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.