GRÆCO-ROMAN
Nothing strikes one more than the contrast in Palestine between the
vanishing of Hebrew buildings and the permanence of Roman ones. You have
come here to a land which you know to have been for many years under
Roman government, but which still to your imagination is Oriental, with
here and there a Roman touch. You find, among the very ancient
buildings, hardly a remaining trace of anything that is not Roman; and
of Roman work you find an amount which probably astonishes you. Before
you have long left Jaffa, some part or other of one of the old Roman
roads making for Jerusalem will be seen. Not long afterwards Bether
comes in sight--that terrible little valley where the blood ran so deep
when the siege ended and the Jews’ last hope was broken. So you move on
from point to point of Roman story until, as you climb the steep ascent
from the Jordan valley to Gadara, you realise that it was when encamped
just here that Vespasian heard the news of Nero’s death and was
proclaimed emperor by his legion.
The Roman work in Palestine seems to exaggerate its peculiar
characteristics, so that here one notices these more distinctly than in
any other land. A Roman tower in Switzerland, a Roman road in
Scotland--certainly they are Roman, but they are not removed from all
things Swiss or Scotch by so vast an interval as that which divides
Roman from native work in Palestine. It is indeed an invasion of arms,
this Roman life--an intrusion of what is, first and last, alien to the
spirit of the place. The traveller to-day, to whom the very dust of this
land is dear, inevitably feels about the Roman relics an air of
obtrusive and uncomprehending indifference. They “cared for none of
these things,” or, if they did care a little now and then and try to
understand, they did it clumsily and unnaturally. Rome’s policy was that
of wide toleration, but her spirit was absolutely unaccommodating. She
might allow her provinces to govern themselves and to worship pretty
much as they chose, but she herself, in her officials and their works,
stood aloof from them and was Rome still. This is to be seen in
Palestine in all its good and in all its bad aspects. In those
solidly-constructed bridges and mighty aqueducts and imperishable
causeways there is the very embodiment of the Roman _virtus_ and
_gravitas_, that output of manhood which never trifled nor spared
itself, that solemn, business-like reality which is so full of purpose.
In this hard _reality_ of Rome there is not only purpose but
pitilessness of force to accomplish what is planned. Every Roman road
you chance upon seems to be feeling its way with an unerring instinct
towards Jerusalem or some other goal, and you know that it will arrive.
Just as impressive, on the other hand, is the sense of Rome’s
limitations. Her works disclose her seeing a certain length, and you
know beyond all doubt that she will get there. But there are very
obvious and very clearly defined limits to the length she ever sees or
will go. The work of Greece is far beyond the furthest reach of Roman
work--the glad spring, the grace of conscious strength that is beautiful
as well as strong, the restfulness withal of perfect harmony that is
thinking of more than merely utilitarian values; of these Rome knows not
the secret. Beside the flight of Greek art she is pedestrian; to the
Greek artist she plays at best but the part of Roman artisan. Forceful,
massive, successful up to its highest desire, the Roman work is finished
and perfect. And it has attained finish and perfection on a lower level
than that of any nation that ever yet dreamed dreams or “looked beyond
the world for truth and beauty.”
Not that there are no other traces of Rome in Syria beyond the stones of
Roman ruins. In many place-names Latin is discernible, and the country
is full of inscriptions of all sorts. A still more permanent mark was
left by that invasion of Roman spirit which, for a time, claimed Israel
for Rome. Rome came to Syria next in succession to the invasion of
Alexander the Great. After his death the Macedonian power remained in
the East, and the seductive spirit of Greek humanism became the rival of
the old Puritan Hebraism of the nation. It was this that led to the Wars
of the Maccabees, who fought for the sterner against the more genial
spirit. As in the days of English Cromwell, the Puritan was invincible
while he remained true to his faith--that singularly effective blend of
patriotism with religious belief which has made itself felt in so many
national histories. The triumph of Hebraism lasted for about a century,
and then came Pompey in 63 B.C. to Jerusalem. Hellenism regained its
ascendency and the Greek cities of Palestine their freedom. About a
quarter of a century later the figure of Herod the Great appears as a
critical factor in the history of Palestine. An Idumean and a Sadducee,
he had neither patriotism nor religion to check his ambition. The path
of glory and of easy advancement, then, was by way of Rome, and there
was much in Herod that found Rome congenial. As a young man he had made
his name by clearing out a notorious band of robbers from the valley
which led down the great road from the Mediterranean to the Sea of
Galilee at Capernaum. This “Vale of Doves” is flanked by precipices
pierced with many caves, in which the robbers lived. Josephus tells us
how Herod fell upon the device of letting down cages with the bravest
of his soldiers. These men, lowered by ropes from the edge of the cliff,
sprang upon the robbers in their cave’s mouth, and when they retreated
within, smoked them out with fires like vermin. The man who contrived
and carried out that design was not unworthy of the title “Great” from
the Roman point of view. He became the centre and the champion of the
new Hellenism, which was really the worship of Rome, touched as Rome was
with the Greek culture she had conquered and envied and sought in vain
to acquire. Rome was clumsily Greek at this time, and Herod was clumsily
Roman. Certainly he would have been a Roman if he could. He was prepared
to go any length to serve his end. At the Banias springs of Jordan he
built a temple to Augustus. Samaria and Cæsarea, his Roman cities, must
have cost him a fabulous sum to build.
Of the actual architectural remains of Rome in Palestine, the smallest
are perhaps the most impressive. Here and there, from south to north,
you come upon tesseræ, the remains of inlaid mosaic floors of the
ancient houses. Sometimes it is single little cubes that turn up among
the gravel of the sea-shore or shine from the newly-ploughed furrow. At
other times broken fragments of a hand-breadth’s size may be found, with
enough variety of colour to suggest the beginning of a pattern. But here
and there you may find whole floors of elaborately designed mosaic, with
concentric circles of various colour and size, with large-scale
pictures, or, as in one case at least, with an ancient map--one of the
most ancient in the world. On many a spot of Palestine you ride over
ground whose stones are capitals of carved pillars, and whose layers of
caked earth disclose fragments of ancient mosaic floors.
The Roman roads are still frequently met with in Palestine, and these,
perhaps more than any other of their works, help the imagination to
realise the old life in its magnificence of power. Whether the causeway
lies bare to the weather across a mountain, or whether it cuts its track
along the sheer cliff of a gorge, there is the same uncompromising
purpose and capacity in it--the stride of the road, that seems to be
aware of whither it is going and the reason for its going there. In the
cities of the Decapolis and others there is generally one straight line
of Roman causeway--the “Street called Straight,” which is by no means
peculiar to Damascus. It was a Roman hobby, this of straightness, and
one of the most characteristic of Roman hobbies. The roads went, so far
as that was possible, up hill and down dale in a direct line from place
to place; and in the cities at least one columned street did the same.
The milestones which may still be found occasionally seem to heighten
the human interest, though that is considerably damped when we realise
that none of these roads date from the early Roman days in Syria. The
paths our Saviour walked on were but tracks, not unlike those which
modern travellers follow.
But the bridges are older, and in some places they are used for traffic
to-day, spanning Jordan and Leontes. There is little causeway at the
ends of them--their one business in these old days was to do the
difficult and needful task of crossing water. Once across, the traveller
might find his path or make it for himself. Parapets are not provided on
the old bridges, and the surface is a flight of broad and shallow steps.
If you walk unwarily and are drowned in the torrent below, that is no
concern of these resolute but unluxurious bridge-builders. Their
business is simply to span the stream. So effectively and
conscientiously have they done this, that even when time and floods have
broken the bridge, you may see the half of it still standing: the huge
pier of stone and of mortar almost harder than stone stands at the side,
and the actual arch is still flung across the water, wedged into an
almost unbreakable strength by its keystone, while all the surface
building above the arch has long been washed away. Such a ruin may be
seen to-day on the coast some miles to the north of Tyre. It was in her
fight with water, either for it in aqueducts or against it in quays and
bridges, that Rome seems to have put out her utmost strength of masonry.
Along the coasts both of the Mediterranean and of the Sea of Galilee,
submerged stones and fragments of building may be seen, which bear
testimony to this; and at Taricheæ, where a large fish-curing trade had
to be provided for, there are remains of a dam and quay where Jordan
swept round in a circle, affording a great length of water-frontage. But
perhaps the most noticeable monuments of Rome in this dry and thirsty
land are the
[Illustration: THE FORECOURT OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.]
aqueducts, sections of which still stand in many parts. In the
neighbourhood of Jericho, Laurence Oliphant counted nine different
aqueducts. At Khan Minyeh, believed by some to be the site of Capernaum,
there is a bewildering mass of water-building of many sorts. A
Wasserthurm still stands, whose walls are 12 feet in thickness, and in
all directions water is carried at various levels in channels which run
along the top of mighty banks of masonry. Great stone water-pipes, with
rim and hollow for fitting to the next pipes tightly, lie scattered in
all directions, peeping up through the long grass and ferns, or hiding
among the roots of the thorn trees. Elsewhere are to be seen longer
stretches of aqueduct, whose architects have been able to turn strength
into beauty in a very wonderful fashion. Roman building at its best
relies on the one principle of constructive truth. It never aims at
being pretty; it never fails in being _right_ for the purpose it is
meant to serve. From the point of view of beauty this may often have
produced harsh, material, and heavy work--and indeed that is part of
what we have already referred to as the limitation of Roman achievement.
But the highest beauty is, after all, a matter far more of truth than of
ornament, and there are many remains of Roman work in which such high
beauty has been unconsciously attained. They built to accomplish some
definite practical purpose, and for that end they built thoroughly and
well. The result is the beauty which comes like a crown upon honest work
beyond the design of the workers--a beauty of wholeness, adequacy,
truth, which is perhaps not so far removed from the Hebrew idea of the
“beauty of holiness” as careless observers might be disposed to think.
This is seen in many a fragment of the Roman aqueducts. These irregular,
three-tiered clusters of variously sized and shaped arches, carrying the
stone or concrete channel across a gorge, have a real beauty of their
own; and the long stretches of single or double tiers that take up the
channel where it emerges from a mountain-tunnel, lead it high and secure
across the treacherous ooze of a marsh, throw their level line on high
bridges over ravines, and at last end in the tumbled ruins of a city
whose pools and fountains they filled long ago--these have an
indisputable beauty of workmanship and design, as well as an infinite
pathos of sentiment.
Next in impressiveness to these monuments are the remains of the Greek
amphitheatres of the Roman period. Whether it be that the massiveness of
the stones has been too much for the lazy builders who have constructed
their modern dwellings out of stolen fragments of ruins; or whether, in
its irony, history has attached to these monuments of Rome’s attempt to
amuse the world some special sacredness, it would be difficult to say.
Certain it is that these in many places remain, sunk in the natural
hollow of a hill as in a socket, while all traces of the city which once
surrounded them have disappeared. They have been often described, both
as they are found in Syria and elsewhere; and the stage arrangements,
the underground passages, and the whole design of them does not
materially differ from those of other countries. One feature in the
Syrian theatres appears with special distinctness. When the play was
going on, an awning may be supposed to have been spread horizontally
over the roof, to shade spectators and actors from the sun. Between the
edge of this awning and the flat top rim of the stage buildings, there
would be a blank space left, as it were, like a framed and draped
picture. The sites were so chosen that this space was filled up with
some commandingly beautiful vista--in the north generally a view of
Hermon. Hauran boasts many such theatres in the cities of the Decapolis.
In cities which were first Greek and then Roman, such as these, it may
be difficult to determine the exact date of a particular building. If
the Romans built these theatres, they closely imitated the older Grecian
work. They certainly built the theatre and hippodrome of Cæsarea, in
which latter the goal-post is still to be seen, an immense granite
stone, which has seen life in its day.
The theatres have, as a rule, survived the fortresses and the temples.
Rome undertook many things. She would worship, govern, educate, amuse.
Is it not significant that her wreck looks so like a gigantic
playground, as if in those degenerate days of her conquest the Empire
was already finding in the motto “il faut s’amuser” her rule of life?
After all, it is his chief interest that is the immortal thing about any
man or nation. Yet this may be an unjust and fanciful estimate. Relics
of Roman temples and fortresses also remain. A statue of Jupiter has had
its resurrection from the sands of Gaza, and a monument in honour of
Jupiter Serapis now bears a Roman inscription near the Zion Gate of
Jerusalem. Near springs and the fountain-heads of rivers especially, the
ruins of Roman shrines to the Genius of the fountain are found, as at
Banias. Fortresses too, where Roman garrisons used to be located, can
still be traced, in a ring or an oblong trail of loose stones. Such
ruins crown the height of Tabor, the summit of Gerizim, and many another
hill. But these shew little trace of their former meaning. Here and
there the acropolis of a Greek or Roman town may retain its ancient
embankment, built on the steep slope of the hill, as if shoring up the
plateau above where the temple once stood. Elsewhere, some parts of the
curtain wall of a crusader castle may be blocks of Roman fortification
left _in situ_. But the greater part of the Roman building must be
looked for in the walls of village houses, where the contrast between
such fragments and their surroundings is as grotesque as it is pitiful.
The Gadarenes have built into their walls whatever lay nearest them.
Coffins and tombstones, capitals and columns, even altars themselves,
are there, “stopping holes to keep the wind away”; it is exactly what
“imperial Cæsar” has come to in Gadara.
When Roman power decayed, the signs of its decadence were manifest in
the departure from old severity into an efflorescence of ornament and a
magnificence of mere size out of all proportion to the constructive
meaning of the work. In Baalbek, Rome has left us a monument of such
decadence. The elaborated detail is foreign to the grand simplicity of
the old Roman style, and the exaggerated size is but boastfulness. “The
Romans had seen the huge Jewish stones at Jerusalem” (as Dr. Merrill
explained the matter to us) “and began at Baalbek to work on a bigger
scale, the Barnums of the ancient world, whose ambition was to run the
biggest show on earth. By and by they got tired of that, and left it
off; it was not their line, after all.” “The line” of Rome was a very
straight and simple one. With immense power and a great and single
purpose, she went straight forward, and did what she meant to do. Hers
was a rough simplicity which never failed. Strange that, with so mighty
a resource, she should have ever gone out of her line to attempt any
other work than her own! When men or nations discover their limitations,
and rashly make up their mind no longer to stay within them, their
ambition has already begun to foreshadow their downfall.
The pathos of seeing anything which evidently was once so competent and
so strong, now so absolutely dead as Rome is, is heightened almost to
weeping, in those places where the little and everyday memorials of her
former life are commonest. It is not the gigantic monoliths, but the
little tesseræ, not the fallen columns, but the broken jar-handles, that
touch the heart most. Between Tyre and Sidon the rider passes over
fields every stone of which is a fragment of some marble slab or
curiously-carved piece of masonry. His horse is overturning the remains
of Ornithopolis, “the city of the bird,” in these ploughed fields. But
it is at Samaria that the emotion is most irresistible. Where the “fat
valley” opens to the westward, a conical hill, slightly oval and with
flattened top now clad with an orchard, nestles in and yet lies apart
from the bend of the mountains of Ephraim. It was this hill that Omri
bought from Shomer for the heavy price of two talents of silver. It was
here that the city rose--the inferior houses (if we may reconstruct the
probable past) of white brick, with rafters of sycamore; the grander
ones of hewn stone and cedar--while the royal palace overtopped them
all. A broad wall with terraced top encircled it, and the city lay
there, “a vast luxurious couch, in which its nobles rested securely,
‘propped and cushioned up on both sides as in the cherished corner of a
rich divan.’” It was Ahab’s capital too, and after the varying fortunes
of centuries it was granted to Herod the Great by Augustus, who
immediately called it by the Greek name of the emperor, Sebaste, and
proceeded to rebuild it in a style of unheard-of magnificence. A
hippodrome appeared in the hollow, a temple on the hill. Round the
summit he ran a flat terrace with double colonnade of monolithic pillars
about 16 feet in height, with palaces and massive gateways. From our
camp on the threshing-floor, quite near the circuit of pillars--for many
of them are still standing, and the bases of almost all may be seen in
the ground--we crossed to within the ring of the colonnade. The ground
was ploughed here even along the faces of the artificial terrace-banks,
which still preserve their sheer angle, clean and steep as of old. The
furrows were literally sown with fragments of broken pottery and
tesseræ. We crossed to a squared and heavy mass of fallen stones and
carved pillars lying slantwise against walls still strong in ruin, which
bears the name of Herod’s daughter’s palace; and then along the
colonnade to the great piles of masonry which guard the gate that looks
toward Cæsarea. Two massive towers are there, partly in ruins and soon
to be wholly so, for the cactus hedge is busy with its roots among the
stones, and is making its way through cracks to the very heart of the
towers. We sat there watching the sun sink into the sea, and thought of
all those faded splendours and crimes that make this spot so famous
among the tragic places of the world. It was the home of Jezebel, it was
the slaughter-house of Mariamne, both of whom must often have watched
the sunset from that gate. The ambitions of the ancient kings, the pride
and wealth and cruelty of Herod, the beauty and the misery of passionate
women, dead these many centuries--all seemed to people the place with
ghosts, as the twilight deepened. We turned to go back, and found
ourselves accompanied by the man who farms the hill--a tall, friendly,
and gracious man in long flowing robes. He held the hand of his little
five-year-old girl, a dark-eyed, sweet-faced child, dressed in a red
cloak crossed with blue and yellow stripes. Her hair was short, in
clustering curls of glossy black, with a blue bead cunningly inwoven
among them to keep off the evil eye. She had her free hand entwined by
all its fingers in the wool of a pet lamb, which she steered along
sideways vigorously. How dead the mighty Herod and all the Roman glory
seemed in contrast with this simple picture of the eternal life of home!
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.
Now,--the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper over-rooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek’s head of blossom winks
Through the chinks--
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.
* * * * *
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.[18]
It is not, however, merely with the chill of that which has been long
dead that Rome affects us in Syria;
[Illustration: THE ROTUNDA AND CHAPEL OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.]
it is with the living interest which attaches to all that touched
Christ, and entered in any way into Christianity. It is a far-reaching
generalisation which reminds us that “the great civilisations have
always risen in the meeting-places of ideas.”[19] Historically it is
true that the times of greatest international struggle have been times
of heightened vitality, when the mingling nations were ready to receive
and to impart much, and to send forth a new spirit upon the world.
Nothing could be more providentially apposite, from this point of view,
than that Jesus should have been born “amid the fever of the
establishment of the Roman power in Judea.” He kept aloof, indeed, from
the Herodian people who lived delicately in kings’ houses, and from all
the Greek and Græco-Roman life of his day. Yet, as Dr. Smith has shown
us memorably, Jesus was no quiet rustic dreaming dreams and seeing
visions far from the life of men. He lived and died in close touch with
all that Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia had to show. Not for
the first time, nor for the last, did He see, in His temptation, “the
kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” As this realisation
becomes more and more distinct, a new force is added to the contention
that His Gospel is the Gospel for the world. It was thought out and
first preached amid the throng of commerce, and while the din of battle
was as yet hardly silent.
This contact of Jesus Christ with Rome, which under Paul’s hand was to
become the messenger and instrument of His kingdom, is vividly
associated with two hill-tops in Palestine. One of them is that height
near Nazareth, some ten minutes distant from the village well, the
description of whose outlook closes the chapter on Galilee in the
_Historical Geography_ with the well-known passage about the boyhood of
Jesus. There, while He faced seawards, lay on the left hand below Him
the wine-coloured, battle-soaked plain of Jezreel, with squadrons of the
Roman army marching east and west along it; while on the right hand the
Sepphoris Road ran ribbon-like along the ranges, with its constant
stream of merchandise. The other hill-top is that known as “Gordon’s
Calvary” at Jerusalem--a low and rounded hillock just outside the
Damascus Gate. If this be indeed the site of Calvary, Christ was
crucified on a wedge of ground between a military and a commercial road;
and “they that passed by wagging their heads” may have been soldiers
from the Tower as well as merchants from the Northern Gate.
Certain it is, at least, that Rome was about His cradle and His grave.
The earliest narratives of His earthly career bring Him to Bethlehem to
a Roman taxation; the latest story delivers Him to a Roman judge, to
Roman soldiers, and to a Roman cross.