CHAPTER X.

SYRIA AND THE LAND OF THE NABATAEANS.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Syria.]

It was very gradually that the Romans, after acquiring the western

half of the coasts of the Mediterranean, resolved on possessing

themselves also of the eastern half. Not the resistance, which they

here encountered in comparatively slight measure, but a well-founded

fear of the denationalising consequences of such acquisitions, led to

as prolonged an effort as possible on their part merely to preserve

decisive political influence in those regions, and to the incorporation

proper at least of Syria and Egypt taking place only when the state was

already almost a monarchy. Doubtless the Roman empire became thereby

geographically compact; the Mediterranean Sea, the proper basis of Rome

after it was a great power, became on all sides a Roman inland lake;

the navigation and commerce on its waters and shores formed politically

an unity to the advantage of all that dwelt around. But by the side

of geographical compactness went national bipartition. Through Greece

and Macedonia the Roman state would never have become binational, any

more than the Greek cities of Neapolis and Massalia had Hellenised

Campania and Provence. But, while in Europe and Africa the Greek

domain vanishes in presence of the compact mass of the Latin, so much

of the third continent as was drawn, with the Nile-valley rightfully

pertaining to it, into this cycle of culture belonged exclusively to

the Greeks, and Antioch and Alexandria in particular were the true

pillars of the Hellenic development that attained its culmination in

Alexander--centres of Hellenic life and Hellenic culture, and great

cities, as was Rome. After having set forth in the preceding chapter

the conflict between the East and West in and around Armenia and

Mesopotamia, that filled the whole period of the empire, we turn to

describe the relations of the Syrian regions, as they took shape at

the same time. What we mean is the territory which is separated by

the mountain-chain of Pisidia, Isauria, and Western Cilicia from Asia

Minor; by the eastern continuation of these mountains and the Euphrates

from Armenia and Mesopotamia, by the Arabian desert from the Parthian

empire and from Egypt; only it seemed fitting to deal with the peculiar

fortunes of Judaea in a special section. In accordance with the

diversity of political development under the imperial government, we

shall speak in the first instance of Syria proper, the northern portion

of this territory, and of the Phoenician coast that stretches along

under the Libanus, and then of the country lying behind Palestine--the

territory of the Nabataeans. What was to be said about Palmyra has

already found its place in the preceding chapter.

[Sidenote: Provincial government.]

After the partition of the provinces between the emperor and the

senate, Syria was under imperial administration, and was in the East,

like Gaul in the West, the central seat of civil and military control.

This governorship was from the beginning the most esteemed of all, and

only became in course of time all the more thought of. Its holder,

like the governor of the two Germanies, wielded the command over four

legions, and while the administration of the inland Gallic districts

was taken away from the commanders of the Rhine-army and a certain

restriction was involved in the very fact of their co-ordination, the

governor of Syria retained the civil administration of the whole

large province undiminished, and held for long alone in all Asia a

command of the first rank. Under Vespasian, indeed, he obtained in

the governors of Palestine and Cappadocia two colleagues likewise

commanding legions; but, on the other hand, through the annexation of

the kingdom of Commagene, and soon afterwards of the principalities

in the Libanus, the field of his administration was increased. It was

only in the course of the second century that a diminution of his

prerogatives occurred, when Hadrian took one of the four legions from

the governor of Syria and handed it over to the governor of Palestine.

It was Severus who at length withdrew the first place in the Roman

military hierarchy from the Syrian governor. After having subdued the

province--which had wished at that time to make Niger emperor, as it

had formerly done with its governor Vespasian--amidst resistance from

the capital Antioch in particular, he ordained its partition into a

northern and a southern half, and gave to the governor of the former,

which was called Coele-Syria, two legions, to the governor of the

latter, the province of Syro-Phoenicia, one.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Syro-Hellenic mixed culture.]

[Sidenote: Tomb of Antiochus of Commagene.]

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 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Commerce.]

To the sale of these wares, which from their nature belonged to the

market of the world, fell to be added the whole mass of goods which

came from the East by the Euphrates-routes to the West. It is true

that the Arabian and Indian imports at this time turned away from

this road, and took chiefly the route by way of Egypt; but not merely

did the Mesopotamian traffic remain necessarily with the Syrians;

the emporia also at the mouth of the Euphrates stood in regular

caravan-intercourse with Palmyra (p. 98), and thus made use of the

Syrian harbours. How considerable this intercourse was with the eastern

neighbours is shown by nothing so clearly as by the similarity of the

silver coinage in the Roman East and in the Parthian Babylonia; in the

provinces of Syria and Cappadocia the Roman government coined silver,

varying from the imperial currency, after the sorts and the standards

of the neighbouring empire. The Syrian manufactures themselves, _e.g._

of linen and silk, were stimulated by the very import of the similar

Babylonian articles of commerce, and, like these, the leather and skin

goods, the ointments, the spices, the slaves of the East, came during

the imperial period to a very considerable extent by way of Syria to

Italy and the West in general. But this always remained characteristic

of these primitive seats of commercial intercourse, that the men of

Sidon and their countrymen, in this matter very different from the

Egyptians, not merely sold their goods to those of other lands, but

themselves conveyed them thither, and, as the ship-captains in Syria

formed a prominent and respected class,[136] so Syrian merchants and

Syrian factories in the imperial period were to be found nearly as much

everywhere as in the remote times of which Homer tells. The Tyrians

had such factories in the two great import-harbours of Italy, Ostia

and Puteoli, and, as these themselves in their documents describe

their establishments as the greatest and most spacious of their kind,

so in the description of the earth which we have often quoted, Tyre

is named the first place of the East for commerce and traffic[137];

in like manner Strabo brings forward as a specialty at Tyre and at

Aradus the unusually high houses, consisting of many stories. Berytus

and Damascus, and certainly many other Syrian and Phoenician commercial

towns, had similar factories in the Italian ports.[138] Accordingly we

find, particularly in the later period of the empire, Syrian merchants,

chiefly Apamean, settled not merely in all Italy but likewise in all

the larger emporia of the West, at Salonae in Dalmatia, Apulum in

Dacia, Malaca in Spain, but above all in Gaul and Germany, _e.g._

at Bordeaux, Lyons, Paris, Orleans, Treves, so that these Syrian

Christians also, like the Jews, live according to their own customs and

make use of their Greek in their meetings.[139]

The state of things formerly described among the Antiochenes and the

Syrian cities generally becomes intelligible only on this basis. The

world of rank there consisted of rich manufacturers and merchants, the

bulk of the population of the labourers and the mariners;[140] and, as

later the riches acquired in the East flowed to Genoa and Venice, so

then the commercial gains of the West flowed back to Tyre and Apamea.

With the extensive field of traffic that lay open to these traders on

a great scale, and with the on the whole moderate frontier and inland

tolls, the Syrian export trade, embracing a great part of the most

lucrative and most transportable articles, already brought enormous

capital sums into their hands; and their business was not confined to

native goods.[141] What comfort of life once prevailed here we learn,

not from the scanty remains of the great cities that have perished, but

from the more forsaken than desolated region on the right bank of the

Orontes, from Apamea on to the point where the river turns towards the

sea. In this district of about a hundred miles in length there still

stand the ruins of nearly a hundred townships, with whole streets still

recognisable, the buildings with the exception of the roofs executed

in massive stone-work, the dwelling-houses surrounded by colonnades,

embellished with galleries and balconies, windows and portals richly

and often tastefully decorated with stone arabesques, with gardens

and baths laid out, with farm-offices in the ground-story, stables,

wine and oil presses hewn in the rocks,[142] as also large burial

chambers likewise hewn in the rock, filled with sarcophagi, and with

the entrances adorned with pillars. Traces of public life are nowhere

met with; it is the country-dwellings of the merchants and of the

manufacturers of Apamea and Antioch, whose assured prosperity and solid

enjoyment of life are attested by these ruins. These settlements, of

quite a uniform character, belong throughout to the late times of the

empire, the oldest to the beginning of the fourth century, the latest

to the middle of the sixth, immediately before the onslaught of Islam,

under which this prosperous and flourishing life succumbed. Christian

symbols and Biblical language are everywhere met with, and likewise

stately churches and ecclesiastical structures. The development of

culture, however, did not begin merely under Constantine, but simply

grew and became consolidated in those centuries. Certainly those

stone-buildings were preceded by similar villa and garden structures of

a less enduring kind. The regeneration of the imperial government after

the confused troubles of the third century has its expression in the

upward impulse which the Syrian mercantile world then received; but up

to a certain degree this picture of it left to us may be referred also

to the earlier imperial period.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Jewish traffic.]

The relations of the Jews in the time of the Roman empire were so

peculiar and, one might say, so little dependent on the province

which was named in the earlier period after them, in the later rather

by the revived name of the Philistaeans or Palaestinenses, that, as

we have already said, it appeared more suitable to treat of them in a

separate section. The little which is to be remarked as to the land

of Palestine, especially the not unimportant share of its maritime

and partly also of its inland towns in Syrian industry and Syrian

trade, has already been mentioned in the exposition given above of

these matters. The Jewish Diaspora had already, before the destruction

of the temple, extended in such a way that Jerusalem, even while it

still stood, was more a symbol than a home, very much as the city of

Rome was for the so-called Roman burgesses of later times. The Jews of

Antioch and Alexandria, and the numerous similar societies of lesser

rights and minor repute took part, as a matter of course, in the

commerce and intercourse of the places where they dwelt. Their Judaism

comes into account in the case only perhaps so far as the feelings

of mutual hatred and mutual contempt, which had become developed or

rather increased since the destruction of the temple, and the repeated

national-religious wars between Jews and non-Jews must have exercised

their effect also in these circles. As the Syrian merchants resident

abroad met together in the first instance for the worship of their

native deities, the Syrian Jew in Puteoli cannot well have belonged to

the Syrian merchant-guilds there; and, if the worship of the Syrian

gods found more and more an echo abroad, that which benefited the other

Syrians drew one barrier the more between the Syrians believing in

Moses and the Italians. If those Jews who had found a home outside of

Palestine, attached themselves beyond it not to those who shared their

dwelling-place but to those who shared their religion, as they could

not but do, they thereby renounced the esteem and the toleration which

the Alexandrians and the Antiochenes and the like met with abroad, and

were taken for what they professed to be--Jews. The Palestinian Jews of

the West, however, had for the most part not originated from mercantile

emigration, but were captives of war or descendants of such, and

in every respect homeless; the Pariah position which the children

of Abraham occupied, especially in the Roman capital--that of the

mendicant Jew, whose household furniture consisted in his bundle of hay

and his usurer’s basket, and for whom no service was too poor and too

menial--linked itself with the slave-market. Under these circumstances

we can understand why the Jews during the imperial period played in

the West a subordinate part alongside of the Syrians. The religious

fellowship of the mercantile and proletarian immigrants told heavily on

the collective body of the Jews, along with the general disparagement

connected with their position. But that Diaspora, as well as this, had

little to do with Palestine.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Province of Arabia.]

There remains still a frontier territory to be looked at, which is not

often mentioned, and which yet well deserves consideration; it is the

Roman province of Arabia. It bears its name wrongly; the emperor who

erected it, Trajan, was a man of big deeds but still bigger words. The

Arabian peninsula, which separates the region of the Euphrates from

the valley of the Nile, lacking in rain, without rivers, on all sides

surrounded by a rocky coast poor in harbours, was little fitted for

agriculture or for commerce, and in old times by far the greater part

of it remained the undisputed heritage of the unsettled inhabitants of

the desert. In particular the Romans, who understood how to restrict

their possession in Asia as in Egypt better than any other of the

changing powers in the ascendant, never even attempted to subdue the

Arabian peninsula. Their few enterprises against its south-eastern

portion, the most rich in products, and from its relation to India the

most important also for commerce, will be set forth when we discuss the

business-relations of Egypt. Roman Arabia, even as a Roman client-state

and especially as a Roman province, embraced only a moderate portion of

the north of the peninsula, but, in addition, the land to the south

and east of Palestine between this and the great desert till beyond

Bostra. At the same time with this let us take into account the country

belonging to Syria between Bostra and Damascus, which is now usually

named after the Haurân mountains, according to its old designation

Trachonitis and Batanaea.

[Sidenote: Conditions of culture in eastern Syria.]

These extensive regions were only to be gained for civilisation under

special conditions. The steppe-country proper (Hamâd) to the eastward

from the region with which we are now occupied as far as the Euphrates,

was never taken possession of by the Romans, and was incapable of

cultivation; only the roving tribes of the desert, such as at the

present day the Haneze, traverse it, to pasture their horses and camels

in winter along the Euphrates, in summer on the mountains south of

Bostra, and often to change the pasture-ground several times in the

year. The pastoral tribes settled westward of the steppe, who pursue in

particular the breeding of sheep to a great extent, stand already at a

higher degree of culture. But there is manifold room for agriculture

also in these districts. The red earth of the Haurân, decomposed lava,

yields in its primitive state much wild rye, wild barley, and wild

oats, and furnishes the finest wheat. Individual deep valleys in the

midst of the stone-deserts, such as the “seed-field,” the Ruhbe in

the Trachonitis, are the most fertile tracts in all Syria; without

ploughing, to say nothing of manuring, wheat yields on the average

eighty and barley a hundredfold, and twenty-six stalks from one grain

of wheat are not uncommon. Nevertheless no fixed dwelling-place was

formed here, because in the summer months the great heat and the want

of water and pasture compel the inhabitants to migrate to the mountain

pastures of the Haurân. But there was not wanting opportunity even

for fixed settlement. The garden-quarter around the town of Damascus,

watered by the river Baradâ in its many arms, and the fertile even now

populous districts which enclose it on the east, north, and south,

were in ancient as in modern times the pearl of Syria. The plain round

Bostra, particularly the so-called Nukra to the west of it, is at the

present day the granary for Syria, although from the want of rain on

an average every fourth harvest is lost, and the locusts often invading

it from the neighbouring desert remain a scourge of the land which

cannot be exterminated. Wherever the water-courses of the mountains are

led into the plain, fresh life flourishes amidst them. “The fertility

of this region,” says one who knows it well, “is inexhaustible; and

even at the present day, where the Nomads have left neither tree nor

shrub, the land, so far as the eye reaches, is like a garden.” Even on

the lava-surfaces of the mountainous districts the lava-streams have

left not a few places (termed Kâ’ in the Haurân), free for cultivation.

This natural condition has, as a rule, handed over the country to

shepherds and robbers. The necessarily nomadic character of a great

part of the population leads to endless feuds, particularly about

places of pasture, and to constant seizures of those regions which

are suited for fixed settlement; here, still more than elsewhere,

there is need for the formation of such political powers as are in a

position to procure quiet and peace on a wider scale, and for these

there is no right basis in the population. There is hardly a region

in the wide world in which, so much as in this case, civilisation has

not grown up spontaneously, but could only be called into existence by

the ascendency of conquest from without. When military stations hem in

the roving tribes of the desert and force those within the limit of

cultivation to a peaceful pastoral life, when colonists are conducted

to the regions capable of culture, and the waters of the mountains are

led by human hands into the plains, then, but only then, a cheerful and

plentiful life thrives in this region.

[Sidenote: Greek influence in eastern Syria.]

The pre-Roman period had not brought such blessings to these lands.

The inhabitants of the whole territory as far as Damascus belong to

the Arabian branch of the great Semitic stock; the names of persons

at least are throughout Arabic. In it, as in northern Syria, Oriental

and Occidental civilisation met; yet up to the time of the empire the

two had made but little progress. The language and the writing, which

the Nabataeans used, were those of Syria and of the Euphrates-lands,

and could only have come from thence to the natives. On the other hand

the Greek settlement in Syria extended itself, in part at least, also

to these regions. The great commercial town of Damascus had become

Greek with the rest of Syria. The Seleucids had carried the founding

of Greek towns even into the region beyond the Jordan, especially into

the northern Decapolis; further to the south at least the old Rabbath

Ammon had been converted by the Lagids into the city of Philadelphia.

But further away and in the eastern districts bordering on the desert

the Nabataean kings were not much more than nominally obedient to

the Syrian or Egyptian Alexandrids, and coins or inscriptions and

buildings, which might be attributed to pre-Roman Hellenism, have

nowhere come to light.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.”

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: The south-Arabian immigration before Mohammed.]

But the end came. As to the Arabian tribes who immigrated to this

region from the south, the historical tradition of the Romans is

silent, and what the late records of the Arabs report as to that of

the Ghassanids and their precursors, can hardly be fixed, at least as

to chronology.[156] But the Sabaeans, after whom the place Borechath

(Brêka to the north of Kanawât) is named, appear in fact to be

south-Arabian emigrants; and these were already settled here in the

third century. They and their associates may have come in peace and

become settled under Roman protection, perhaps even may have carried

to Syria the highly-developed and luxuriant culture of south-western

Arabia. So long as the empire kept firmly together and each of these

tribes was under its own sheikh, all obeyed the Roman lord-paramount.

But in order the better to meet the Arabians or--as they were now

called--Saracens of the Persian empire united under one king,

Justinian, during the Persian war in the year 531, placed all the

phylarchs of the Saracens subject to the Romans under Aretas son of

Gabalus--Harith Abu son of Chaminos among the Arabs--and bestowed on

this latter the title of king, which hitherto, it is added, had never

been done. This king of all the Arabian tribes settled in Syria was

still a vassal of the empire; but, while he warded off his countrymen,

he at the same time prepared the place for them. A century later, in

the year 637, Arabia and Syria succumbed to Islam.