell than that Antiochus the Great, as he was called, made the poet Euphorion his librarian. Perhaps the history of Latin literature may make a claim to serious scientific work on the part of Berytus, the Latin island in the sea of Oriental Hellenism. It is perhaps no accident that the reaction against the modernising tendency in literature of the Julio-Claudian epoch, and the reintroduction of the language and writings of the republican time into the school as into literature, originated with a Berytian belonging to the middle class, Marcus Valerius Probus, who in the schools that were left in his remote home moulded himself still on the old classics, and then, in energetic activity more as a critical author than as strictly a teacher, laid the foundation for the classicism of the later imperial period. The same Berytus became later, and remained through the whole period of the empire, for all the East, the seat of the study of jurisprudence requisite towards an official career. As to Hellenic literature no doubt the poetry of the epigram and the wit of the feuilleton were at home in Syria; several of the most noted Greek minor poets, like Meleager, Philodemus of Gadara, and Antipater of Sidon, were Syrians and unsurpassed in sensuous charm as in refined versification; and the father of the feuilleton literature was Menippus of Gadara. But these performances lie for the most part before, and some of them considerably before, the imperial period.
Minor literature.In the Greek literature of this epoch no province is so poorly represented as Syria; and this is hardly an accident, although, considering the universal position of Hellenism under the empire, not much stress can be laid on the home of the individual writers. On the other hand the subordinate authorship which prevailed in this epoch—such as stories of love, robbers, pirates, procurers, soothsayers, and dreams, destitute of thought or form, and fabulous travels—had probably its chief seat here. Among the colleagues of the already-mentioned Jamblichus, author of the Babylonian history, his countrymen must have been numerous; the contact of this Greek literature with the Oriental literature of a similar kind doubtless took place through the medium of Syrians. The Greeks indeed had no need to learn lying from the Orientals; yet the no longer plastic but fanciful story-telling of their later period has sprung from Scheherazade’s horn of plenty, not from the pleasantry of the Graces. It is perhaps not accidentally that the satire of this period, when it views Homer as the father of lying travels, makes him a Babylonian with the proper name of Tigranes. Apart from this entertaining reading, of which even those were somewhat ashamed who spent their time in writing or reading it, there is hardly any other prominent name to be mentioned from these regions than the contemporary of that Jamblichus, Lucian of Commagene. He, too, wrote nothing except, in imitation of Menippus, essays and fugitive pieces after a genuinely Syrian type, witty and sprightly in personal banter, but where this is at an end, incapable of saying amid his laughter the earnest truth or of even handling the plastic power of comedy.
Daily life and amusements.This people valued only the day. No Greek region has so few memorial-stones to show as Syria; the great Antioch, the third city in the empire, has—to say nothing of the land of hieroglyphics and obelisks—left behind fewer inscriptions than many a small African or Arabian village. With the exception of the rhetorician Libanius from the time of Julian, who is more well-known than important, this town has not given to literature a single author’s name. The Tyanitic Messiah of heathenism, or his apostle speaking for him, was not wrong in terming the Antiochenes an uncultivated and half-barbarous people, and in thinking that Apollo would do well to transform them as well as their Daphne; for “in Antioch, while the cypresses knew how to whisper, men knew not how to speak.” In the artistic sphere Antioch had a leading position only as respected the theatre and sports generally. The exhibitions which captivated the public of Antioch were, according to the fashion of this time, less strictly dramatic than noisy musical performances, ballets, animal hunts, and gladiatorial games. The applauding or hissing of this public decided the reputation of the dancer throughout the empire. The jockeys and other heroes of the circus and theatre came pre-eminently from Syria.[132] The ballet-dancers and the musicians, as well as the jugglers and buffoons, whom Lucius Verus brought back from his Oriental campaign—performed, so far as his part went, in Antioch—to Rome, formed an epoch in the history of Italian theatricals. The passion with which the public in Antioch gave itself up to this pleasure is characteristically shown by the fact, that according to tradition the gravest disaster which befell Antioch in this period, its capture by the Persians in 260 ([p. 101]), surprised the burgesses of the city in the theatre, and from the top of the mount, on the slope of which it was constructed, the arrows flew into the ranks of the spectators. In Gaza, the most southerly town of Syria, where heathenism possessed a stronghold in the famous temple of Marnas, at the end of the fourth century the horses of a zealous heathen and of a zealous Christian ran at the races, and, when on that occasion “Christ beat Marnas,” St. Jerome tells us, numerous heathens had themselves baptised.
Immorality.All the great cities of the Roman empire doubtless vied with each other in dissoluteness of morals; but in this the palm probably belongs to Antioch. The decorous Roman, whom the severe moral-portrait-painter of Trajan’s time depicts, as he turns his back on his native place, because it had become a city of Greeks, adds that the Achaeans formed the least part of the filth; that the Syrian Orontes had long discharged itself into the river Tiber, and flooded Rome with its language and its habits, its street-musicians, female harp-players and triangle-beaters, and the troops of its courtesans. The Romans of Augustus spoke of the Syrian female flute-player, the ambubaia,[133] as we speak of the Parisian cocotte. In the Syrian cities, it is stated even in the last age of the republic by Posidonius, an author of importance, who was himself a native of the Syrian Apamea, the citizens have become disused to hard labour; the people there think only of feasting and carousing, and all clubs and private parties serve for this purpose; at the royal table a garland is put on every guest, and the latter is then sprinkled with Babylonian perfume; flute-playing and harp-playing sound through the streets; the gymnastic institutes are converted into hot baths—by the latter is meant the institution of the so-called Thermae, which probably first emerged in Syria and subsequently became general; they were in substance a combination of the gymnasium and the hot-bath. Four hundred years later matters went on after quite a similar fashion in Antioch. The quarrel between Julian and these townsmen arose not so much about the emperor’s beard, as because in this city of taverns, which, as he expresses himself, has nothing in view but dancing and drinking, he regulated the prices for the hosts. The religious system of the Syrian land was also, and especially, pervaded by these dissolute and sensuous doings. The cultus of the Syrian gods was often an appanage of the Syrian brothel.[134]
Antiochene ridicule.It would be unjust to make the Roman government responsible for this state of affairs in Syria; it had been the same under the government of the Diadochi, and was merely transmitted to the Romans. But in the history of this age the Syro-Hellenic element was an essential factor, and, although its indirect influence was of far more weight, it still in many ways made itself perceptible directly in politics. Of political partisanship proper there can be still less talk in the case of the Antiochenes of this and every age, than in the case of the burgesses of the other great cities of the empire; but in mocking and disputation they apparently excelled all others, even the Alexandrians that vied with them in this respect. They never made a revolution, but readily and earnestly supported every pretender whom the Syrian army set up, Vespasian against Vitellius, Cassius against Marcus, Niger against Severus, always ready, where they thought that they had support in reserve, to renounce allegiance to the existing government. The only talent which indisputably belonged to them—their mastery of ridicule—they exercised not merely against the actors of their stage, but no less against the rulers sojourning in the capital of the East, and the ridicule was quite the same against the actor as against the emperor; it applied to personal appearance and to individual peculiarities, just as if their sovereign appeared only to amuse them with his part. Thus there existed between the public of Antioch and their rulers—particularly those who spent a considerable time there, Hadrian, Verus, Marcus, Severus, Julian—so to speak, a perpetual warfare of sarcasm, one document of which, the reply of the last named emperor to the “beard-mockers” of Antioch, is still preserved. While this imperial man of letters met their sarcastic sayings with satirical writings, the Antiochenes at other times had to pay more severely for their evil speaking and their other sins. Thus Hadrian withdrew from them the right of coining silver; Marcus withdrew the right of assembly, and closed for some time the theatre. Severus took even from the town the primacy of Syria, and transferred it to Laodicea, which was in constant neighbourly warfare with the capital; and, if these two ordinances were soon again withdrawn, the partition of the province, which Hadrian had already threatened, was carried into execution, as we have already said ([p. 118]), under Severus, and not least because the government wished to humble the turbulent great city. This city even made a mockery of its final overthrow. When in the year 540 the Persian king Chosroes Nushirvan appeared before the walls of Antioch he was received from its battlements not merely with showers of arrows but with the usual obscene sarcasms; and, provoked by this, the king not merely took the town by storm, but carried also its inhabitants away to his New-Antioch in the province of Susa.
Culture of the soil.The brilliant aspect of the condition of Syria was the economic one; in manufactures and trade Syria takes, alongside of Egypt, the first place among the provinces of the Roman empire, and even claims in a certain respect precedence over Egypt. Agriculture throve under the permanent state of peace, and under a sagacious administration which directed its efforts particularly to the advancement of irrigation, to an extent which puts to shame modern civilisation. No doubt various parts of Syria are still at the present day of the utmost luxuriance; the valley of the lower Orontes, the rich garden round Tripolis with its groups of palms, groves of oranges, copses of pomegranates and jasmine, the fertile coast-plain north and south of Gaza, neither the Bedouins nor the Pashas have hitherto been able to make desolate. But their work is nevertheless not to be estimated lightly. Apamea in the middle of the Orontes valley, now a rocky wilderness without fields and trees, where the poor flocks on the scanty pasturages are decimated by the robbers of the mountains, is strewed far and wide with ruins, and there is documentary attestation that under Quirinius the governor of Syria, the same who is named in the Gospels, this town with its territory included numbered 117,000 free inhabitants. Beyond question the whole valley of the Orontes abounding in water—already at Hemesa it is from 30 to 40 mètres broad and one and a half to three mètres deep—was once a great seat of cultivation. But even of the districts, which are now mere deserts, and where it seems to the traveller of the present day impossible for man to live and thrive, a considerable portion was formerly a field of labour for active hands. To the east of Hemesa, where there is now not a green leaf nor a drop of water, the heavy basalt-slabs of former oil-presses are found in quantities. While at the present day olives scantily grow only in the valleys of the Lebanon abounding in springs, the olive woods must formerly have stretched far beyond the valley of the Orontes. The traveller now from Hemesa to Palmyra carries water with him on the back of camels, and all this part of the route is covered with the remains of former villas and hamlets.[135] The march of Aurelian along this route ([p. 110]) no army could now undertake. Of what is at present called desert a good portion is rather the laying waste of the blessed labour of better times. “All Syria,” says a description of the earth from the middle of the fourth century, “overflows with corn, wine, and oil.” But Syria was not even in antiquity an exporting land, in a strict sense, for the fruits of the earth, like Egypt and Africa, although the noble wines were sent away, e.g. that of Damascus to Persia, those of Laodicea, Ascalon, Gaza, to Egypt and from thence as far as Ethiopia and India, and even the Romans knew how to value the wine of Byblus, of Tyre, and of Gaza.
Manufactures.Of far more importance for the general position of the province were the Syrian manufactures. A series of industries, which came into account for export, were here at home, especially of linen, purple, silk, glass. The weaving of flax, practised from of old in Babylonia, was early transplanted thence to Syria; as that description of the earth says: “Scytopolis (in Palestine), Laodicea, Byblus, Tyrus, Berytus, send out their linen into all the world,” and in the tariff-law of Diocletian accordingly there are adduced as fine linen goods those of the three first-named towns alongside of those of the neighbouring Tarsus and of Egypt, and the Syrian have precedence over all. That the purple of Tyre, however many competitors with it arose, always retained the first place, is well known; and besides the Tyrian there were in Syria numerous purple dyeworks likewise famous on the coast above and below Tyre at Sarepta, Dora, Caesarea, even in the interior, in the Palestinian Neapolis and in Lydda. The raw silk came at this epoch from China and especially by way of the Caspian Sea, and so to Syria; it was worked up chiefly in the looms of Berytus and of Tyre, in which latter place especially was prepared the purple silk that was much in use and brought a high price. The glass manufactures of Sidon maintained their primitive fame in the imperial age, and numerous glass-vases of our museums bear the stamp of a Sidonian manufacturer.