ASIA MINOR.

The great peninsula which is washed on three sides by the three seas, the Black, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean, and which is connected towards the east with the Asiatic continent proper, will, so far as it belongs to the frontier–territory of the empire, be dealt with in the next section, which treats of the region of the Euphrates and the relations between the Romans and Parthians. Here we have to set forth the peaceful relations, more especially of the western districts, under the imperial government.

The natives and the colonists.The original, or at any rate pre–Greek, population of these wide regions held its ground in many places to a considerable extent down to the imperial period. The greatest part of Bithynia certainly belonged to the formerly discussed Thracian stock; Phrygia, Lydia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, show very manifold and not easily unravelled survivals of older linguistic epochs, which in various forms reach down to the Roman period; strange names of gods, men, and places meet us everywhere. But, so far as our view reaches—and it is but seldom allowed to penetrate here very deeply—these elements appear only losing ground and waning, essentially as a negation of civilisation or—what seems to us here at least to coincide with it—Hellenising. We shall return at the fitting place to the individual groups of this category; so far as concerns the historical development of Asia Minor in the imperial period there were but two active nationalities, the two which were the last immigrants, the Hellenes in the beginnings of the historical period, and the Celts during the troublous times of the Diadochi.

Hellenic and Hellenistic culture.The history of the Hellenes of Asia Minor, so far as it forms a part of Roman history, has already been set forth. In the remote age, when the coasts of the Mediterranean were first navigated and settled, and the world began to be apportioned among the progressive nations at the expense of those left behind, the flood of Hellenic emigration had poured no doubt over all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but yet nowhere—not even towards Italy and Sicily,—in so broad a stream as over the Aegean Sea rich in islands, and the adjacent charming coast of anterior Asia rich in harbours. Thereafter the west–Asiatic Greeks themselves had taken an active part, above all the rest, in the further conquest of the world, and had helped to settle from Miletus the coasts of the Black, and from Phocaea and Cnidus those of the Western, Sea. In Asia Hellenic civilisation doubtless laid hold of the inhabitants of the interior, the Mysians, Lydians, Carians, Lycians; and even the Persian great power remained not unaffected by it. But the Hellenes themselves possessed nothing but the fringe of coast, including at the utmost the lower course of the larger rivers and the islands. They were not able here to gain continental conquests and a power of their own by land overagainst the powerful native princes; moreover the interior of Asia Minor, highlying and in great part but little capable of cultivation, was not so attractive for settlement as the coasts, and the communications of the latter with the interior were difficult. Essentially in consequence of this, the Asiatic Hellenes attained still less than the European to inward union and to great power of their own, and early learned submissiveness in presence of the lords of the continent. The national Hellenic idea first came to them from Athens; they became its allies only after the victory, and did not remain so in the hour of danger. What Athens had wished to provide, and had not been able to furnish for these clients of the nation, was accomplished by Alexander; Hellas he was obliged to conquer, Asia Minor saw in the conqueror simply its deliverer.

Formation of new centres.Alexander’s victory in fact not merely made Asiatic Hellenism secure, but opened up for it a wide, almost boundless, future; in the process of continental settlement, which, in contrast to the merely littoral, marked this second stage of Hellenic world–conquest, Asia Minor took part to a considerable extent. Yet of the great centres for the newly formed states there was none that came to the old Greek towns of the coast.224 The new period required new formations in general, and above all, new towns, to serve at once as Greek royal residences and as centres of populations hitherto non–Greek, that were to be brought to Greek habits. The great political development moves around the towns of royal foundation and of royal name, Thessalonica, Antioch, Alexandria. With their masters the Romans had to contend; the possession of Asia Minor they gained almost throughout, as a man gets an estate from relations or friends, by bequest in a testament; and, however heavy was the burden at times of Roman government on the regions thus acquired, there was not added here the sting of foreign rule. Doubtless the Achaemenid Mithradates confronted the Romans in Asia Minor with a national opposition, and the Roman misrule drove the Hellenes into his arms; but the Hellenes themselves never undertook anything similar. Therefore there is little to be told of this great, rich, and important possession in a political respect; and all the less, inasmuch as what has been remarked in the previous section concerning the national relations of the Hellenes generally to the Romans holds good in substance also for those of Asia Minor.

The provinces of Asia Minor.The Roman administration of Asia Minor was never organised in a systematic way, but the several territories were, just as they came to the empire, established without material change of their limits as Roman administrative districts. The states which king Attalus III. of Pergamus bequeathed to the Romans, formed the province of Asia; those of king Nicomedes, which likewise fell to them by inheritance, formed the province of Bithynia; the territory taken from Mithradates Eupator formed the province of Pontus united with Bithynia. Crete was occupied by the Romans on occasion of the great war with the pirates; Cyrene, which may also be mentioned here, was taken over by them according to the last will of its ruler. The same legal title gave to the republic the island of Cyprus; to which was here added the need for the suppression of piracy. This had also laid a basis for the formation of the governorship of Cilicia; the land was annexed to Rome completely by Pompeius at the same time with Syria, and the two were administered jointly during the first century. Possession of all these lands was already acquired by the republic. In the imperial period a number of territories were added, which had formerly belonged but indirectly to the empire: in 729 U.C.25. the kingdom of Galatia, with which there had been united a part of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Pisidia, and Pamphylia; in 747 U.C.7. the lordship of king Deiotarus, son of Castor, which embraced Gangra in Paphlagonia and probably also Amasia and other neighbouring places; in 17 A.D. the kingdom of Cappadocia; in 43 the territory of the confederation of the Lycian towns; in 63 the north–east of Asia Minor from the valley of the Iris to the Armenian frontier; Lesser Armenia and some smaller principalities in Cilicia probably by Vespasian. Thereby the direct imperial administration was carried out throughout Asia Minor. As dependent principalities, there remained only the Tauric Bosporus, of which we have already spoken, and Great Armenia, of which the next section will treat.

Senatorial and imperial government.When, on the introduction of the imperial government, the administrative partition was made between it and that of the senate, the whole territory of Asia Minor, so far as it was at that time directly under the empire, fell to the latter body; the island of Cyprus, which at first had come under imperial administration, was likewise transferred, a few years later, to the senate. Thus arose the four senatorial governorships of Asia, Bithynia and Pontus, Cyprus, Crete and Cyrene. Only Cilicia, as part of the Syrian province, was placed at first under imperial administration. But the territories that subsequently came to be directly administered as parts of the empire were here, as throughout the empire, placed under imperial governors; thus even under Augustus there was formed from the inland districts of the Galatian kingdom the province of Galatia, and the coast district of Pamphylia was assigned to another governor, under which latter Lycia was also placed under Claudius. Moreover Cappadocia became an imperial governorship under Tiberius. Cilicia also naturally remained, when it obtained governors of its own, under imperial administration. Apart from the fact that Hadrian exchanged the important province of Bithynia and Pontus for the unimportant Lycio–Pamphylian one, this arrangement remained in force, until towards the end of the third century the senatorial share in administration generally was, with the exception of some slight remnants, superseded. The frontier was in the first period of the empire formed throughout by the dependent principalities; after their annexation the imperial frontier did not, apart from Cyrene, touch any of these administrative districts, excepting only the Cappadocian, so far as to this at that time was apportioned also the north–eastern border–district as far as Trapezus;225 and even this governorship bordered not with the foreign land proper, but in the north with the dependent tribes on the Phasis, and farther on with the vassal–kingdom of Armenia, which belonged de jure and in more than one sense de facto to the empire.

In order to gain a conception of the condition and the development of Asia Minor in the first three centuries of our era, so far as this is possible in the case of a country as to which we have no direct historical tradition, we must, looking to the conservative character of the Roman provincial government, begin with the older territorial divisions and the previous history of the several regions.

Asia.The province of Asia was the old kingdom of the Attalids, the west of Asia Minor as far north as the Bithynian and as far south as the Lycian frontier; the eastern districts at first separated from it, the Great Phrygia, had already in the republican period been again attached to it (iii.288)iii.274., and the province thenceforth reached as far as the country of the Galatians and the Pisidian mountains. Rhodes too and the other smaller islands of the Aegean Sea belonged to this province. The coast–towns.The original Hellenic settlement had, besides the islands and the coast proper, occupied also the lower valleys of the larger rivers; Magnesia on the Sipylus, in the valley of the Hermus, the other Magnesia and Tralles in the valley of the Maeander, had already before Alexander been founded as Greek towns, or had at any rate become such; the Carians, Lydians, Mysians, became early at least half Hellenes. The Greek rule, when it set in, found not much to do in the coast districts; Smyrna, which centuries before had been destroyed by the barbarians of the interior, rose at that time from its ruins, in order speedily to become one of the first stars in the brilliant belt of the cities of Asia Minor; and if the rebuilding of Ilion at the sepulchral mound of Hector was more a work of piety than of policy, the laying out of Alexandria on the coast of the Troas was of enduring importance. Pergamus in the valley of the Caicus flourished as the court–residence of the Attalids.

The interior.In the great work of Hellenising the interior of this province in keeping with the intentions of Alexander, all the Hellenic governments, Lysimachus, the Seleucids, the Attalids vied with each other. The details of the foundations have disappeared from our tradition still more than the warlike events of the same epoch; we are left dependent mainly on the names and the surnames of the towns; but even these suffice to make known to us the general outlines of this activity continuing for centuries, and yet homogeneous and throughout conscious of its aim. A series of inland townships, Stratonicea in Caria, Peltae, Blaundus, Docimeium, Cadi in Phrygia, the Mysomacedonians in the district of Ephesus, Thyatira, Hyrcania, Nacrasa in the region of the Hermus, the Ascylaces in the district of Adramytium, are designated in documents or other credible testimonies as cities of the Macedonians; and these notices are of a nature so accidental, and the townships in part so unimportant, that the like designation certainly extended to a great number of other settlements in this region; and we may infer an extensive settling of Greek soldiers in the districts indicated, probably connected with the protection of anterior Asia against the Galatians and Pisidians. If, moreover, the coins of the considerable Phrygian town Synnada combine with the name of their city that of the Ionians and the Dorians as well as that of the common Zeus (?e?? p??d???), one of the Alexandrids must have summoned the Greeks in common to settle there; and the summons was certainly not confined to this single town. The numerous towns, chiefly of the interior, the names of which are traceable to the royal houses of the Seleucids or the Attalids, or which have otherwise Greek names, need not here be adduced; there are found in particular among the towns certainly founded or reorganised by the Seleucids several that were in later times the most flourishing and most civilised in the interior, e.g. in southern Phrygia Laodicea, and above all Apamea, the old Celaenae on the great military road from the west coast of Asia Minor to the middle Euphrates, already in the Persian period the entrepÔt for this traffic, and under Augustus, next to Ephesus, the most considerable city of the province of Asia. Although every case of assigning a Greek name is not to be connected with a settlement by Greek colonists, we may be allowed at any rate to reckon a considerable portion of these townships among Greek colonies. But even the urban settlements of non–Greek origin, which the Alexandrids found in existence, turned of themselves into the paths of Hellenising, as indeed the residence of the Persian governor, Sardes, was organised even by Alexander himself as a Greek commonwealth.

Its position under the Romans.This urban development was completed when the Romans entered upon the rule of interior Asia; they themselves did not make special exertions to promote it. That a great number of the urban communities in the eastern half of the province reckon their years from that of the city 67084., is due to the fact that then, after the close of the Mithradatic war, these districts were brought by Sulla under direct Roman administration (iii.328)iii.312.; these townships did not receive city–rights only then for the first time. Augustus occupied the town of Parium on the Hellespont and the already–mentioned Alexandria in Troas with veterans of his army, and assigned to both the rights of Roman burgess–communities; the latter was thenceforth in Greek Asia an Italian island like Corinth in Greece and Berytus in Syria. But this was nothing but a provision for soldiers; of the foundation of towns proper in the Roman province of Asia under the emperors there is little mention. Among the not numerous towns named after emperors there it is only perhaps in the case of Sebaste and Tiberiopolis, both in Phrygia, and of Hadrianoi on the Bithynian frontier, that no older name of the city can be pointed out. Here, in the mountain–region between Ida and Olympus, dwelt Cleon in the time of the triumvirate, and a certain Tilliborus under Hadrian, both half robber–chiefs, half popular princes, of whom the former even played a part in politics; in this asylum of criminals the foundation of an organised urban community by Hadrian was at all events a benefit. Otherwise in this province, with its five hundred urban communities, the province richest in cities of the whole state, not much more was left to be done in the way of foundation; there was room at the most perhaps for division, that is, for detaching such hamlets as developed themselves de facto into urban communities, from the earlier communal union and making them independent, as we can point to a case of the kind in Phrygia under Constantine I. But from Hellenising proper the sequestered districts were still far remote when the Roman government began; especially in Phrygia the language of the country, perhaps similar in character to the Armenian, held its ground. If from the absence of Greek coins and of Greek inscriptions we may not with certainty infer the absence of Hellenising,226 yet the fact that the Phrygian coins belong almost throughout to the Roman imperial period, and the Phrygian inscriptions as regards the great majority to the later times of the empire, points to the conclusion that, so far as Hellenic habits found their way at all into the regions of the province of Asia that were remote and difficult of access to civilisation, they did so in the main only under the emperors. For direct interference on the part of the imperial administration this process, accomplishing itself in silence, gave little opportunity, and traces of such interference we are not able to show. Asia, it is true, was a senatorial province, and we may here bear in mind that with the government of the senate all initiative fell into abeyance.

Urban rivalries.Syria, and still more, Egypt, became merged in their capitals; the province of Asia and Asia Minor generally had no single town to show like Antioch and Alexandria, but their prosperity rested on the numerous middle–sized towns. The division of the towns into three classes, which are distinguished as to the right of voting at the diet, as to the apportionment of the contributions to be furnished by the whole province, even as to the number of town–physicians and town–teachers to be appointed,227 is eminently peculiar to these regions. The urban rivalries, which appear in Asia Minor so emphatic and in part so childish, occasionally even so odious—as, for example, the war between Severus and Niger in Bithynia was properly a war of the two rival capitals Nicomedia and Nicaea—belong to the character of Hellenic politics in general, but especially of those in Asia Minor. We shall mention further on the emulation as to temples of the emperors; in a similar way the ranking of the urban deputations at the common festivals in Asia Minor was a vital question—Magnesia on the Maeander calls itself on the coins the “seventh city of Asia” —and above all the first place was one so much desired, that the government ultimately agreed to admit several first cities. It fared similarly with the designation of “metropolis.” The proper metropolis of the province was Pergamus, the residence of the Attalids and the seat of the diet. But Ephesus, the de facto capital of the province, where the governor was obliged to enter on his office, and which boasts of this “right of reception at landing” on its coins; Smyrna, in constant rivalship with its Ephesian neighbour, and, in defiance of the legitimate right of the Ephesians to primacy, naming itself on coins “the first in greatness and beauty;” the very ancient Sardis, Cyzicus, and several others strove after the same honorary right. With these their wranglings, on account of which the senate and the emperor were regularly appealed to—the “Greek follies,” as men were wont to say in Rome—the people of Asia Minor were the standing annoyance and the standing laughing–stock of the Romans of mark.228

Bithynia.Bithynia did not stand on a like level with the Attalid kingdom. The older Greek colonising had here confined itself merely to the coast. In the Hellenistic epoch at first the Macedonian rulers, and later the native dynasty which walked entirely in their steps, had—along with a regulation of the places on the coast, which perhaps on the whole amounted to a changing of their names—also opened up in some measure the interior, in particular by the two successful foundations of Nicaea (Isnik) and Prusa on Olympia (Broussa); of the former it is stated that the first settlers were of good Macedonian and Hellenic descent. But in the intensity of the Hellenising the kingdom of Nicomedes was far behind that of the citizen prince of Pergamus; in particular the eastern interior can have been but little settled before Augustus. This was otherwise in the time of the empire. In the Augustan age a successful robber–chief, who became a convert to order, reconstructed on the Galatian frontier the utterly decayed township Gordiou Kome, under the name of Juliopolis; in the same region the towns Bithynion–Claudiopolis and Crateia–Flaviopolis probably attained Greek civic rights in the course of the first century. Generally in Bithynia Hellenism took a mighty upward impulse under the imperial period, and the tough Thracian stamp of the natives gave a good foundation for it. The fact that, among the inscribed stones of this province known in great number, not more than four belong to the pre–Roman epoch, cannot well be explained solely from the circumstance that urban ambition was only fostered under the emperors. In the literature of the imperial period a number of the best authors and the least carried away by exuberant rhetoric, such as the philosopher Dio of Prusa, the historian Memnon of Heraclea, Arrianus of Nicomedia, Cassius Dio of Nicaea, belong to Bithynia.

Pontus.The eastern half of the south coast of the Black Sea, the Roman province of Pontus, had as its basis that portion of the kingdom of Mithradates, of which Pompeius took direct possession immediately after the victory. The numerous smaller principalities, which Pompeius at the same time gave away in the interior of Paphlagonia and thence eastward to the Armenian frontier, were, after a shorter or longer subsistence, on their annexation partly attached to the same province, partly joined to Galatia or Cappadocia. The former kingdom of Mithradates had been far less affected than the western regions either by the older or by the younger Hellenism. When the Romans took possession directly or indirectly of this territory, there were, strictly speaking, no towns of Greek organisation there; Amasia, the old capital of the Pontic Achaemenids, and still their burial–place, was not such; the two old Greek coast–towns, Amisus and Sinope that once commanded the Black Sea, had become royal residences, and Greek polity would hardly be given to the few townships laid out by Mithradates, e.g. Eupatoria (iv. 152). But here, as was already shown in detail (iv.151 f.)iv.146., the Roman conquest was at the same time the Hellenising; Pompeius organised the province in such a way as to make the eleven chief townships of it into towns, and to distribute the territory among them. Certainly these artificially created towns with their immense districts—that of Sinope had along the coast an extent of 70 miles, and bordered on the Halys with that of Amisus—resembled more the Celtic cantons than the Hellenic and Italian urban communities proper. But at any rate Sinope and Amisus were then reinstated in their old positions, and other towns in the interior, such as Pompeiopolis, Nicopolis, Megalopolis, the later Sebasteia, were called into life. Sinope obtained from the dictator Caesar the rights of a Roman colony, and beyond doubt also Italian settlers (iv.574)iv.544.. More important for the Roman administration was Trapezus, an old colony of Sinope; the town, which in the year 63 was joined to the province of Cappadocia (p.324, note), was both the station of the Roman Black Sea fleet and in a certain measure the base of operations for the military corps of this province, which was the only corps in all Asia Minor.

Cappadocia.Inland Cappadocia was in the Roman power after the erection of the provinces of Pontus and Syria; of its annexation in the beginning of the reign of Tiberius, which was primarily occasioned by the attempt of Armenia to release itself from the Roman suzerainty, we shall have to give an account in the following section. The court, and those immediately connected with it, had become Hellenised (iii.59)iii.57., somewhat as the German courts of the eighteenth century adapted themselves to French habits. The capital, Caesarea, the ancient Mazaca, like the Phrygian Apamea, an intermediate station for the great traffic between the ports of the west coast and the lands of the Euphrates, and in the Roman period, as still at the present day, one of the most flourishing commercial cities of Asia Minor, was, at the instigation of Pompeius, not merely rebuilt after the Mithradatic war, but probably also furnished at that time with civic rights after the Greek type. Cappadocia itself was at the beginning of the imperial period hardly more Greek than Brandenburg and Pomerania under Frederick the Great were French. When the country became Roman, it was divided, according to the statements of the contemporary Strabo, not into city–districts, but into ten prefectures, of which only two had towns, the already–mentioned capital and Tyana; and this arrangement was here on the whole not more changed than in Egypt, though individual townships subsequently received Greek civic rights; e.g. the emperor Marcus made the Cappadocian village, in which his wife had died, into the town Faustinopolis. It is true that the Cappadocians now spoke Greek; but the students from Cappadocia had much to endure abroad on account of their uncouth accent, and of their defects in pronunciation and modulation; and, if they learned to speak after an Attic fashion, their countrymen found their language affected.229 It was only in the Christian period that the comrades in study of the emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, gave a better sound to the Cappadocian name.

Lycia.The Lycian cities in their secluded mountain–land did not open their coast for Greek settlement, but did not on that account debar themselves from Hellenic influence. Lycia was the only district of Asia Minor in which early civilising did not set aside the native language, and which, almost like the Romans, entered into Greek habits without becoming externally Hellenised. It is characteristic of their position, that the Lycian confederation as such joined the Attic naval league and paid its tribute to the Athenian leading power. The Lycians not merely practised their art after Hellenic models, but probably also regulated their political organisation early in the same way. The conversion of the cities–league, once subject to Rhodes, but which had become independent after the third Macedonian war (ii.325)ii.307. into a Roman province, which was ordained by the emperor Claudius on account of the endless quarrels among the allies, must have furthered the progress of Hellenism; in the course of the imperial period the Lycians thereupon became completely Greeks.

Pamphylia and Cilicia.The Pamphylian coast–towns, like Aspendus and Perga, Greek foundations of the oldest times, subsequently left to themselves, and attaining under favourable circumstances prosperous development, had either conserved, or moulded specially on their own part, the oldest Hellenic character in such a way that the Pamphylians might be regarded as an independent nation in language and writing not much less than the neighbouring Lycians. Then, when Asia was gained for the Hellenes, they found gradually their way back into the common Greek civilisation, and so also into the general political organisation. The rulers in this region and on the neighbouring Cilician coast were in the Hellenistic period partly the Egyptians, whose royal house gave its name to different townships in Pamphylia and Cilicia, partly the Seleucids, after whom the most considerable town of west Cilicia was named Seleucia on the Calycadnus, partly the Pergamenes, of whose rule Attalia (Adalia) in Pamphylia testifies.

Pisidia and Isauria.On the other hand the tribes in the mountains of Pisidia, Isauria and western Cilicia substantially maintained their independence down to the beginning of the imperial period. Here hostilities never ceased. Not merely by land had the civilised governments continued troubles with the Pisidians and their comrades, but these pursued still more zealously than robbery by land the trade of piracy, particularly from western Cilicia, where the mountains immediately approach the sea. When, on the decline of the Egyptian naval power, the south coast of Asia Minor became entirely an asylum of the pirates, the Romans interfered and erected the province of Cilicia, which embraced also, or was at any rate intended to embrace, the Pamphylian coast, for the sake of suppressing piracy. But what they did showed more what ought to have been done than that anything was really accomplished; the intervention took place too late and too fitfully. Though a blow was once struck against the corsairs, and Roman troops penetrated even into the Isaurian mountains, and broke up the pirates’ strongholds far into the interior (iv.47)iv.44., the Roman republic did not attain true permanent establishment in these districts reluctantly annexed by it. Here everything was left for the empire to do. Antonius, when he took in hand the East, entrusted an able Galatian officer, Amyntas, with the subjugation of the refractory Pisidian region,230 and, when the latter proved his quality,231 he made him king of Galatia,—the region of Asia Minor which was best organised in a military point of view, and most ready for action—and at the same time extended his government from thence as far as the south coast, and so as to include Lycaonia, Pisidia, Isauria, Pamphylia, and western Cilicia, while the civilised east half of Cilicia was left with Syria. Even when Augustus, after the battle of Actium, entered upon rule in the East, he left the Celtic prince in his position. The latter made essential progress as well in the suppression of the bad corsairs harbouring in the lurking places of western Cilicia, as also in the extirpation of the brigands, killed one of the worst of these robber–chiefs, Antipater, the ruler of Derbe and Laranda in southern Lycaonia, built for himself a residence in Isauria, and not merely drove the Pisidians out from the adjoining Phrygian territories, but invaded their own land, and took Cremna in the heart of it. But some years after (729 U.C.)25. he lost his life on an expedition against one of the west Cicilian tribes, the Homonadenses; after he had taken most of the townships and their prince had fallen, he perished through a plot directed against him by the wife of the latter. After this disaster Augustus himself undertook the difficult business of pacifying the interior of Asia Minor. If in doing so he, as was already observed (p.324), assigned the small Pamphylian coast–district to a governor of its own and separated it from Galatia, this was evidently done because the mountain–land lying between the coast and the Galato–Lycaonian steppe was so little under control that the administration of the coast region could not well be conducted from Galatia. Roman troops were not stationed in Galatia; yet the levy of the warlike Galatians must have meant more than in the case of most provincials. Moreover, as western Cilicia was then placed under Cappadocia, the troops of this dependent prince had to take part in the work. The Syrian army carried out the chastisement in the first place of the Homonadenses; the governor, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, advanced some years later into their territory, cut off their supplies, and compelled them to submit en masse, whereupon they were distributed to the surrounding townships and their former territory was laid waste. The Clitae, another stock settled in western Cilicia nearer to the coast, met with similar chastisements in the years 36 and 52; as they refused obedience to the vassal–prince placed over them by Rome, and pillaged land and sea, and as the so–called rulers of the land could not dispose of them, the imperial troops were on both occasions brought in from Syria to subdue them. These accounts have been accidentally preserved; numerous similar incidents have certainly been lost to remembrance.

Pisidian colonies.But Augustus attempted the pacification of this region also by way of settlement. The Hellenistic governments had, so to speak, isolated it; not merely retained or seized a footing everywhere on the coast, but also founded in the north–west a series of towns—on the Phrygian frontier Apollonia, alleged to have been founded by Alexander himself, Seleucia Siderus and Antiochia, both from the time of the Seleucids, further in Lycaonia, Laodicea Katakekaumene, and the capital of this district which doubtless originated at the same time, Iconium. But in the mountain–land proper no trace of Hellenistic settlement is found, and still less did the Roman senate apply itself to this difficult task. Augustus did so; and only here in the whole Greek coast we meet a series of colonies of Roman veterans evidently intended to acquire this district for peaceful settlement. Of the older settlements just mentioned, Antiochia was supplied with veterans and reorganised in Roman fashion, while there were newly laid out in southern Lycaonia Parlais, in Pisidia itself the already–mentioned Cremna, as well as further to the south Olbasa and Comama. The later governments did not continue with equal energy the work so begun; yet under Claudius the “iron Seleucia” of Pisidia was made the “Claudian;” while in the interior of western Cilicia Claudiopolis, and not far from it, perhaps at the same time, Germanicopolis were called into life, and Iconium, in the time of Augustus a small place, was brought to considerable development. The newly–founded towns remained indeed unimportant, but still notably restricted the field of the free inhabitants of the mountains, and general peace must at length have made its triumphal entrance also here. As well the plains and mountain–terraces of Pamphylia as the mountain–towns of Pisidia itself, e.g. Selga and Sagalassus, were during the imperial period well peopled and the territory carefully cultivated; the remains of mighty aqueducts and singularly large theatres, all of them structures of the Roman imperial period, show, it is true, only mechanical skill, but bear traces of a peaceful prosperity richly developed.

Isaurians.The government, it is true, never quite mastered brigandage in these regions, and if in the earlier period of the empire its ravages were kept in moderate bounds, the bands once more emerge as a warlike power in the troubles of the third century. They now pass under the name of Isaurians, and have their chief seat in the mountains of Cilicia, from whence they plunder land and sea. They are mentioned first under Severus Alexander. That under Gallienus they proclaimed their robber–chief emperor, is probably a fable; but certainly under the emperor Probus such an one, by name Lydius, who for long had pillaged Lycia and Pamphylia, was subdued in the Roman colony Cremna, which he had occupied, after a long and obstinate siege by a Roman army. In later times we find a military cordon drawn round their territory, and a special commanding general appointed for the Isaurians. Their savage valour even procured for those of them, who chose to take service at the Byzantine court, for a time a position there such as the Macedonians had possessed at the court of the Ptolemies; in fact one from their ranks, Zeno, died as emperor of Byzantium.232

Galatia.Lastly, the region of Galatia, at a remote period the chief seat of the Oriental rule over anterior Asia, and preserving in the famed rock–sculptures of the modern BoghazkÖi, formerly the royal town of Pteria, reminiscences of an almost forgotten glory, had in the course of centuries become in language and manners a Celtic island amidst the waves of eastern peoples, and remained so in internal organisation even under the empire. The three Celtic tribes, which, on the great migration of the nation about the time of the war between Pyrrhus and the Romans, had arrived in the heart of Asia Minor, and there, like the Franks in the East during the middle ages, had consolidated themselves into a firmly knit soldier–state, and after prolonged roving had taken up their definitive abode on either side of the Halys, had long since left behind the times when they issued forth thence to pillage Asia Minor, and were in conflict with the kings of Asia and Pergamus, provided that they did not serve them as mercenaries. They too were shattered before the superior power of the Romans (ii.290)ii.273., and became not less subject to them in Asia than their countrymen in the valley of the Po and on the Rhone and Seine. But in spite of their sojourn of several hundred years in Asia Minor, a deep gulf still separated these Occidentals from the Asiatics. It was not merely that they retained their native language and their nationality, that still each of the three cantons was governed by its four hereditary princes, and the federal assembly, to which deputies were sent by all in common, presided in the sacred oak–grove as supreme authority over the Galatian land (ii.232)ii.219.; nor was it that continued rudeness as well as warlike valour distinguished them to advantage as well as to disadvantage from their neighbours; such contrasts between culture and barbarism existed elsewhere in Asia Minor, and the superficial and external Hellenising—such as neighbourhood, commercial relations, the Phrygian cultus adopted by the immigrants, and mercenary service brought in their train—must have set in not much later in Galatia than e.g. in the neighbouring Cappadocia. The contrast was of a different kind; the Celtic and the Hellenic invasion came into competition in Asia Minor, and to the distinction of nationality was added the spur of rival conquest. This was brought clearly to light in the Mithradatic crisis; by the side of the command of Mithradates to murder the Italians went the massacre of the whole Galatian nobility (iii.322)iii.306., and, in keeping therewith, the Romans in the wars against the Oriental liberator of the Hellenes had no more faithful ally than the Galatians of Asia Minor (iv.56, 149)iv.53,143..

The Galatian kingdom.For that reason the success of the Romans was theirs also, and the victory gave to them for a time a leading position in the affairs of Asia Minor. The old tetrarchate was done away, apparently by Pompeius. One of the new cantonal princes, who had approved himself most in the Mithradatic wars, Deiotarus, attached to himself, besides his own territory, Lesser Armenia and other portions of the former Mithradatic empire, and became an inconvenient neighbour to the other Galatian princes, and the most powerful among the dynasts of Asia Minor (iv.149)iv.143.. After the victory of Caesar, to whom he occupied an attitude of hostility, and whose favour he was unable to gain even by help rendered against Pharnaces, the possessions gained by him with or without consent of the Roman government were for the most part again withdrawn; the Caesarian Mithradates of Pergamus, who on the mother’s side was sprung from the Galatian royal house, obtained the most of what Deiotarus lost, and was even placed by his side in Galatia itself. But, after the latter had shortly afterwards met his end in the Tauric Chersonese (p.313), and Caesar himself had not long afterwards been murdered, Deiotarus reinstated himself unbidden in possession of what he had lost, and, as he knew how to submit to the Roman party predominant on each occasion in the East as well as how to change it at the right time, he died at an advanced age in the year 71440. as lord of all Galatia. His descendants were portioned off with a small lordship in Paphlagonia; his kingdom, further enlarged towards the south by Lycaonia and all the country down to the coast of Pamphylia, was transferred, as was already said, in the year 71836. by Antonius to Amyntas, who seems to have conducted the government already in the last years of Deiotarus as his secretary and general, and, as such, had before the battle of Philippi effected the transition from the republican generals to the triumvirs. His further fortunes have been already told. Equal to his predecessor in sagacity and bravery, he served first Antonius, and then Augustus as chief instrument for the pacification of the territory not yet subject in Asia Minor, till he there met his death in the year 72925.. With him ended the Galatian kingdom, and it was converted into the Roman province of Galatia.

The inhabitants.Its inhabitants were called Gallograeci among the Romans even in the last age of the republic; they were, adds Livy, a mixed people, as they were called, and degenerate. A good portion of them must have descended from the older Phrygian inhabitants of these regions. Of still more weight is the fact, that the zealous worship of the gods in Galatia and the priesthood there have nothing in common with the ritual institutions of the European Celts; not merely was the Great Mother, whose sacred symbol the Romans of Hannibal’s time asked and received from the Tolistobogi, of a Phrygian type, but her priests belonged in part at least to the Galatian nobility. Nevertheless, even in the Roman province of Galatia the internal organisation was predominantly Celtic. The fact that even under Pius the strict paternal power foreign to Hellenic law subsisted in Galatia, is a proof of this from the sphere of private law. In public relations there were in this country still only the three old communities of the Tectosages, the Tolistobogi, the Trocmi, who perhaps appended to their names those of the three chief places, Ancyra, Pessinus, and Tavium, but were essentially nothing but the well–known Gallic cantons, which also indeed were not without their chief place. If among the Celts of Asia the conception of the community as town gains the predominance earlier than among the European,233 and the name Ancyra more quickly dispossesses that of the Tectosages than in Europe the name Burdigala dispossesses that of the Bituriges, and there Ancyra even as foremost place of the whole country calls itself the “mother–city” ?t??p????, this certainly shows—what could not in fact be otherwise—the influence of Greek neighbourhood and the incipient process of assimilation, the several phases of which the superficial information that survives to us does not allow us to follow out. The Celtic names keep their hold down to the time of Tiberius; afterwards they appear only isolated in the houses of rank.

Language under the Romans.That the Romans after the erection of the province—as in Gaul they allowed only the Latin language—allowed in Galatia alongside of this only the Greek in business–dealings, was a matter of course. What course was taken earlier we know not, as we do not meet with pre–Roman written monuments in this country at all. As the language of conversation the Celtic maintained its ground with tenacity also in Asia;234 yet the Greek gradually gained the upper hand. In the fourth century Ancyra was one of the chief centres of Greek culture; “the small towns in Greek Galatia,” says the man of letters, Themistius, who had grown gray in addressing the cultivated public, “cannot indeed cope with Antioch; but the people appropriate to themselves culture more zealously than the genuine Hellenes, and, wherever the philosopher’s cloak appears, they cling to it like the iron to the magnet.” Yet the national language may have preserved itself in the lower circles down even to this period, particularly beyond the Halys among the Trocmi evidently much later Hellenised.235 It has already been mentioned (p.101) that, according to the testimony of the far–travelled church–father Jerome, still at the end of the fourth century the Asiatic Galatian spoke the same language, although corrupt, which was then spoken in Treves. That as soldiers the Galatians, though sustaining no comparison with the Occidentals, were yet far more useful than the Greek Asiatics, is attested as well by the legion which king Deiotarus raised from his subjects after the Roman model, and which Augustus took over with the kingdom and incorporated with the Roman army under its previous name, as by the fact, that in the Oriental recruiting of the imperial period the Galatians were drawn upon by preference just as the Batavians were in the West.236

The Greek islands.To the extra–European Hellenes belong further the two great islands of the eastern Mediterranean, Crete and Cyprus, as well as the numerous islets of the sea between Greece and Asia Minor; the Cyrenaic Pentapolis also on the opposite African coast is so separated by the surrounding desert from the interior that it may be in some measure ranked along with those Greek islands. These constituent elements, however, of the enormous mass of lands united under the sceptre of the emperors do not add essentially new features to the general historical conception. The minor islands, Hellenised earlier and more completely than the continent, belong as regards their essential character more to European Greece than to the colonial field of Asia Minor; as indeed we have already several times mentioned the Hellenic model–state, Rhodes, in connection with the former. The islands are chiefly noticed at this epoch, inasmuch as it was usual in the imperial period to banish men of the better classes to them by way of punishment. They chose, where the case was specially severe, rocks like Gyarus and Donussa; but Andros, Cythnus, Amorgos, once flourishing centres of Greek culture, were now places of punishment, while in Lesbos and Samos not seldom Romans of rank and even members of the imperial house voluntarily took up a somewhat lengthened abode. Crete and Cyprus, whose old Hellenism had under the Persian rule or in complete isolation lost contact with home, organised themselves—Cyprus as a dependency of Egypt, the Cretan towns as autonomous—in the Hellenistic and later in the Roman epochs according to the general forms of Greek polity. In the Cyrenaic towns the system of the Lagids prevailed; we find in them not merely, as in the strictly Greek towns, Hellenic burgesses and metoeci, but alongside of them, as with the Egyptians in Alexandria, the “peasants,” that is the native Africans, and among the metoeci the Jews form, as they do likewise in Alexandria, a numerous and privileged class.

Leagues of the Hellenes in Asia Minor.To the Greeks in common the Roman imperial government never granted a constitution. The Augustan Amphictiony was restricted, as we saw (p.254), to the Hellenes in Achaia, Epirus, and Macedonia. If the Hadrianic Panhellenes in Athens acted as though they were representative of all the Hellenes, they yet encroached on the other Greek provinces only in so far as they decreed, so to speak, honorary Hellenism to individual towns in Asia (p.267); and the fact that they did so, just shows that the extraneous communities of Greeks were by no means included among those Panhellenes. If in Asia Minor there is mention of representation or representatives of the Hellenes, what is meant by this in the provinces of Asia and Bithynia organised completely after the Hellenic manner, is the diet and the president of the diet of these provinces, in so far as these proceed from the deputies of the towns belonging to each of them, and all of these towns are Greek polities;237 while in the non–Greek province of Galatia the representatives of the Greeks sojourning there, placed alongside of the Galatian diet, are designated as “presidents of the Greeks.”238

Land–diets and land festivals.To the confederation of towns the Roman government in Asia Minor had no occasion to oppose special obstacles. In Roman as in pre–Roman times nine towns of the Troad performed in common religious functions and celebrated common festivals.239 The diets of the different provinces of Asia Minor, which were here as in the whole empire called into existence as a fixed institution by Augustus, were not different in themselves from those of the other provinces. Yet this institution developed itself, or rather changed its nature, here in a peculiar fashion. With the immediate purpose of these annual assemblies of the civic deputies of each province240—to bring its wishes to the knowledge of the governor or the government, and generally to serve as organ of the province—was here first combined the celebration of the annual festival for the governing emperor and the imperial system generally. Augustus in the year 72529. allowed the diets of Asia and Bithynia to erect temples and show divine honour to him at their places of assembly, Pergamus and Nicomedia. This new arrangement soon extended to the whole empire, and the blending of the ritual institution with the administrative became a leading idea of the provincial organisation of the imperial period. But as regards pomp of priests and festivals and civic rivalries, this institution nowhere developed itself so much as in the province of Asia and, analogously, in the other provinces of Asia Minor; and nowhere, consequently, has there subsisted alongside of, and above, municipal ambition a provincial ambition of the towns still more than of the individuals, such as in Asia Minor dominates the whole public life.

Provincial priests and Asiarchs.The high priest (????e?e??) of the new temple appointed from year to year in the province is not merely the most eminent dignitary of the province, but throughout its bounds the year is designated after him.241 The system of festivals and games after the model of the Olympic festival, which spread more and more as we saw among all the Hellenes, was associated in Asia Minor predominantly with the festivals and games of the provincial worship of the emperor. The conduct of these fell to the president of the diet, in Asia to the Asiarch, in Bithynia to the Bithyniarch, and so on; and not less he had chiefly to bear the costs of the annual festival, although a portion of these, like the remaining expenses of this equally brilliant and loyal worship, was covered by voluntary gifts and endowments, or was apportioned among the several towns. Hence these presidentships were only accessible to rich people; the prosperity of the town Tralles is indicated by the fact, that it never wanted Asiarchs—the title remained even after the expiry of the official year—and the repute of the Apostle Paul in Ephesus is indicated by his connection with different Asiarchs there. In spite of the expense this was an honorary position much sought after, not on account of the privileges attached to it, e.g. of exemption from trusteeship, but on account of its outward splendour; the festal entrance into the town, in purple dress and with chaplet on the head, preceded by a procession of boys swinging their vessels of incense, was in the horizon of the Greeks of Asia Minor what the olive–branch of Olympia was among the Hellenes. On several occasions this or that Asiatic of quality boasts of having been not merely himself Asiarch but descended also from Asiarchs. If this cultus was at the outset confined to the provincial capitals, the municipal ambition, which in the province of Asia in particular assumed incredible proportions, very soon broke through those limits. Here already in the year 23 a second temple was decreed by the province to the then reigning emperor Tiberius as well as to his mother and to the senate, and after long quarrelling of the towns was, by decree of the senate, erected at Smyrna. The other larger towns followed the example on later occasions.242 If hitherto the province had had only one president and one chief priest, as only one temple, now not merely had as many chief priests to be appointed as there were provincial temples, but also, seeing that the conduct of the temple–festival and the execution of the games pertained not to the chief priest but to the land–president, and the rival great towns were chiefly concerned about the festivals and games, there was given to all the chief priests at the same time the title and the right of presidency, so that at least in Asia the Asiarchy and the chief priesthood of the provincial temples coincided.243 Therewith the diet and the civil functions, from which the institution had its origin, fell into the background; the Asiarch was soon nothing more than the provider of a popular festival annexed to the divine worship of the former and present emperors, on which account indeed his wife—the Asiarchess—might and zealously did take part in the celebration.

Superintendence of worship by the provincial priests.A practical importance, increased in Asia Minor by the high estimation in which this institution was held, may have attached to the provincial chief–priesthood for the worship of the emperors through the religious superintendence associated with it. After the diet had once resolved on the worship of the emperors, and the government had given its consent, action on the part of the towns followed as a matter of course; in Asia already under Augustus at least all the chief places of judicial circuit had their Caesareum and their emperors’ festival.244 It was the right and duty of the chief priest to watch over the execution of these provincial and municipal decrees and the practice of the cultus in his district; what this might mean, is elucidated by the fact, that the autonomy of the free city of Cyzicus in Asia was set aside under Tiberius for this among other reasons, that it had allowed the decree for building the temple of the god Augustus to remain unfulfilled—perhaps just because it as a free town was not under the diet. It is probable that this superintendence, although it primarily concerned the emperor–worship, extended to the affairs of religion in general.245 Then, when the old and the new faith began to contend in the empire for the mastery, it was probably, in the first instance, through the provincial chief priesthood that the contrast between them was converted into conflict. These priests, appointed from the provincials of mark by the diet of the province, were by their traditions and by their official duties far more called and inclined than were the imperial magistrates to animadvert on neglect of the recognised worship, and, where dissuasion did not avail, as they had not themselves a power of punishment, to bring the act punishable by civil law to the notice of the local or imperial authorities and to invoke the aid of the secular arm—above all, to force the Christians to comply with the demands of the imperial cultus. In the later period the regents adhering to the old faith even expressly enjoin these chief priests personally, and through the priests of the towns placed under them, to punish contraventions of the existing religious arrangements, and assign to them exactly the part which under the emperors of the new faith is taken by the metropolitan and his urban bishops.246 Probably here it was not the heathen organisation that copied the Christian institutions; but, conversely, the conquering Christian church that took its hierarchic weapons from the arsenal of the enemy. All this applied, as we have already observed, to the whole empire; but the very practical consequences of the provincial regulation of the imperial cultus—the exercise of religious superintendence and the persecution of persons of another faith—were drawn pre–eminently in Asia Minor.

System of religion.Alongside of the cultus of the emperors the worship of the gods proper found its favoured abode in Asia Minor, and all its extravagances in particular there found a refuge. The mischief of asylums and of miraculous cures had here its seat in a quite special sense. Under Tiberius the limitation of the former was enjoined by the Roman senate; the god of healing, Asklepios, nowhere performed more and greater wonders than in his much–loved city of Pergamus, which worshipped him as Zeus Asklepios, and owed to him a good part of its prosperity in the imperial period. The most active wonder–workers of the time of the empire—the subsequently canonised Cappadocian Apollonius of Tyana and the Paphlagonian serpent–man Alexander of Abonuteichos—belonged to Asia Minor. If the general prohibition of associations was carried out, as we shall see, with special strictness in Asia Minor, the reason must doubtless be sought mainly in the religious conditions which gave special occasion to the abuse of such unions there.

Public safety.The public safety was left to depend in the main on the land itself. In the earlier imperial period, apart from the Syrian command which included eastern Cilicia, there was stationed in all Asia Minor simply a detachment of 5000 auxiliary troops, which served as a garrison in the province of Galatia,247 along with a fleet of 40 ships; this command was destined partly to keep in check the restless Pisidians, partly to cover the north–eastern frontier of the empire, and to watch over the coast of the Black Sea as far as the Crimea. Vespasian raised this troop to the status of an army corps of two legions and placed their staffs in the province of Cappadocia on the upper Euphrates. Besides these forces destined to guard the frontier there were not then any garrisons of note in anterior Asia; in the imperial province of Lycia and Pamphylia, e.g. there lay a single cohort of 500 men, in the senatorial provinces, at the most, individual soldiers told off from the imperial guard or from the neighbouring imperial provinces for special purposes.248 If this testifies, on the one hand, most emphatically to the internal peace of these provinces, and clearly brings before our eyes the enormous contrast of the citizens of Asia Minor with the constantly unsettled capitals of Syria and Egypt, it explains, on the other hand, the subsistence, already noticed in another connection, of brigandage in a country mountainous throughout and in the interior partly desolate, particularly on the Myso–Bithynian frontier and in the mountain valleys of Pisidia and Isauria. There was no civic militia proper in Asia Minor. In spite of the flourishing of gymnastic institutes for boys, youths, and men, the Hellenes of this period in Asia remained as unwarlike as in Europe.249Eirenarchs. They restricted themselves to creating for the maintenance of public safety civic peace–masters (Eirenarchs), and placing at their disposal a number of civic gens d’armes, partly mounted mercenaries of small repute, but which must yet have been useful, since the emperor Marcus did not disdain, in the sorely felt want of tried soldiers during the Marcomanian war, to incorporate these town–soldiers of Asia Minor among the imperial troops.250

Administration of justice.The administration of justice on the part as well of the civic authorities as of the governors left at this epoch much to be desired; yet the emergence of the imperial rule marks a turn in it for the better. The interference of the supreme power had under the republic confined itself to the penal control of the public officials, and exercised this, especially in later times, feebly and factiously, or rather not at all. Now not merely were the reins drawn tighter in Rome, inasmuch as the strict superintendence of its own officers was inseparable from the unity of military government, and even the imperial senate was induced to watch more sharply over the administration of its mandatories; but it became now possible to set aside the miscarriages of the provincial courts by way of the newly introduced appeal, or else, where an impartial trial could not be expected in the province, to carry the process to Rome before the bar of the emperor.251 Both of these steps applied also to the senatorial provinces, and were to all appearance predominantly felt as a benefit.

The constitution of towns in Asia Minor.As in the case of the Hellenes of Europe, so in Asia Minor the Roman province was essentially an aggregate of urban communities. Here, as in Hellas, the traditional received forms of democratic polity were in general retained, e.g. the magistrates continued to be chosen by the burgesses, but everywhere the determining influence was placed in the hands of the wealthy, and no free play was allowed to the pleasure of the multitude any more than to serious political ambition. Among the limitations of municipal autonomy it was peculiar to the towns of Asia Minor, that the already mentioned Eirenarch, the police–master of the city, was subsequently nominated by the governor from a list of ten names proposed by the council of the city.Logistae. The government–trusteeship of civic finance–administration—the imperial appointment of one not belonging to the city itself as a guardian of property (curator rei publicae, ????st??), whose consent the civic authorities had to procure in the more important dealings with property—was never generally ordained, but only for this or that city according to need; in Asia Minor, however, in keeping with the importance of its urban development, it was introduced specially early, i.e. from the beginning of the second century, and on a specially comprehensive scale. At least in the third century here, as elsewhere, other important decrees of the communal administration had to be laid before the governor to be confirmed. The Roman government did not insist anywhere, and least of all in the Hellenic lands, on uniformity of municipal constitution; in Asia Minor there prevailed great variety, according, it may be conjectured, in many cases with the pleasure of the individual burgess–bodies, although for the communities belonging to the same province the law organising each province prescribed general rules. Whatever institutions of this sort may be looked upon as diffused in Asia Minor, and predominantly peculiar to the land, bear no political character, but are merely significant as regards social relations, such as the unions spread over all Asia Minor, partly of the older, partly of the younger citizens, Gerusia, Neoi. the Gerusia and the Neoi, clubs for the two classes of age with corresponding places of gymnastic exercise and festivals.252 Of autonomous communities there were from the outset far fewer in Asia Minor than in Hellas proper; and, in particular, the most important towns of Asia Minor never had this doubtful distinction, or at any rate early lost it, such as Cyzicus under Tiberius (p.348), Samos through Vespasian. Asia Minor was just old subject–territory and, under its Persian as under its Hellenic rulers, accustomed to monarchic organisation; here less than in Hellas did useless recollections and vague hopes carry men away beyond the limited municipal horizon of the present, and there was not much of this sort to disturb the peaceful enjoyment of such happiness in life as was possible under the existing circumstances.

Urban life.Of this happiness of life there was abundance in Asia Minor under the Roman imperial government. “No province of them all,” says an author living in Smyrna under the Antonines, “has so many towns to show as ours, and none such towns as our largest. It has the advantage of a charming country, a favourable climate, varied products, a position in the centre of the empire, a girdle of peaceful people all round, good order, rarity of crime, gentle treatment of slaves, consideration and goodwill from the rulers.” Asia was called, as we have already said, the province of the five hundred towns; and, if the arid interior, in part fitted only for pasture, of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, and Cappadocia was even at that time but thinly peopled, the rest of the coast was not far behind Asia. The enduring prosperity of the regions capable of cultivation in Asia Minor did not extend merely to the cities of illustrious name, such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Laodicea, Apamea; wherever a corner of the country, neglected under the desolation of the fifteen hundred years which separate us from that time, is opened up to investigation, there the first and the most powerful feeling is that of astonishment, one might almost say of shame, at the contrast of the wretched and pitiful present with the happiness and splendour of the past Roman age.

Cragus, Sidyma.On a secluded mountain–top not far from the Lycian coast, where according to the Greek fable dwelt the Chimaera, lay the ancient Cragus, probably built only of beams and clay tiles, and having for that reason no trace of it left excepting the Cyclopian fortress–walls at the foot of the hill. Below the summit spreads a pleasant fertile valley with fresh Alpine air and southern vegetation, surrounded by mountains rich in woods and game. When under the emperor Claudius Lycia became a province, the Roman government transferred the mountain–town—the “green Cragus” of Horace—to this plain; in the market–place of the new town, Sidyma, the remains still stand of the tetrastyle temple then dedicated to the emperor, and of a stately colonnade, which a native of the place who had acquired means as a physician built in his early home. Statues of the emperors and of deserving fellow–citizens adorned the market; there were in the town a temple to its protecting gods, Artemis and Apollo, baths, gymnastic institutions (????s?a) for the older as for the younger citizens; from the gates along the main road, which led steeply down the mountain side to the harbour Calabatia, there stretched on both sides rows of stone sepulchral monuments, more stately and more costly than those of Pompeii, and for the most part still erect, while the houses presumably built, like those of the ancient city, from perishable materials, have disappeared. We may draw an inference as to the position and habits of the former inhabitants from a municipal decree recently found there, probably drawn up under Commodus, as to constituting the club for the elder citizens; it was composed of a hundred members, taken one half from the town–council and the other from the rest of the citizens, including not more than three freedmen and one person of illegitimate birth, all the rest begotten in lawful wedlock and belonging in part to demonstrably old and wealthy burgess–houses. Some of these families attained to Roman citizenship, one even to the senate of the empire. But even abroad this senatorial house, as well as different physicians of Sidyma employed in other lands and even at the imperial court, remained mindful of their home, and several of them closed their lives there; one of these distinguished denizens has put together the legends of the town and the prophecies concerning it in a compilation not exactly excellent, but very learned and very patriotic, and caused these memorabilia to be publicly exhibited. This Cragus–Sidyma did not vote among towns of the first class at the diet of the small Lycian province, was without a theatre, without honorary titles, and without those general festivals which in the world, as it then was, marked a great town; was even, according to the conception of the ancients, a small provincial town and thoroughly a creation of the Roman imperial period. But in the whole Vilajet AÏdin there is at the present day no inland place which can be even remotely placed by the side of this little mountain–town, such as it was, as regards civilised existence. What still stands vividly to–day before our eyes in this secluded village has disappeared, with the exception of slight remains, or even without a trace, in an untold number of other towns under the devastating hand of man. The coinage of the imperial period, freely given to the towns in copper, allows us a certain glance at this abundance; no province can even remotely vie with Asia in the number of mints and the variety of the representations.

Defects of municipal administration.No doubt this merging of all interests in the petty town of one’s birth was not without its reverse side in Asia Minor, any more than among the European Greeks. What was said of their communal administration holds good in the main also here. The urban finance–system, which knows itself to be without right control, lacks steadiness and frugality and often even honesty; as to buildings—sometimes the resources of the town are exceeded, sometimes even what is most needful is left undone; the humbler citizens become accustomed to the largesses of the town–chest, or of men of wealth, to free oil in the baths, to public banquets and popular recreations out of others’ pockets; the good houses become used to the clientage of the multitude, with its abject demonstrations of homage, its begging intrigues, its divisions; rivalries exist, as between town and town (p.329), so in every town between the several circles and the several houses; the government in Asia Minor dares not to introduce the formation of poor–clubs and of voluntary fire–brigades, such as everywhere existed in the west, because the spirit of faction here at once takes possession of every association. The calm sea easily becomes a swamp, and the lack of the great pulsation of general interest is clearly discernible also in Asia Minor.

Prosperity.Asia Minor, especially in its anterior portion, was one of the richest domains of the great Roman state. It is true that the misgovernment of the republic, the disasters of the Mithradatic time thereby produced, thereafter the evil of piracy, and lastly the many years of civil war which had financially affected few provinces so severely as these, had doubtless so utterly disorganised the means of the communities and of individuals there, that Augustus resorted to the extreme expedient of striking off all claims of debt; all the Asiatics, with the exception of the Rhodians, made use of this dangerous remedy. But the peaceful government which again set in made up for much. Not everywhere—the islands of the Aegean Sea, for example, never thereafter revived—but in most places, already when Augustus died, the wounds as well as the remedies were forgotten; and in this state the land remained for three centuries down to the epoch of the Gothic wars. The sums at which the towns of Asia Minor were assessed, and which they themselves, certainly under control of the governor, had to allocate and raise, formed one of the most considerable sources of income for the imperial exchequer. How the burden of taxation stood related to the ability of the taxed to pay, we are unable to ascertain; but permanent overburdening in the strict sense is not compatible with the circumstances in which we find the land down to the middle of the third century. The remissness of the government, still more perhaps than its intentional forbearance, may have kept within bounds the fiscal restriction of traffic and the application of a tax–screw which was inconvenient not merely for the taxed. In great calamities, particularly on occasion of the earthquakes which under Tiberius fearfully devastated twelve flourishing cities of Asia, especially Sardis, and under Pius a number of Carian and Lycian towns and the islands of Cos and Rhodes, private and above all imperial help was rendered with great liberality, and bestowed upon the natives of Asia Minor the full blessing of a great state—the collective guarantee of all for all. The construction of roads, which the Romans had taken in hand on the first erection of the province of Asia by Manius Aquillius (iii.59)iii.56., was seriously prosecuted during the imperial period in Asia Minor only where larger garrisons were stationed, particularly in Cappadocia and the neighbouring Galatia, after Vespasian had instituted a legionary camp on the middle Euphrates.253 In the other provinces not much was done for it, partly, doubtless, in consequence of the laxity of the senatorial government; wherever roads were here constructed on the part of the state, it was done on imperial ordinance.254

This prosperity of Asia Minor was not the work of a government of superior insight and energetic activity. The political institutions, the incitements of trade and commerce, the initiative in literature and art belong throughout Asia Minor to the old free towns or to the Attalids. What the Roman government gave to the land, was essentially the permanence of a state of peace, the toleration of inward prosperity, the absence of that governing wisdom which regards every sound pair of arms and every saved piece of money as rightfully subservient to its immediate aims—negative virtues of personages far from prominent, but often more conducive to the common weal than the great deeds of the self–constituted guardians of mankind.

Trade and commerce.The prosperity of Asia Minor was in beautiful equipoise, dependent as much on agriculture as on industry and commerce. The favours of nature were bestowed in richest measure, especially on the regions of the coast; and there are many evidences with how laborious diligence, even under more difficult circumstances, every at all useable piece of ground was turned to account, e.g. in the rocky valley of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia by the citizens of Selga. The products of the industry of Asia Minor are too numerous and too manifold to be dwelt upon in detail;255 we may mention that the immense pastures of the interior, with their flocks of sheep and goats, made Asia Minor the headquarters of woollen manufactures and of weaving generally—it suffices to recall the Milesian and the Galatian, that is, the Angora, wool, the Attalic gold–embroideries, the cloths prepared in the workshops of Phrygian Laodicea after the Nervian, that is the Flemish, style. It is well–known that an insurrection had almost broken out in Ephesus because the goldsmiths dreaded injury to their sale of sacred images from the new Christian faith. In Philadelphia, a considerable town of Lydia, we know the names of two out of the seven districts: they are those of the wool–weavers and the shoemakers. Probably there is here brought to light what in the case of the other towns is hidden under older and more genteel names, that the more considerable towns of Asia included throughout not merely a multitude of labourers, but also a numerous manufacturing population.

The money–dealing and traffic were in Asia Minor dependent chiefly on its own products. The great foreign import and export trade of Syria and Egypt was in the main excluded, though from the eastern lands various articles were introduced into Asia Minor, e.g. a considerable number of slaves through the Galatian traders.256 But, if the Roman merchants were to be found here apparently in every large and small town, even at places like Ilium and Assus in Mysia, Prymnessus and Traianopolis in Phrygia, in such numbers that their associations were in the habit of taking part along with the town’s burgesses in public acts; if in Hierapolis, in the interior of Phrygia, a manufacturer (???ast??) caused it to be inscribed on his tomb that he had in his lifetime sailed seventy–two times round Cape Malea to Italy, and a Roman poet describes the merchant of the capital who hastens to the port, in order not to let his business–friend from Cibyra, not far distant from Hierapolis, fall into the hands of rivals, there is thus opened up a glimpse into a stirring manufacturing and mercantile life not merely at the seaports. Language also testifies to the constant intercourse with Italy; among the Latin words that became current in Asia Minor not a few proceed from such intercourse, as indeed in Ephesus even the guild of the wool–weavers gives itself a Latin name.257 Teachers of all sorts and physicians came especially from this quarter to Italy and the other lands of the Latin tongue, and not merely gained often considerable wealth, but also brought it back to their native place; among those to whom the towns of Asia Minor owe buildings or endowments, the physicians who had become rich,258 and literati, occupy a prominent position. Lastly, the emigration of the great families to Italy affected Asia Minor less and later than the West; it was easier for people from Vienna and Narbo to transplant themselves to the capital of the empire than from the Greek towns; nor was the government in the earlier period quite inclined to bring the municipals of mark from Asia Minor to the court, and to introduce them into the Roman aristocracy.

Literary activity.If we leave out of view the marvellous period of early bloom, in which the Ionic epos and the Aeolic lyric poetry, the beginnings of historical composition and of philosophy, of plastic art and of painting, had their rise on these shores, in science as in the practice of art the great age of Asia Minor was that of the Attalids, which faithfully cherished the memory of that still greater epoch. If Smyrna showed divine honours to its citizen Homer, struck coins for him and named them after him, there was thus expressed the feeling, which dominated all Ionia and all Asia Minor, that divine art had come down to earth in Hellas generally, and in Ionia in particular

Instruction.How early and to what extent elementary instruction was an object of public care in these regions is clearly shown by a decree of the town Teos in Lydia259 concerning it. According to this, after the gift of capital by a rich citizen had provided the town with means, there was to be instituted in future, alongside of the inspector of gymnastics (???as??????), also the honorary office of a school–inspector (pa?d?????). Further, there were to be appointed three paid teachers of writing with salaries, according to the three classes respectively, of 600, 550, and 500 drachmae, in order that all the free boys and girls might be instructed in writing; likewise two gymnastic masters, each with a salary of 500 drachmae; a teacher of music with a salary of 700 drachmae, who should instruct the boys of the last two years at school and the youths that had left school in playing the lute and the cithara; a boxing master with 300 drachmae, and a teacher for archery and throwing of the spear with a pay of 250 drachmae. The teachers of writing and music are to hold a public examination of the scholars annually in the town–hall. Such was the Asia Minor of the time of the Attalids; but the Roman republic did not continue their work. It did not cause its victories over the Galatians to be immortalised by the chisel, and the Pergamene library went shortly before the battle of Actium to Alexandria; many of the best germs perished in the devastation of the Mithradatic and the civil wars. It was only in the time of the empire that the care of art, and above all of literature, revived at least outwardly with the prosperity of Asia Minor. To a primacy proper, such as was possessed by Athens as a university–town, by Alexandria in the sphere of scientific research, and by the frivolous capital of Syria for the drama and the ballet, none of the numerous cities of Asia Minor could lay claim in any direction whatever; but general culture was probably nowhere more widely diffused and more influential. It must have been very early the custom in Asia to grant to teachers and physicians exemption from the civic offices and functions that involved expense; to this province was directed the edict of the emperor Pius (p.329), which, in order to set limits to an exemption that was evidently very burdensome for the city finances, prescribes maximal numbers for it: e.g. allows towns of the first class to grant this immunity to the extent of ten physicians, five instructors in rhetoric, and five in grammar.

Addresses of the sophists.The position of Asia Minor as occupying the first rank in the literary world of the imperial period was based on the system of the rhetors, or, according to the expression later in use, the sophists of this epoch—a system which we moderns cannot easily realise. The place of written works, which pretty nearly ceased to have any significance, was taken by the public discourse, somewhat of the nature of our modern university and academic addresses, eternally producing itself anew and preserved only by way of exception, once heard and applauded, and then for ever forgotten. The contents were furnished frequently by the occasion of the birthday of the emperor, the arrival of the governor, or any analogous event, public or private; still more frequently without any occasion they talked at large on everything, which was not practical and not instructive. The political address had no existence for this age at all, not even in the Roman senate. The forensic speech was no longer for the Greeks the goal of oratory, but stood alongside of the speech for speaking’s sake as a neglected and plebeian sister, to which a master of that art might occasionally condescend. From poetry, philosophy, history, there was borrowed whatever admitted of being dealt with by way of common–place, while these all themselves, little cultivated in general, least of all in Asia Minor, and still less esteemed, languish by the side of the pure art of words and beneath its infection. The great past of the nation is regarded by these orators, so to speak, as their special property; they reverence and treat Homer in some measure as the Rabbins do the books of Moses, and even in religion they study the most zealous orthodoxy. These discourses are sustained by all the allowed and unallowed resources of the theatre, by the art of gesticulation and of modulation of the voice, by the magnificence of the orator’s costume, by the artifices of the virtuoso and the methods of partisanship, by competition, by the claque. To the boundless self–conceit of these word–artists corresponds the lively sympathetic interest of the public—which is but little inferior to that felt for race–horses—and the expression given to this sympathy quite after the fashion of the theatre; and the frequency with which such exhibitions were brought before the cultured in the larger places entitles them, just like the theatre, to rank everywhere among the customary doings of urban life. If perhaps our understanding of this extinct phenomenon may be somewhat helped by connecting it with the impression called forth in our most susceptible great cities by the discourses of their learned bodies, as they fall due, there is yet wholly wanting in the modern state of things what was by far the main matter in the ancient world—the didactic element, and the connection of the aimless public discourse with the higher instruction of youth. If the latter at present, as we say, educates the boy of the cultured class to be a professor of philology, it educated him then to be a professor of eloquence, and, in fact, of this sort of eloquence. For the school–training conduced more and more to equip the boy for holding just such discourses, as we have now described, on his own part, if possible, in two languages; and, whoever had finished the course with profit, applauded in similar performances the recollection of his own time at school.

Asia Minor leads the fashion.This production embraced East and West, but Asia Minor stood in the van and led the fashion. When in the age of Augustus the school–rhetoric gained a footing in the Latin instruction of the youth of the capital, its chief pillars alongside of Italians and Spaniards were two natives of Asia Minor, Arellius Fuscus and Cestius Pius. At that same place, where the grave forensic address maintained its ground in the better imperial period by the side of this parasite, an ingenious advocate of the Flavian age points to the enormous gulf which separates Nicetes of Smyrna and the other rhetoricians applauded in Ephesus and Mytilene from Aeschines and Demosthenes. By far the most, and most noted, of the famous rhetors of this sort are from the coast of western Asia. We have already observed how much the supply of schoolmasters for the whole empire told upon the finances of the towns of Asia Minor. In the course of the imperial period the number and the estimation of these sophists were constantly on the increase, and they gained ground more and more in the west. The cause of this lies partly doubtless in the changed attitude of the government, which in the second century—especially after the Hadrianic epoch exhibiting not so much a Hellenising as a bad cosmopolitan type—stood less averse to Greek and Oriental habits than in the first; but chiefly in the ever increasing general diffusion of higher culture, and the rapidly enlarging number of institutes for the higher instruction of youth. The sophistic system thus belongs, at all events especially, to Asia Minor, and particularly to the Asia Minor of the second and third centuries; only there may not be found in this literary primacy any special peculiarity of these Greeks and of this epoch, or even a national characteristic. The sophistic system appears everywhere alike, in Smyrna and Athens as in Rome and Carthage; the masters of eloquence were sent out like patterns of lamps, and the manufacture was organised everywhere in the same way, Greek or Latin, according to desire, the supply being raised in accordance with the need. But no doubt those Greek districts, which took precedence in prosperity and culture, furnished this article of export of the best quality and in greatest quantity; this holds true of Asia Minor for the times of Sulla and Cicero no less than for those of Hadrian and the Antonines.

Galenus.Here, however, all is not shadow. Those same regions possess, not indeed among the professional sophists, but yet among the literati of a different type, who are still found there in comparatively large numbers, the best representatives of Hellenism which this epoch has at all to show, the teacher of philosophy, Dio of Prusa in Bithynia, under Vespasian and Trajan, and the medical man Galenus of Pergamus, imperial physician in ordinary at the courts of Marcus and Severus. What is particularly pleasing in the case of Galen is the polished manner of the man of the world and the courtier, in connection with a general and philosophical culture, such as is frequently conspicuous in the physicians of this period.260

Dio of Prusa.In purity of sentiment and clear grasp of the position of things, the Bithynian Dio is nowise inferior to the scholar of Chaeronea; in plastic power, in elegance and apt vigour of speech, in earnest meaning underlying lightness of form, in practical energy, he is superior to him. The best of his writings—the fancies of the ideal Hellene before the invention of the city and of money; the appeal to the Rhodians, the only surviving representatives of genuine Hellenism; the description of the Hellenes of his time in the solitude of Olbia as in the luxury of Nicomedia and of Tarsus; the exhortations to the individual as to an earnest conduct of life, and to all as to their keeping together in unity—form the best evidence that even of the Hellenism of Asia Minor in the time of the empire the word of the poet holds good: “The sun even in setting is ever the same.”

END OF VOL. I.

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