Alexandria and Antioch were pre-eminently seats of wealthy merchants
and manufacturers; but in Antioch there was wanting the seaport and
its belongings, and, however stirring matters were on the streets
there, they bore no comparison with the life and doings of the
Alexandrian artisans and sailors. On the other hand, for enjoyment
of life, dramatic spectacles, dining, pleasures of love, Antioch had
more to offer than the city in which “no one went idle.” Literary
amusements, linking themselves especially with the rhetorical
exhibitions--such as we sketched in the description of Asia Minor--fell
into the background in Egypt,[242] doubtless more amidst the pressure
of the affairs of the day than through the influence of the numerous
and well-paid _savants_ living in Alexandria, and in great part
natives of it. These men of the Museum, of whom we shall have to
speak further on, did not prominently affect the character of the
town as a whole, especially if they did their duty in diligent work.
But the Alexandrian physicians were regarded as the best in the whole
empire; it is true that Egypt was no less the genuine home of quacks
and of secret remedies, and of that strange civilised form of the
“shepherd-medicine,” in which pious simplicity and speculating deceit
draped themselves in the mantle of science. Of the thrice-greatest
Hermes we have already made mention (p. 261); the Alexandrian Sarapis,
too, wrought more marvellous cures in antiquity than any one of his
colleagues, and he infected even the practical emperor Vespasian, so
that he too healed the blind and lame, but only in Alexandria.
[Sidenote: Scholar-life in Alexandria.]
Although the place which Alexandria occupies, or seems to occupy,
in the intellectual and literary development of the later Greece
and of Occidental culture generally cannot be fitly estimated in a
description of the local circumstances of Egypt, but only in the
delineation of this development itself, the Alexandrian scholarship
and its continuation under the Roman government are too remarkable
a phenomenon not to have its general position touched on in this
connection. We have already observed (p. 126) that the blending of
the Oriental and the Hellenic intellectual world was accomplished
pre-eminently in Egypt alongside of Syria; and if the new faith which
was to conquer the West issued from Syria, the science homogeneous
with it--that philosophy which, alongside of and beyond the human
mind, acknowledges and proclaims the supra-mundane God and the divine
revelation--came pre-eminently from Egypt: probably already the new
Pythagoreanism, certainly the philosophic Neo-Judaism--of which we
have formerly spoken (p. 170)--as well as the new Platonism, whose
founder, the Egyptian Plotinus, was likewise already mentioned (p.
126). Upon this interpenetration of Hellenic and Oriental elements,
that was carried out especially in Alexandria, mainly depends the fact,
that--as falls to be set forth more fully in surveying the state of
things in Italy--the Hellenism there in the earlier imperial period
bears pre-eminently an Egyptian form. As the old-new wisdoms associated
with Pythagoras, Moses, Plato, penetrated from Alexandria into
Italy, so Isis and her belongings played the first part in the easy,
fashionable piety, which the Roman poets of the Augustan age and the
Pompeian temples from that of Claudius exhibit to us. Art as practised
in Egypt prevails in the Campanian frescoes of the same epoch, as in
the Tiburtine villa of Hadrian. In keeping with this is the position
which Alexandrian erudition occupies in the intellectual life of the
imperial period. Outwardly it is based on the care of the state for
intellectual interests, and would with more warrant link itself to the
name of Alexander than to that of Alexandria; it is the realisation of
the thought that in a certain stage of civilisation art and science
must be supported and promoted by the authority and the resources
of the state, the consistent sequel of the brilliant moment in the
world’s history which placed Alexander and Aristotle side by side. It
is not our intention here to inquire how in this mighty conception
truth and error, the injuring and elevating of the intellectual life,
became mingled, nor is the scanty after-bloom of the divine singing
and of the high thinking of the free Hellenes to be once more placed
side by side with the rank and yet also noble produce of the later
collecting, investigating, and arranging. If the institutions which
sprang from this thought could not, or, what was worse, could only
apparently, renew to the Greek nation what was irrecoverably lost, they
granted to it on the still free arena of the intellectual world the
only possible compensation, and that, too, a glorious one. For us the
local circumstances are above all to be taken into account. Artificial
gardens are in some measure independent of the soil, and it is not
otherwise with these scientific institutions; only that they from
their nature are directed towards the courts. Material support may be
imparted to them otherwise; but more important than this is the favour
of the highest circles, which swells their sails, and the connections,
which, meeting together in the great centres, replenish and extend
these circles of science. In the better time of the monarchies of
Alexander there were as many such centres as there were states, and
that of the Lagid court was only the most highly-esteemed among them.
The Roman republic had brought the others one after another into its
power, and had set aside with the courts also the scientific institutes
and circles belonging to them. The fact that the future Augustus,
when he did away with the last of these courts, allowed the learned
institutes connected with it to subsist, is a genuine, and not the
worst, indication of the changed times. The more energetic and higher
Philhellenism of the government of the Caesars was distinguished to
its advantage from that of the republic by the fact that it not merely
allowed Greek literati to earn money in Rome, but viewed and treated
the great guardianship of Greek science as a part of the sovereignty
of Alexander. No doubt, as in this regeneration of the empire as a
whole, the building-plan was grander than the building. The royally
patented and pensioned Muses, whom the Lagids had called to Alexandria,
did not disdain to accept the like payments also from the Romans;
and the imperial munificence was not inferior to the earlier regal.
The fund for the library of Alexandria and the fund for free places
for philosophers, poets, physicians, and scholars of all sorts,[243]
as well as the immunities granted to these, were not diminished
by Augustus, and were increased by the emperor Claudius--with the
injunction, indeed, that the new Claudian academicians should have the
Greek historical works of the singular founder publicly read year by
year in their sittings. With the first library in the world Alexandria
retained at the same time, through the whole imperial period, a
certain primacy of scientific work, until Islam burnt the library and
killed the ancient civilisation. It was not merely the opportunity
thus offered, but at the same time the old tradition and turn of mind
of these Hellenes, which preserved for the city that precedence, as
indeed among the scholars the native Alexandrians are prominent in
number and importance. In this epoch numerous and respectable labours
of erudition, particularly philological and physical, proceeded
from the circle of the _savants_ “of the Museum,” as they entitled
themselves, like the Parisians “of the Institute”; but the literary
importance, which the Alexandrian and the Pergamene court-science
and court-art had in the better epoch of Hellenism for the whole
Hellenic and Hellenising world, was never even remotely attached to
the Romano-Alexandrian. The cause lay not in the want of talents or in
other accidents, least of all in the fact that places in the Museum
were bestowed by the emperor sometimes according to gifts and always
according to favour, and the government dealt with them quite as with
the horse of the knight and the posts of officials of the household;
the case was not otherwise at the older courts. Court-philosophers
and court-poets remained in Alexandria, but not the court; it was
here very clearly apparent that the main matter was not pensions and
rewards, but the contact--quickening for both sides--of great political
and great scientific work. The latter doubtless presented itself for
the new monarchy and brought its consequences with it; but the place
for it was not Alexandria: this bloom of political development justly
belonged to the Latins and to the Latin capital. The Augustan poetry
and Augustan science attained, under similar circumstances, to a
similar important and pleasing development with that attained by the
Hellenistic at the court of the Pergamenes and the earlier Ptolemies.
Even in the Greek circle, so far as the Roman government operated upon
it in the sense of the Lagids, this development was linked more with
Rome than with Alexandria. It is true that the Greek libraries of the
capital were not equal to the Alexandrian, and there was no institute
in Rome comparable to the Alexandrian Museum. But a position at the
Roman libraries opened up relations to the court. The professorship of
Greek rhetoric in the capital, instituted by Vespasian, filled up and
paid for by the government, gave to its holder, although he was not an
officer of the household in the same sense as the imperial librarian,
a similar position, and was regarded, doubtless on that account, as
the chief professorial chair of the empire.[244] But, above all, the
office of imperial cabinet secretary in its Greek division was the most
esteemed and the most influential position to which a Greek man of
letters could at all attain. Transference from the Alexandrian academy
to such an office in the capital was demonstrably promotion.[245]
Even apart from all which the Greek literati otherwise found in Rome
alone, the court-positions and the court-offices were enough to draw
the most distinguished of them thither rather than to the Egyptian
“free table.” The learned Alexandria of this time became a sort of
“jointure” of Greek science, worthy of respect and useful, but of no
pervading influence on the great movement of culture or mis-culture of
the imperial period; the places in the Museum were, as was reasonable,
not seldom bestowed on scholars of note from abroad, and for the
institution itself the books of the library were of more account than
the burgesses of the great commercial and manufacturing city.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Egyptian army.]
The military circumstances of Egypt laid down, just as in Syria, a
double task for the troops there; the protection of the south frontier
and of the east coast, which indeed may not be remotely compared with
that required for the line of the Euphrates, and the maintenance of
internal order in the country as in the capital. The Roman garrison
consisted, apart from the ships stationed at Alexandria and on the
Nile, which seem chiefly to have served for the control of the customs,
under Augustus of three legions, along with the not numerous auxiliary
troops belonging to them, about 20,000 men. This was about half as many
as he destined for all the Asiatic provinces--which was in keeping
with the importance of this province for the new monarchy. But the
occupying force was probably even under Augustus himself diminished
about a third, and then under Domitian by about a further third. At
first two legions were stationed outside of the capital; but the main
camp, and soon the only one, lay before its gates, where Caesar the
younger had fought out the last battle with Antonius, in the suburb
called accordingly Nicopolis. The suburb had its own amphitheatre
and its own imperial popular festival, and was quite independently
organised; so that for a time the public amusements of Alexandria were
thrown into the shade by those of Nicopolis. The immediate watching of
the frontier fell to the auxiliaries. The same causes therefore which
relaxed discipline in Syria--the police-character of their primary task
and their immediate contact with the great capital--came into play
also for the Egyptian troops; to which fell to be added, that the bad
custom of allowing to the soldiers with the standards a married life
or at any rate a substitute for it, and of filling up the troop from
their camp-children, had for long been naturalised among the Macedonian
soldiers of the Ptolemies, and soon prevailed also among the Romans,
at least up to a certain degree. Accordingly, the Egyptian corps, in
which the Occidentals served still more rarely than in the other armies
of the East, and which was recruited in great part from the citizens
and the camp of Alexandria, appears to have been among all the sections
of the army the least esteemed; as indeed also the officers of this
legion, as was already observed, were inferior in rank to those of the
rest.
The properly military task of the Egyptian troops was closely connected
with the measures for the elevation of Egyptian commerce. It will be
convenient to take the two together, and to set forth in connection, in
the first instance, the relations to the continental neighbours in the
south, and then those to Arabia and India.
[Sidenote: Aethiopia.]
[Sidenote: War with queen Candace.]
Egypt reaches on the south, as was already remarked, as far as the
barrier which the last cataract, not far from Syene (Assouan),
opposes to navigation. Beyond Syene begins the stock of the Kesch,
as the Egyptians call them, or, as the Greeks translated it, the
dark-coloured, the Aethiopians, probably akin to the Axomites to be
afterwards mentioned, and, although perhaps sprung from the same
root as the Egyptians, at any rate confronting them in historical
development as a foreign people. Further to the south follow the Nahsiu
of the Egyptians, that is, the Blacks, the Nubians of the Greek,
the modern Negroes. The kings of Egypt had in better times extended
their rule far into the interior, or at least emigrant Egyptians had
established for themselves here dominions of their own; the written
monuments of the Pharaonic government go as far as above the third
cataract to Dongola, where Nabata (near Nûri) seems to have been the
centre of their settlements; and considerably further up the stream,
some six days’ journey to the north of Khartoum, near Shendy, in
Sennaar, in the neighbourhood of the long forgotten Aethiopian town
Meroe, are found groups of temples and pyramids, although destitute
of writing. When Egypt became Roman, all this development of power
was long a matter of the past; and beyond Syene there ruled an
Aethiopian stock under queens, who regularly bore the name or the title
Candace,[246] and resided in that once Egyptian Nabata in Dongola; a
people at a low stage of civilisation, predominantly shepherds, in a
position to bring into the field an army of 30,000, but equipped with
shields of ox-hides, armed mostly not with swords, but with axes or
lances and iron-mounted clubs, predatory neighbours, not a match for
the Romans in combat. In the year 730 or 731 {24, 23. B.C.} these
invaded the Roman territory--as they asserted, because the presidents
of the nearest nomes had injured them--as the Romans thought, because
the Egyptian troops were then to a large extent occupied in Arabia,
and they hoped to be able to plunder with immunity. In reality they
overcame the three cohorts who covered the frontier, and dragged
away the inhabitants from the nearest Egyptian districts--Philae,
Elephantine, Syene--as slaves, and the statues of the emperor, which
they found there, as tokens of victory. But the governor, who just
then took up the administration of the province, Gaius Petronius,
speedily requited the attack; with 10,000 infantry and 800 cavalry
he not merely drove them out, but followed them along the Nile into
their own land, defeated them emphatically at Pselchis (Dekkeh),
and stormed their stronghold Premis (Ibrim), as well as the capital
itself, which he destroyed. It is true that the queen, a brave woman,
renewed the attack next year and attempted to storm Premis, where a
Roman garrison had been left; but Petronius brought seasonable relief,
and so the Aethiopian queen determined to send envoys and to sue for
peace. The emperor not merely granted it, but gave orders to evacuate
the subject territory, and rejected the proposal of his governor to
make the vanquished tributary. This event, otherwise not important, is
remarkable in so far as just then the definite resolution of the Roman
government became apparent, to maintain absolutely the Nile valley as
far as the river was navigable, but not at all to contemplate taking
possession of the wide districts on the upper Nile. Only the tract
from Syene, where under Augustus the frontier-troops were stationed,
as far as Hiera Sycaminos (Maharraka), the so-called Twelve-mile-land
(Δωδεκάσχοινος), while never organised as a nome and never viewed as
a part of Egypt, was yet regarded as belonging to the empire; and at
least under Domitian the posts were even advanced as far as Hiera
Sycaminos.[247] On that footing substantially the matter remained.
The Oriental expedition planned by Nero (p. 61) was certainly intended
to embrace Aethiopia; but it did not go beyond the preliminary
reconnoitring of the country by Roman officers as far as Meroe. The
relations with the neighbours on the Egyptian southern frontier down
to the middle of the third century must have been on the whole of a
peaceful kind, although there were not wanting minor quarrels with that
Candace and with her successors, who appear to have maintained their
position for a considerable time, and subsequently perhaps with other
tribes, that attained to ascendency beyond the imperial bounds.
[Sidenote: The Blemyes.]
It was not till the empire was unhinged in the period of Valerian
and Gallienus, that the neighbours broke over this boundary. We have
already mentioned (p. 250) that the Blemyes settled in the mountains
on the south-east frontier, formerly obeying the Aethiopians, a
barbarous people of revolting savageness, who even centuries later had
not abandoned human sacrifices, advanced at this epoch independently
against Egypt, and by an understanding with the Palmyrenes occupied
a good part of upper Egypt, and held it for a series of years. The
vigorous emperor Probus drove them out; but the inroads once begun did
not cease,[248] and the emperor Diocletian resolved to draw back the
frontier. The narrow “Twelve-mile-land” demanded a strong garrison, and
brought in little to the state. The Nubians, who roamed in the Libyan
desert, and were constantly visiting in particular the great Oasis,
agreed to give up their old abodes and to settle in this region, which
was formally ceded to them; at the same time fixed annual payments
were made to them as well as to their eastern neighbours the Blemyes,
nominally in order to compensate them for guarding the frontier, in
reality beyond doubt to buy off their plundering expeditions, which
nevertheless of course did not cease. It was a retrograde step--the
first, since Egypt became Roman.
[Sidenote: Aethiopian commercial traffic.]
Of the mercantile intercourse on this frontier little is reported from
antiquity. As the cataracts of the upper Nile closed the direct route
by water, the traffic between the interior of Africa and the Egyptians,
particularly the trade in ivory, was carried on in the Roman period
more by way of the Abyssinian ports than along the Nile; but it was
not wanting also in this direction.[249] The Aethiopians who dwelt in
numbers beside the Egyptians on the island of Philae were evidently
mostly merchants, and the border-peace that here prevailed must have
contributed its part to the prosperity of the frontier-towns of upper
Egypt and of Egyptian trade generally.
[Sidenote: The Egyptian east coast and general commerce.]
[Sidenote: The sea route to India.]
The east coast of Egypt presented to the development of general traffic
a problem difficult of solution. The thoroughly desolate and rocky
shore was incapable of culture proper, and in ancient as in later times
a desert.[250] On the other hand the two seas, eminently important for
the development of culture in the ancient world, the Mediterranean and
the Red or Indian, approach each other most closely at the two most
northern extremities of the latter, the Persian and the Arabian gulfs;
the former receives into it the Euphrates, which in the middle of its
course comes near to the Mediterranean; the latter is only a few days’
march distant from the Nile, which flows into the same sea. Hence in
ancient times the commercial intercourse between the East and the West
took preponderantly either the direction along the Euphrates to the
Syrian and Arabian coast, or it made its way from the east coast of
Egypt to the Nile. The traffic routes from the Euphrates were older
than those by way of the Nile; but the latter had the advantage of the
stream being better for navigation and of the shorter land-transport;
the getting rid of the latter by preparing an artificial water-route
was in the case of the Euphrates excluded, in that of Egypt found in
ancient as in modern times difficult doubtless, but not impossible.
Accordingly nature itself prescribed to the land of Egypt to connect
the east coast with the course of the Nile and the northern coast by
land or water routes; and the beginnings of such structures go back to
the time of those native rulers who first opened up Egypt to foreign
countries and to traffic on a great scale. Following in the traces
apparently of older structures of the great rulers of Egypt, Sethi I.
and Rhamses II., king Necho, the son of Psammetichus (610-594 B.C.)
began the building of a canal, which, branching off from the Nile in
the neighbourhood of Cairo, was to furnish a water-communication with
the bitter lakes near Ismailia, and through these with the Red Sea,
without being able, however, to complete the work. That in this he had
in view not merely the control of the Arabian Gulf and the commercial
traffic with the Arabians, but already brought within his horizon the
Persian and the Indian seas, and the more remote East, is probable, for
this reason, that the same ruler suggested the only circumnavigation of
Africa executed in antiquity. Beyond doubt thus thought king Darius I.,
the lord of Persia as well as of Egypt; he completed the canal, but,
as his memorial-stones found on the spot mention, he caused it to be
filled up again, probably because his engineers feared that the water
of the sea, admitted into the canal, would overflow the fields of Egypt.
[Sidenote: The Egyptian eastern ports.]
The rivalry of the Lagids and the Seleucids, which dominated the
policy of the post-Alexandrine period generally, was at the same
time a contest between the Euphrates and the Nile. The former was in
possession, the latter the pretender; and in the better time of the
Lagids the peaceful offensive was pursued with great energy. Not only
was that canal undertaken by Necho and Darius, now named the “river
of Ptolemaeus,” opened for the first time to navigation by the second
Ptolemy Philadelphus († 247 B.C.); but comprehensive harbour-structures
were carried out at the points of the difficult east coast that were
best fitted for the security of the ships and for the connection with
the Nile. Above all, this was done at the mouth of the canal leading to
the Nile, at the townships of Arsinoe, Cleopatris, Clysma, all three in
the region of the present Suez. Further downward, besides several minor
structures, arose the two important emporia, Myos Hormos, somewhat
above the present Kosêr, and Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes,
nearly in the same latitude with Syene on the Nile as well as with the
Arabian port Leuce Come, the former distant six or seven, the latter
eleven days’ march from the town Coptos, near which the Nile bends
farthest to the eastward, and connected with this chief emporium on the
Nile by roads constructed across the desert and provided with large
cisterns. The goods traffic of the time of the Ptolemies probably went
less through the canal than by these land routes to Coptos.
[Sidenote: Abyssinia.]
Beyond that Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, the Egypt proper
of the Lagids did not extend. The settlements lying farther to the
south, Ptolemais “for the chase” below Suâkim, and the southmost
township of the Lagid kingdom, the subsequent Adulis, at that time
perhaps named “Berenice the Golden” or “near Saba,” Zula not far from
the present Massowah, by far the best harbour on all this coast, were
not more than coast-forts and had no communication by land with Egypt.
These remote settlements were beyond doubt either lost or voluntarily
abandoned under the later Lagids, and at the epoch when the Roman rule
began, the Trogodytic Berenice was on the coast, like Syene in the
interior, the limit of the empire.
[Sidenote: The kingdom of the Axomites.]
In this region, never occupied or early evacuated by the Egyptians,
there was formed--whether at the end of the Lagid epoch or in the first
age of the empire--an independent state of some extent and importance,
that of the Axomites,[251] corresponding to the modern Habesh. It
derives its name from the town Axômis, the modern Axum, situated in the
heart of this Alpine country eight days’ journey from the sea, in the
modern country of Tigre; the already-mentioned best emporium on this
coast, Adulis in the bay of Massowah, served it as a port. The original
population of the kingdom of Axômis, of which tolerably pure remnants
still maintain themselves at the present day in individual tracts of
the interior, belonged from its language, the Agau, to the same Hamitic
cycle with the modern Bego, Sali, Dankali, Somali, Galla; to the
Egyptian population this linguistic circle seems related in a similar
way as the Greeks to the Celts and Slaves, so that here doubtless for
research an affinity may subsist, but for their historical existence
rather nothing but contrast. But before our knowledge of this country
so much as begins, superior Semitic immigrants belonging to the
Himyaritic stocks of southern Arabia must have crossed the narrow gulf
of the sea and rendered their language as well as their writing at
home there. The old written language of Habesh, extinct in popular use
since the seventeenth century, the Ge’ez, or as it is for the most part
erroneously termed, the Aethiopic,[252] is purely Semitic,[253] and
the still living dialects, the Amhara and the Tigriña, are so also in
the main, only disturbed by the influence of the older Agau.
[Sidenote: Its extent and development.]
As to the beginnings of this commonwealth no tradition has been
preserved. At the end of Nero’s time, and perhaps already long before,
the king of the Axomites ruled on the African coast nearly from Suâkim
to the Straits of Bab el Mandeb. Some time afterwards--the epoch cannot
be more precisely defined--we find him as a frontier-neighbour of the
Romans on the southern border of Egypt, and on the other coast of the
Arabian Gulf in warlike activity in the territory intervening between
the Roman possession and that of the Sabaeans, and so coming into
immediate contact towards the north with the Roman territory also in
Arabia; commanding, moreover, the African coast outside of the Gulf
perhaps as far as Cape Guardafui. How far his territory of Axômis
extended inland is not clear; Aethiopia, that is, Sennaar and Dongola,
at least in the earlier imperial period, hardly belonged to it; perhaps
at this time the kingdom of Nabata may have subsisted alongside of the
Axomitic. Where the Axomites meet us, we find them at a comparatively
advanced stage of development. Under Augustus the Egyptian commercial
traffic increased not less with these African harbours than with India.
The king had the command not merely of an army, but, as his very
relations to Arabia presuppose, also of a fleet. A Greek merchant, who
was present in Adulis, terms king Zoskales, who ruled in Vespasian’s
time in Axômis, an upright man and acquainted with Greek writing;
one of his successors has set up on the spot a memorial-writing
composed in current Greek which told his deeds to the foreigners;
he even names himself in it a son of Ares--which title the kings of
the Axomites retained down to the fourth century--and dedicates the
throne, which bears that memorial inscription, to Zeus, to Ares, and
to Poseidon. Already in Zoskales’s time that foreigner names Adulis a
well organised emporium; his successors compelled the roving tribes
of the Arabian coast to keep peace by land and by sea, and restored a
land communication from their capital to the Roman frontier, which,
considering the nature of this district primarily left dependent on
communication by sea, was not to be esteemed of slight account. Under
Vespasian brass pieces, which were divided according to need, served
the natives instead of money, and Roman coin circulated only among the
strangers settled in Adulis; in the later imperial period the kings
themselves coined. The Axomite ruler withal calls himself king of
kings, and no trace points to Roman clientship; he practises coining in
gold, which the Romans did not allow, not merely in their own territory
but even within the range of their power. There was hardly another land
in the imperial period beyond the Romano-Hellenic bounds which had
appropriated to itself Hellenic habits with equal independence and to
an equal extent as the state of Habesh. That in the course of time the
popular language, indigenous or rather naturalised from Arabia, gained
the upper hand and dispossessed the Greek, is probably traceable partly
to Arabian influence, partly to that of Christianity and the revival
connected with it of the popular dialects, such as we found also in
Syria and Egypt; and it does not exclude the view that the Greek
language in Axomis and Adulis in the first and second centuries of our
era had a similar position to what it had in Syria and Egypt, so far as
it is allowable to compare small and great.
[Sidenote: Rome and the Axomites.]
Of political relations of the Romans to the state of Axomis hardly
anything is mentioned from the first three centuries of our era, to
which our narrative is confined. With the rest of Egypt they took
possession also of the ports of the east coast down to the remote
Trogodytic Berenice, which on account of that remoteness was in the
Roman period placed under a commandant of its own.[254] Of extending
their territory into the inhospitable and worthless mountains along
the coast there was never any thought; nor can the sparse population,
standing at the lowest stage of development, in the immediately
adjoining region have ever given serious trouble to the Romans. As
little did the Caesars attempt, as the early Lagids had done, to
possess themselves of the emporia of the Axomitic coast. There is
express mention only of the fact that envoys of the Axomite kings
negotiated with the emperor Aurelian. But this very silence, as well as
the formerly indicated independent position of the ruler,[255] leads
to the inference that here the recognised frontier was permanently
respected on both sides, and that a relation of good neighbourhood
subsisted, which proved advantageous to the interests of peace and
especially of Egyptian commerce. That the latter, especially the
important traffic in ivory, in which Adulis was the chief entrepôt for
the interior of Africa, was carried on predominantly from Egypt and
in Egyptian vessels, cannot--considering the superior civilisation of
Egypt--be subject to any doubt even as regards the Lagid period; and
in Roman times this traffic probably only increased in amount, without
undergoing further change.
[Sidenote: The west coast of Arabia.]
Far more important for Egypt and the Roman empire generally than the
traffic with the African south was that which subsisted with Arabia
and the coasts situated farther to the east. The Arabian peninsula
remained aloof from the sphere of Hellenic culture. It would possibly
have been otherwise had king Alexander lived a year longer; death
swept him away amidst the preparations for sailing round and occupying
the already-explored south coast of Arabia, setting out from the
Persian Gulf. But the voyage which the great king had not been able to
enter on was never undertaken by any Greek after him. From the most
remote times, on the other hand, a lively intercourse had taken place
between the two coasts of the Arabian Gulf over its moderately broad
waters. In the Egyptian accounts from the time of the Pharaohs the
voyages to the land of Punt, and the spoils thence brought home in
frankincense, ebony, emeralds, leopards’ skins, play an important part.
It has been already (p. 148) mentioned that subsequently the northern
portion of the Arabian west coast belonged to the territory of the
Nabataeans, and with this came into the power of the Romans. This was
a desolate beach;[256] only the emporium Leuce Come, the last town of
the Nabataeans and so far also of the Roman empire, was not merely in
maritime intercourse with Berenice lying opposite, but was also the
starting-point of the caravan-route leading to Petra and thence to
the ports of southern Syria, and in so far, one of the centres of the
traffic between the East and the West (p. 151). The adjoining regions
on the south, northward and southward of the modern Mecca, corresponded
in their natural character to the opposite Trogodyte country, and were,
like this, neither politically nor commercially of importance, nor yet
apparently united under one sceptre, but occupied by roving tribes. But
at the south end of this gulf was the home of the only Arabic stock,
which attained to greater importance in the pre-Islamic period. The
Greeks and the Romans name these Arabs in the earlier period after
the people most prominent at that time Sabaeans, in later times after
another tribe usually Homerites, as, according to the new Arabic form
of the latter name, now for the most part Himjarites.
[Sidenote: The state of the Homerites.]
The development of this remarkable people had reached a considerable
stage long before the beginning of the Roman rule over Egypt.[257] Its
native seat, the Arabia Felix of the ancients, the region of Mocha
and Aden, is surrounded by a narrow plain along the shore intensely
hot and desolate, but the healthy and temperate interior of Yemen
and Hadramaut produces on the mountain-slopes and in the valleys a
luxuriant vegetation, and the numerous mountain-waters permit in
many respects with careful management a garden-like cultivation. We
have even at the present day an expressive testimony to the rich and
peculiar civilisation of this region in the remains of city-walls
and towers, of useful buildings, particularly aqueducts, and temples
covered with inscriptions, which completely confirm the description of
ancient authors as to the magnificence and luxury of this region; the
Arabian geographers have written books concerning the strongholds and
castles of the numerous petty princes of Yemen. Famous are the ruins of
the mighty embankment which once in the valley of Mariaba dammed up the
river Dana and rendered it possible to water the fields upwards,[258]
and from the bursting of which, and the migration alleged to have been
thereby occasioned of the inhabitants of Yemen to the north, the Arabs
for long counted their years. But above all this district was one of
the original seats of wholesale traffic by land and by sea, not merely
because its productions, frankincense, precious stones, gum, cassia,
aloes, senna, myrrh, and numerous other drugs called for export, but
also because this Semitic stock was, just like that of the Phoenicians,
formed by its whole character for commerce; Strabo says, just like the
more recent travellers, that the Arabs are all traders and merchants.
The coining of silver is here old and peculiar; the coins were at
first modelled after Athenian dies, and later after Roman coins of
Augustus, but on an independent, probably Babylonian basis.[259]
From the land of these Arabians the original frankincense-routes led
across the desert to the marts on the Arabian gulf, Aelana and the
already-mentioned Leuce Come, and the emporia of Syria, Petra and
Gaza;[260] these routes of the land-traffic, which along with those of
the Euphrates and the Nile, furnish the means of intercourse between
East and West from the earliest times, may be conjectured to be the
proper basis of the prosperity of Yemen. But the sea-traffic likewise
soon became associated with them; the great mart for this was Adane,
the modern Aden. From this the goods went by water, certainly in the
main in Arabian ships, either to those same marts on the Arabian gulf
and so to the Syrian ports, or to Berenice and Myos Hormos, and from
thence to Coptos and Alexandria. We have already stated that the
same Arabs likewise at a very early time possessed themselves of the
opposite coast, and transplanted their language, their writing and
their civilisation to Habesh. If Coptos, the Nile-emporium for the
eastern traffic, had just as many Arab as Egyptian inhabitants, if
even the emerald-mines above Berenice (near Jebel Zebâra) were worked
by the Arabs, this shows that in the Lagid state itself they had the
trade up to a certain degree in their hands; and its passive attitude
in respect to the traffic on the Arabian Sea, whither at most an
expedition against the pirates was once undertaken,[261] is the more
readily intelligible, if a state well organised and powerful at sea
ruled these waters. We meet the Arabs of Yemen even beyond their own
sea. Adane remained down to the Roman imperial times a mart of traffic
on the one hand with India, on the other with Egypt, and, in spite
of its own unfavourable position on the treeless shore, rose to such
prosperity that the name of “Arabia Felix” had primary reference to
this town. The dominion, which in our days the Imam of Muscat in the
south-east of the peninsula has exercised over the islands of Socotra
and Zanzibar and the African east coast from Cape Guardafui southward,
pertained in Vespasian’s time “from of old” to the princes of Arabia;
the island of Dioscorides, that same Socotra, belonged then to the
king of Hadramaut, Azania, that is, the coast of Somal and further
southward, to one of the viceroys of his western neighbour, the king
of the Homerites. The southernmost station on the east African coast
which the Egyptian merchants knew of, Rhapta in the region of Zanzibar,
was leased from this sheikh by the merchants of Muza, that is nearly
the modern Mocha, “and they send thither their trading-ships, mostly
manned by Arabian captains and sailors, who are accustomed to deal and
are often connected by marriage with the natives, and are acquainted
with the localities and the languages of the country.” The cultivation
of the soil and industry went hand in hand with commerce; in the houses
of rank in India, Arabian wine was drunk alongside of the Falernian
from Italy and the Laodicene from Syria; and the lances and shoemakers’
awls, which the natives of the coast of Malabar purchased from the
foreign traders were manufactured at Muza. Thus this region, which
moreover sold much and bought little, became one of the richest in the
world.
How far its political development kept pace with the economic, cannot
be determined for the pre-Roman and earlier imperial period; only this
much seems to result both from the accounts of the Occidentals and
from the native inscriptions, that this south-west point of Arabia
was divided among several independent rulers with territories of
moderate size. There subsisted in that quarter, alongside of the more
prominent Sabaeans and Homerites, the already-mentioned Chatramotitae
in the Hadramaut, and northward in the interior the Minaeans, all under
princes of their own.
With reference to the Arabians of Yemen the Romans pursued the very
opposite policy to that adopted towards the Axomites. Augustus, for
whom the non-enlargement of the empire was the starting-point of the
imperial government, and who allowed almost all the plans of conquest
of his father and master to drop, made an exception of the south-west
coast of Arabia, and here took aggressive measures of his own free
will. This was done on account of the position which this group of
peoples occupied at that time in Indo-Egyptian commercial intercourse.
In order to bring the province of his dominions, which was politically
and financially the most important, up, in an economic aspect, to the
level which his predecessors in rule had neglected to establish or had
allowed to decline, he needed above all to obtain inter-communication
between Arabia and India on the one hand and Europe on the other.
The Nile-route for long competed successfully with the Arabian and
the Euphrates routes; but Egypt played in this respect, as we saw, a
subordinate part at least under the later Lagids. A trading rivalry
subsisted not with the Axomites, but doubtless with the Arabians; if
the Egyptian traffic was to be converted from a passive into an active,
from indirect into direct, the Arabs had to be overthrown; and this
it was that Augustus desired and the Roman government in some measure
achieved.
[Sidenote: Expedition of Gallus.]
In the sixth year of his reign in Egypt (end of 729) {25 B.C.}
Augustus despatched a fleet, fitted out expressly for this expedition,
of 80 warships and 130 transports, and the half of the Egyptian army,
a corps of 10,000 men, without reckoning the contingents of the two
nearest client kings, the Nabataean Obodas and the Jew Herod, against
the states of Yemen, in order either to subjugate or at least to ruin
them,[262] while at the same time the treasures there accumulated
were certainly taken into account. But the enterprise completely
miscarried, and that from the incapacity of the leader, the governor
of Egypt at the time, Gaius Aelius Gallus.[263] Since the occupation
and the possession of the desolate coast from Leuce Come downwards to
the frontier of the enemy’s territory was of no consequence at all,
it was necessary that the expedition should be directed immediately
against the latter, and that the army should be conducted from the most
southern Egyptian port at once into Arabia Felix.[264] Instead of this
the fleet was got ready at the most northerly, that of Arsinoe (Suez),
and the army was landed at Leuce Come, just as if it were the object
to prolong as much as possible the voyage of the fleet and the march
of the troops. Besides, the war-vessels were superfluous, since the
Arabians possessed no war-fleet, the Roman sailors were unacquainted
with the navigation on the Arabian coast, and the transports, although
specially built for this expedition, were unsuited for their purpose.
The pilots had difficulty in finding their way between the shallows and
the rocks, and even the voyage in Roman waters from Arsinoe to Leuce
Come cost many vessels and men. Here the winter was passed; in the
spring of 730 the campaign in the enemy’s country began. The Arabians
offered no hindrance, but Arabia undoubtedly did so. Wherever the
double axes and the slings and bows came into collision with the pilum
and the sword, the natives dispersed like chaff before the wind; but
the diseases, which are endemic in the country, scurvy, leprosy, palsy,
decimated the soldiers worse than the most bloody battle, and all
the more as the general did not know how to move rapidly forward the
unwieldy mass of his army. Nevertheless the Roman army arrived in front
of the walls of Mariaba, the capital of the Sabaeans first affected by
the attack. But, as the inhabitants closed the gates of their powerful
walls still standing,[265] and offered energetic resistance, the
Roman general despaired of solving the problem proposed to him; and,
after he had lain six days in front of the town, he entered on his
retreat, which the Arabians hardly disturbed in earnest, and which was
accomplished with comparative rapidity under the pressure of need,
although with a severe loss in men.
[Sidenote: Further enterprises against the Arabs.]
It was a bad miscarriage; but Augustus did not abandon the conquest
of Arabia. It has already been related (p. 39) that the journey to
the East, which the crown-prince Gaius entered upon in the year 753
{1 B.C.}, was to terminate at Arabia; it was this time contemplated
after the subjugation of Armenia to reach, in concert with the Parthian
government or in case of need after the overthrow of their armies, the
mouth of the Euphrates, and from thence to take the sea-route which
the admiral Nearchus had once explored for Alexander, towards Arabia
Felix.[266] These hopes ended in another but not less unfortunate
way, through the Parthian arrow which struck the crown-prince before
the walls of Artageira. With him was buried the plan of Arabian
conquest for all the future. The great peninsula remained through the
whole imperial period--apart from the stripes of coast on the north
and north-west--in possession of that freedom from which Islam, the
executioner of Hellenism, was in its own time to issue.
[Sidenote: Injury to Arabian commerce.]
But the Arabian commerce was at all events broken down partly by the
measures, to be explained further on, of the Roman government for
protecting the Egyptian navigation, partly by a blow struck by the
Romans against the chief mart of Indo-Arabian traffic. Whether under
Augustus himself, possibly among the preparations for the invasion to
be carried out by Gaius, or under one of his immediate successors,
a Roman fleet appeared before Adane and destroyed the place; in
Vespasian’s time it was a village, and its prosperity was gone. We
know only the naked fact,[267] but it speaks for itself. A counterpart
to the destruction of Corinth and of Carthage by the republic, it, like
these, attained its end, and secured for the Romano-Egyptian trade the
supremacy in the Arabian gulf and in the Indian Sea.
[Sidenote: Later fortunes of the Homerites.]
The prosperity, however, of the blessed land of Yemen was too firmly
founded to succumb to this blow; politically it was even perhaps in
this epoch only that it more energetically rallied its resources.
Mariaba, at the time when the arms of Gallus failed before its walls,
was perhaps no more than the capital of the Sabaeans; but already
at that time the tribe of the Homerites, whose capital Sapphar lay
somewhat to the south of Mariaba, also in the interior, was the
strongest in Arabia Felix. A century later we find the two united
under a king of the Homerites and of the Sabaeans reigning in Sapphar,
whose rule extends as far as Mocha and Aden, and, as was already said,
over the island of Socotra and the coast of Somal and Zanzibar; and
at least from this time we may speak of a kingdom of the Homerites.
The desert northwards from Mariaba as far as the Roman frontier did
not at that time belong to it, and was under no regular authority at
all;[268] the principalities of the Minaei and of the Chatramotitae
continued also to be under sovereigns of their own. The eastern half
of Arabia formed constantly a part of the Persian empire (p. 13), and
never was under the sceptre of the rulers of Arabia Felix. Even now
therefore the bounds were narrow and probably remained so; little is
known as to the further development of affairs.[269] In the middle of
the fourth century the kingdom of the Homerites was united with that of
the Axomites, and was governed from Axomis[270]--a subjection, however,
which was subsequently broken off again. The kingdom of the Homerites,
as well as the united Axomitico-Homeritic, stood as independent states
in intercourse and treaty with Rome during the later imperial period.
[Sidenote: Commercial intercourse of the Homerites.]
In commerce and navigation the Arabians of the south-west of the
peninsula occupied, if no longer the place of supremacy, at any rate
a prominent position throughout the whole imperial period. After
the destruction of Adane, Muza became the commercial metropolis of
this region. The representation formerly given is still in the main
appropriate for the time of Vespasian. The place is described to us at
this time as exclusively Arabian, inhabited by ship-owners and sailors,
and full of stirring mercantile life; the Muzaites with their own ships
navigate the whole east coast of Africa and the west coast of India,
and not merely carry the goods of their own country, but bring also
the purple stuffs and gold embroideries prepared according to Oriental
taste in the workshops of the West, and the fine wines of Syria and
Italy, to the Orientals, and in turn to the western lands the precious
wares of the East. In frankincense and other aromatics Muza and the
emporium of the neighbouring kingdom of Hadramaut, Cane to the east of
Aden, must always have retained a sort of practical monopoly; these
wares, used in antiquity very much more than at present, were produced
not only on the southern coast of Arabia, but also on the African coast
from Adulis as far as the “promontory of spices,” Cape Guardafui, and
from thence the merchants of Muza fetched them and brought them into
general commerce. On the already mentioned island of Dioscorides there
was a joint trading settlement of the three great seafaring nations of
these seas, the Hellenes, that is, the Egyptians, the Arabians, and
the Indians. But of relations to Hellenism, such as we found on the
opposite coast among the Axomites (p. 283), we meet no trace in the
land of Yemen; if the coinage is determined by Occidental types (p.
287 f.), these were current throughout the East. Otherwise writing
and language and the exercise of art, so far as we are able to judge,
developed themselves here just as independently as commerce and
navigation; and certainly this co-operated in producing the result that
the Axomites, while they subjected to themselves the Homerites in a
political point of view, subsequently reverted from the Hellenic path
into the Arabic (p. 283).
[Sidenote: Land routes and harbours in Egypt.]
In the same spirit as for the relations to southern Africa and to the
Arabian states, and in a more pleasing way, provision was made in
Egypt itself for the routes of commercial intercourse, in the first
instance by Augustus, and beyond doubt by all its intelligent rulers.
The system of roads and harbours established by the earlier Ptolemies
in the footsteps of the Pharaohs had, like the whole administration,
fallen into sad decay amidst the troubles of the last Lagid period.
It is not expressly mentioned that Augustus put again into order the
land and water routes and the ports of Egypt; but that it was done,
is none the less certain. Coptos remained through the whole imperial
period the rendezvous of this traffic.[271] From a recently found
document we gather that in the first imperial period the two routes
leading thence to the ports of Myos Hormos and of Berenice were
repaired by the Roman soldiers and provided at the fitting places
with the requisite cisterns.[272] The canal which connected the Red
Sea with the Nile, and so with the Mediterranean Sea, was in the
Roman period only of secondary rank, employed chiefly perhaps for
the conveyance of blocks of marble and porphyry from the Egyptian
east coast to the Mediterranean; but it remained navigable throughout
the imperial period. The emperor Trajan renewed and probably also
enlarged it--perhaps it was he who placed it in communication with the
still undivided Nile near Babylon (not far from Cairo), and thereby
increased its water-supply--and assigned to it the name of Trajan’s or
the emperor’s river (_Augustus amnis_), from which in later times this
part of Egypt was named (_Augustamnica_).
[Sidenote: Piracy.]
Augustus exerted himself also in earnest for the suppression of piracy
on the Red and Indian Seas; the Egyptians long even after his death
thanked him, that through his efforts piratical sails disappeared from
the sea and gave way to trading vessels. No doubt what was done in
that respect was far from enough. The facts that, while the government
doubtless from time to time set naval squadrons to work in these
waters, it did not station there a standing war-fleet; and that the
Roman merchantmen regularly took archers on board in the Indian Sea to
repel the attacks of the pirates, would be surprising, if a comparative
indifference to the insecurity of the sea had not everywhere--here,
as well as on the Belgian coast, and on those of the Black Sea--clung
like a hereditary sin to the Roman imperial government or rather to
the Roman government in general. It is true that the governments of
Axomis and of Sapphar were called by their geographical position still
more than the Romans at Berenice and Leuce Come to check piracy, and it
may be partly due to this consideration that the Romans remained, upon
the whole, on a good understanding with these weaker but indispensable
neighbours.
[Sidenote: Growth of the Egyptian active traffic to the East.]
We have formerly shown that the maritime intercourse of Egypt, if not
with Adulis (p. 284), at any rate with Arabia and India at the epoch
which immediately preceded the Roman rule, was not carried on in the
main through the medium of Egyptians. It was only through the Romans
that Egypt obtained the great maritime traffic to the East. “Not
twenty Egyptian ships in the year,” says a contemporary of Augustus,
“ventured forth under the Ptolemies from the Arabian gulf; now 120
merchantmen annually sail to India from the port of Myos Hormos alone.”
The commercial gain, which the Roman merchant had been obliged hitherto
to share with the Persian or Arabian intermediary, flowed to him in
all its extent after the opening up of direct communication with
the more remote East. This result was probably brought about in the
first instance by the circumstance that the Egyptian ports were, if
not directly barred, at any rate practically closed, by differential
custom-dues against Arabian and Indian transports;[273] only by the
hypothesis of such a navigation-act in favour of their own shipping
could this sudden revolution of commercial relations be explained. But
the traffic was not merely violently transformed from a passive into an
active one; it was also absolutely increased, partly in consequence of
the increased inquiry in the West for the wares of the East, partly at
the expense of the other routes of traffic through Arabia and Syria.
For the Arabian and Indian commerce with the West the route by way
of Egypt more and more proved itself the shortest and the cheapest.
The frankincense, which in the olden time went in great part by the
land-route through the interior of Arabia to Gaza (p. 288, note 2),
came afterwards for the most part by water through Egypt. The Indian
traffic received a new impulse about the time of Nero, when a skilled
and courageous Egyptian captain, Hippalus, ventured, instead of making
his way along the long stretch of coast, to steer from the mouth of
the Arabian Gulf directly through the open sea for India; he knew the
monsoon, which thenceforth the mariners, who traversed this route
after him, named the Hippalus. Thenceforth the voyage was not merely
materially shortened, but was less exposed to the land and sea pirates.
To what extent the secure state of peace and the increasing luxury
raised the consumption of Oriental wares in the West, may be discerned
in some measure from the complaints, which were in the time of
Vespasian loudly expressed, regarding the enormous sums which went out
of the empire for that purpose. The whole amount of the purchase-money
annually paid to the Arabians and the Indians is estimated by Pliny at
100,000,000 sesterces (= £1,100,000), for Arabia alone at 55,000,000
sesterces (= £600,000), of which, it is true, a part was covered by
the export of goods. The Arabians and the Indians bought doubtless the
metals of the West, iron, copper, lead, tin, arsenic, the Egyptian
articles mentioned formerly (p. 254), wine, purple, gold and silver
plate, also precious stones, corals, saffron, balm; but they had always
far more to offer to foreign luxury than to receive for their own.
Hence the Roman gold and silver money went in considerable quantities
to the great Arabian and Indian emporia. In India it had already under
Vespasian so naturalised itself that the people there preferred to
use it. Of this Oriental traffic the greatest part went to Egypt; and
if the increase of the traffic benefited the government-chest by the
increased receipts from customs, the need for building ships and making
mercantile voyages of their own elevated the prosperity of private
individuals.
While thus the Roman government limited its rule in Egypt to the narrow
space which is marked off by the navigableness of the Nile, and,
whether in pusillanimity or in wisdom, at any rate never attempted
with consistent energy to conquer either Nubia or Arabia, it strove
as energetically after the possession of the Arabian and the Indian
wholesale traffic, and attained at least an important limitation of
the competitors. As the unscrupulous pursuit of commercial interests
characterised the policy of the republic, so not less did it mark that
of the principate, especially in Egypt.
[Sidenote: Romano-Indian commercial intercourse.]
We can only determine approximately how far the direct Roman maritime
traffic went towards the East. In the first instance it took the
direction of Barygaza (Barôtch on the Gulf of Cambay above Bombay),
which great mart must have remained through the whole imperial
period the centre of the Egyptio-Indian traffic; several places in
the peninsula of Gujerat bear among the Greeks Greek designations,
such as Naustathmos and Theophila. In the Flavian period, in which the
monsoon-voyages had already become regular, the whole west coast of
India was opened up to the Roman merchants as far down as the coast
of Malabar, the home of the highly-esteemed and dear-priced pepper,
for the sake of which they visited the ports of Muziris (probably
Mangaluru) and Nelcynda (in Indian doubtless Nilakantha from one
of the surnames of the god Shiva, probably the modern Nîlêswara);
somewhat farther to the south at Kananor numerous Roman gold coins of
the Julio-Claudian epoch have been found, formerly exchanged against
the spices destined for the Roman kitchens. On the island Salice, the
Taprobane of the older Greek navigators, the modern Ceylon, in the time
of Claudius a Roman official, who had been driven thither from the
Arabian coast by storms, had met with a friendly reception from the
ruler of the country, and the latter, astonished, as the report says,
at the uniform weight of the Roman pieces of money in spite of the
diversity of the emperor’s heads, had sent along with the shipwrecked
man envoys to his Roman colleague. Thereby in the first instance it was
only the sphere of geographical knowledge that was enlarged; it was not
till later apparently that navigation was extended as far as that large
and productive island, in which on several occasions Roman coins have
come to light. But coins are found only by way of exception beyond Cape
Comorin and Ceylon,[274] and hardly has even the coast of Coromandel
and the mouth of the Ganges, to say nothing of the Further Indian
peninsula and China, maintained regular commercial intercourse with the
Occidentals.
Chinese silk was certainly already at an early period sold regularly
to the West, but, as it would appear, exclusively by the land-route,
and through the medium partly of the Indians of Barygaza, partly and
chiefly of the Parthians; the Silk-people or the Seres (from the
Chinese name of silk Sr) of the Occidentals were the inhabitants of
the Tarim-basin to the north-west of Thibet, whither the Chinese
brought their silk, and the Parthian intermediaries jealously guarded
the traffic thither. By sea, certainly, individual mariners reached
accidentally or by way of exploration at least to the east coast of
Further India and perhaps still farther; the port of Cattigara known
to the Romans at the beginning of the second century A.D. was one of
the Chinese coast-towns, perhaps Hang-chow-foo at the mouth of the
Yang-tse-kiang. The report of the Chinese annals that in A.D. 166
an embassy of the emperor Antun of Ta-(that is Great) Tsin (Rome)
landed in Ji-nan (Tonkin), and thence by the land-route arrived at the
capital Lo-yang (or Ho-nan-foo on the middle Hoang-ho) to the emperor
Hwan-ti, may warrantably be referred to Rome and to Marcus Antoninus.
This event, however, and what the Chinese authorities mention as to
a similar appearance of the Romans in their country in the course of
the third century, can hardly be understood of public missions, since
as to these Roman statements would hardly have been wanting; but
possibly individual captains may have passed with the Chinese court
as messengers of their government. These connections had perceptible
consequences only in so far as the earlier tales regarding the
procuring of silk gradually gave way to better knowledge.