The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 2

by Theodor Mommsen

Arrangements of Pompeius.

When Syria became Roman, Pompeius exerted himself to strengthen the Hellenic urban system, which he found in existence; as indeed the towns of the Decapolis subsequently reckoned their years from the year 690–91 64–63 B.C., in which Palestine had been added to the empire.[143] But in this region the government as well as the civilisation continued to be left to the two vassal-states, the Jewish and the Arabian.

The territory of Herod beyond the Jordan.Of the king of the Jews, Herod and his house, we shall have to speak elsewhere; here we have to mention his activity in the extending of civilisation toward the east. His field of dominion stretched over both banks of the Jordan in all its extent, northwards as far at least as Chelbon north-west from Damascus, southward as far as the Dead Sea, while the region farther to the east between his kingdom and the desert was assigned to the king of the Arabians. He and his descendants, who still bore sway here after the annexation of the lordship of Jerusalem down to Trajan, and subsequently resided in Caesarea Paneas in the southern Lebanon, had endeavoured energetically to tame the natives. The oldest evidences of a certain culture in these regions are doubtless the cave-towns, of which there is mention in the Book of Judges, large subterranean collective hiding-places made habitable by air-shafts, with streets and wells, fitted to shelter men and flocks, difficult to be found and, even when found, difficult to be reduced. Their mere existence shows the oppression of the peaceful inhabitants by the unsettled sons of the steppe. “These districts,” says Josephus, when he describes the state of things in the Haurân under Augustus, “were inhabited by wild tribes, without towns and without fixed fields, who harboured with their flocks under the earth in caves with narrow entrance and wide intricate paths, but copiously supplied with water and provisions were difficult to be subdued.” Several of these cave-towns contained as many as 400 head. A remarkable edict of the first or second Agrippa, fragments of which have been found at Canatha (Kanawât), summons the inhabitants to leave off their "animal-conditions" and to exchange their cavern-life for civilised existence. The non-settled Arabs live chiefly by the plundering partly of the neighbouring peasants, partly of caravans on the march; the uncertainty was increased by the fact that the petty prince Zenodorus of Abila to the north of Damascus, in the Anti-Libanus, to whom Augustus had committed the superintendence over the Trachon, preferred to make common cause with the robbers and secretly shared in their gains. Just in consequence of this the emperor assigned this region to Herod, and his remorseless energy succeeded, in some measure, in repressing this brigandage. The king appears to have instituted on the east frontier a line of military posts, fortified and put under royal commanders (ἔπαρχοι). He would have achieved still more if the Nabataean territory had not afforded the robbers an asylum; this was one of the causes of variance between him and his Arabian colleague.[144] His Hellenising tendency comes into prominence in this domain as strongly and less unpleasantly than in his government at home. As all the coins of Herod and the Herodians are Greek, so in the land beyond the Jordan, while the oldest monument with an inscription that we know—the Temple of Baalsamin at Canatha—bears an Aramaean dedication, the honorary bases erected there, including one for Herod the Great,[145] are bilingual or merely Greek; under his successors Greek rules alone.

The kingdom of Nabat.By the side of the Jewish kings stood the formerly-mentioned (iv. 140)iv. 134. “king of Nabat,” as he called himself. The residence of this Arabian prince was the city, known to us only by its Greek name Petra, a rock-fastness situated midway between the Dead Sea and the north-east extremity of the Arabian Gulf, from of old an emporium for the traffic of India and Arabia with the region of the Mediterranean. These rulers possessed the northern half of the Arabian peninsula; their power extended on the Arabian Gulf as far as Leuce Come opposite to the Egyptian town of Berenice, in the interior at least as far as the region of the old Thaema.[146] To the north of the peninsula their territory reached as far as Damascus, which was under their protection,[147] and even beyond Damascus[148], and enclosed as with a girdle the whole of Palestinian Syria. The Romans, after taking possession of Judaea, came into hostile contact with them, and Marcus Scaurus led an expedition against them. At that time their subjugation was not accomplished; but it must have ensued soon afterwards.[149] Under Augustus their king Obodas was just as subject to the empire[150] as Herod the king of the Jews, and rendered, like the latter, military service in the Roman expedition against southern Arabia. Since that time the protection of the imperial frontier in the south as in the east of Syria, as far up as to Damascus, must have lain mainly in the hands of this Arabian king. With his Jewish neighbour he was at constant feud. Augustus, indignant that the Arabian instead of seeking justice at the hand of his suzerain against Herod, had encountered the latter with arms, and that Obodas’s son, Harethath, or in Greek Aretas, after the death of his father, instead of waiting for investiture, had at once entered upon the dominion, was on the point of deposing the latter and of joining his territory to the Jewish; but the misrule of Herod in his later years withheld him from this step, and so Aretas was confirmed (about 747 U.C.)7 B.C.. Some decades later he began again warfare at his own hand against his son-in-law, the prince of Galilee, Herod Antipas, on account of the divorce of his daughter in favour of the beautiful Herodias. He retained the upper hand, but the indignant suzerain Tiberius ordered the governor of Syria to proceed against him. The troops were already on the march, when Tiberius died (37); and his successor, Gaius, who did not wish well to Antipas, pardoned the Arabian. King Maliku or Malchus, the successor of Aretas, fought under Nero and Vespasian in the Jewish war as a Roman vassal, and transmitted his dominion to his son Dabel, the contemporary of Trajan, and the last of these rulers. More especially after the annexation of the state of Jerusalem and the reducing of the respectable dominion of Herod to the far from martial kingdom of Caesarea Paneas, the Arabian was the most considerable of the Syrian client-states, as indeed it furnished the strongest among the royal contingents to the Roman army besieging Jerusalem. This state even under Roman supremacy refrained from the use of the Greek language; the coins struck under the rule of its kings bear, apart from Damascus, an Aramaic legend. But there appear the germs of an organised condition and of civilised government. The coinage itself probably only began after the state had come under Roman clientship. The Arabian-Indian traffic with the region of the Mediterranean moved in great part along the caravan-route watched over by the Romans, running from Leuce Come by way of Petra to Gaza.[151] The princes of the Nabataean kingdom made use, just like the community of Palmyra, of Greek official designations for their magistrates, e.g. of the titles of Eparch and of Strategos. If under Tiberius the good order of Syria brought about by the Romans and the security of the harvests occasioned by their military occupation are made prominent as matters of boasting, this is primarily to be referred to the arrangements made in the client-states of Jerusalem or subsequently of Caesarea Paneas and of Petra.

Institution of the province of Arabia.Under Trajan the direct rule of Rome took the place of these two client-states. In the beginning of his reign king Agrippa II. died, and his territory was united with the province of Syria. Not long after, in the year 106, the governor Aulus Cornelius Palma broke up the previous dominion of the kings of Nabat, and made the greater part of it into the Roman province of Arabia, while Damascus went to Syria, and what the Nabataean king had possessed in the interior of Arabia was abandoned by the Romans. The erection of Arabia is designated as subjugation, and the coins also which celebrate the taking possession of it attest that the Nabataeans offered resistance, as indeed generally the nature of their territory as well as their previous attitude lead us to assume a relative independence on the part of these princes. But the historical significance of these events may not be sought in warlike success; the two annexations, which doubtless went together, were no more than acts of administration carried out perhaps by military power, and the tendency to acquire these domains for civilisation and specially for Hellenism was only heightened by the fact that the Roman government took upon itself the work. The Hellenism of the East, as summed up in Alexander, was a church militant, a thoroughly conquering power pushing its way in a political, religious, economic, and literary point of view. Here, on the edge of the desert, under the pressure of anti-Hellenic Judaism and in the hands of the spiritless and vacillating government of the Seleucids, it had hitherto achieved little. But now, pervading the Roman system, it develops a motive power, which stands related to the earlier, as the power of the Jewish and the Arabian vassal-princes to that of the Roman empire. In this country, where everything depended and depends on protecting the state of peace by the setting up of a superior and standing military force, the institution of a legionary camp in Bostra under a commander of senatorial rank was an epoch-making event. From this centre the requisite posts were established at suitable places and provided with garrisons. For example, the stronghold of Namara (Nemâra) deserves mention, a long day’s march beyond the boundaries of the properly habitable mountain-land, in the midst of the stony desert, but commanding the only spring to be found within it and the forts attached to it in the already mentioned oasis of Ruhbe and further on at Jebel Sês; these garrisons together control the whole projection of the Haurân. Another series of forts, placed under the Syrian command and primarily under that of the legion posted at Danava ([p. 95]), and laid out at uniform distances of three leagues apart, secured the route from Damascus to Palmyra; the best known of them, the second in the series, was that of Dmêr ([p. 149], n. 1), a rectangle of 300 and 350 paces respectively, provided on every side with six towers and a portal fifteen paces in breadth, and surrounded by a ring-wall of sixteen feet thick, once faced outwardly with beautiful blocks of hewn stone.

The civilisation of east Syria under Roman rule.Never had such an aegis been extended over this land. It was not, properly speaking, denationalised. The Arabic names remained down to the latest time, although not unfrequently, just as in Syria ([p. 121]), a Romano-Hellenic name is appended to the local one; thus a sheikh names himself “Adrianos or Soaidos, son of Malechos.”[152] The native worship also remains unaffected; the chief deity of the Nabataeans, Dusaris, is doubtless compared with Dionysus, but regularly continues to be worshipped under his local name, and down to a late period the Bostrenes celebrate the Dusaria in honour of him.[153] In like manner in the province of Arabia temples continue to be consecrated, and offerings presented to Aumu or Helios, to Vasaeathu, to Theandritos, to Ethaos. The tribes and the tribal organisation no less continue: the inscriptions mention lists of “Phylae” by the native name, and frequently Phylarchs or Ethnarchs. But alongside of traditional customs civilisation and Hellenising make progress. If from the time before Trajan no Greek monument can be shown in the sphere of the Nabataean state, on the other hand no monument subsequent to Trajan’s time in the Arabic language has been found there;[154] to all appearance the imperial government suppressed at once upon the annexation the written use of Arabic, although it certainly remained the language proper of the country, as is attested not only by the proper names but by the "interpreter of the tax-receivers."

Agriculture and commerce.As to the advance of agriculture we have no witnesses to speak; but if, on the whole eastern and southern slope of the Haurân, from the summits of the mountains down to the desert, the stones, with which this volcanic plain was once strewed, are thrown into heaps or arranged in long rows, and thus the most glorious fields are obtained, we may recognise therein the hand of the only government which has governed this land as it might and should be governed. In the Ledjâ, a lava-plateau thirteen leagues long and eight to nine broad, which is now almost uninhabited, there grew once vines and figs between the streams of lava; the Roman road connecting Bostra with Damascus ran across it; in the Ledjâ and around it are counted the ruins of twelve larger and thirty-nine smaller townships. It can be shown that, at the bidding of the same governor who erected the province of Arabia, the mighty aqueduct was constructed which led the water from the mountains of the Haurân to Canatha (Kerak) in the plain, and not far from it a similar one in Arrha (Rahâ)—buildings of Trajan, which may be named by the side of the port of Ostia and the Forum of Rome. The flourishing of commercial intercourse is attested by the very choice of the capital of the new province. Bostra existed under the Nabataean government, and an inscription of king Malichu has been found there; but its military and commercial importance begins with the introduction of direct Roman government. “Bostra,” says Wetzstein, “has the most favourable situation of all the towns in eastern Syria; even Damascus, which owes its size to the abundance of its water and to its situation protected by the eastern Trachon, will excel Bostra only under a weak government, while the latter under a strong and wise government must elevate itself in a few decades to a fabulous prosperity. It is the great market for the Syrian desert: the high mountains of Arabia and Peraea, and its long rows of booths of stone still in their desolation, furnish evidence of the reality of an earlier, and the possibility of a future, greatness.” The remains of the Roman road, leading thence by way of Salchat and Ezrak to the Persian Gulf, show that Bostra was, along with Petra and Palmyra, a medium of traffic from the East to the Mediterranean. This town was probably constituted on a Hellenic basis already by Trajan; at least it is called thenceforth the “new Trajanic Bostra,” and the Greek coins begin with Pius, while later the legend becomes Latin in consequence of the bestowal of colonial rights by Alexander.

Petra too had a Greek municipal constitution already under Hadrian, and several other places subsequently received municipal rights; but in this territory of the Arabians down to the latest period the tribe and the tribal village preponderated.

Stone buildings of eastern Syria.A peculiar civilisation was developed from the mixture of national and Greek elements in these regions during the five hundred years between Trajan and Mohammed. A fuller picture of it has been preserved to us than of other forms of the ancient world, inasmuch as the structures of Petra, in great part worked out of the rock, and the buildings in the Haurân, executed entirely of stone owing to the want of wood, comparatively little injured by the sway of the Bedouins which was here again installed with Islam in its old misrule, are still to a considerable degree extant to the present day, and throw a clear light on the artistic skill and the manner of life of those centuries. The above-mentioned temple of Baalsamin at Canatha, certainly built under Herod, shows in its original portions a complete diversity from Greek architecture and in the structural plan remarkable analogies with the temple-building of the same king in Jerusalem, while the pictorial representations shunned in the latter are by no means wanting here. A similar state of things has been observed in the monuments found at Petra. Afterwards further steps were taken. If under the Jewish and the Nabataean rulers culture freed itself but slowly from the influences of the East, a new time seems to have begun here with the transfer of the legion to Bostra. “Building,” says an excellent French observer, Melchior de Vogué, “obtained thereby an impetus which was not again arrested. Everywhere rose houses, palaces, baths, temples, theatres, aqueducts, triumphal arches; towns sprang from the ground within a few years with the regular construction and the symmetrically disposed colonnades which mark towns without a past, and which are as it were the inevitable uniform for this part of Syria during the imperial period.” The eastern and southern slope of the Haurân shows nearly three hundred such desolated towns and villages, while there only five new townships now exist; several of the former, e.g. Bûsân, number as many as 800 houses of one to two stories, built throughout of basalt, with well-jointed walls of square blocks without cement, with doors mostly ornamented and often provided with inscriptions, the flat roof formed of stone-rafters, which are supported by stone arches and made rain-proof above by a layer of cement. The town-wall is usually formed only by the backs of the houses joined together, and is protected by numerous towers. The poor attempts at re-colonising of recent times find the houses habitable; there is wanting only the diligent hand of man, or rather the strong arm that protects it. In front of the gates lie the cisterns, often subterranean, or provided with an artificial stone roof, many of which are still at the present day, when this deserted seat of towns has become pasturage, kept up by the Bedouins in order to water their flocks from them in summer. The style of building and the practice of art have doubtless preserved some remains of the older Oriental type, e.g. the frequent form, for a tomb, of the cube crowned with a pyramid, perhaps also the pigeon-towers often added to the tomb, still frequent in the present day throughout Syria; but, taken on the whole, the style is the usual Greek one of the imperial period. Only the absence of wood has here called forth a development of the stone arch and the cupola, which technically and artistically lends to these buildings an original character. In contrast to the customary repetition elsewhere usual of traditional forms there prevails here an architecture independently suiting the exigencies and the conditions, moderate in ornamentation, thoroughly sound and rational, and not destitute even of elegance. The burial-places, which are cut out in the rock-walls rising to the east and west of Petra and in their lateral valleys, with their façades of Doric or Corinthian pillars often placed in several tiers one above another, and their pyramids and propylaea reminding us of the Egyptian Thebes, are not artistically pleasing, but imposing by their size and richness. Only a stirring life and a high prosperity could display such care for its dead. In presence of these architectural monuments it is not surprising that the inscriptions make mention of a theatre in the “village” (κώμη) Sakkaea and a “theatre-shaped Odeon” in Canatha, and a local poet of Namara in Batanaea celebrates himself as a “master of the glorious art of proud Ausonian song.”[155] Thus at this eastern limit of the empire there was gained for Hellenic civilisation a frontier-domain which may be compared with the Romanised region of the Rhine; the arched and domed buildings of eastern Syria well stand comparison with the castles and tombs of the nobles and of the great merchants of Belgica.