~73 min read • Updated Mar 26, 2026
Roman Egypt
Egypt should have been the happiest country; for not only did the Nile water it for free, but this land was the most self-sufficient in the Mediterranean basin in every respect — rich in cereals and fruits, yielding three harvests a year; unmatched in industry, exporting goods to a hundred countries; and rarely disturbed by foreign or internal wars. Nevertheless, perhaps because of these very factors, Josephus says: “Apparently the Egyptians have never, even for a single day, enjoyed liberty.” Their wealth tempted others, and their semi-tropical lethargy allowed despots and conquerors to rule them for fifty centuries, one after another.
Rome did not count Egypt among the conquered provinces, but considered it the emperor’s personal property, and administered it through a prefect directly responsible to the emperor. Native officials of Greek origin stood at the head of the three divisions of the country — Lower Egypt, Middle Egypt, Upper Egypt — and its thirty-six districts; and Greek remained the official language. The Romans made no effort to urbanize the population, for Egypt’s main function was to be Rome’s granary. Vast estates were taken from the priests and given to Roman or Alexandrian capitalists to be managed under the latifundia system and cultivated by peasants accustomed to ruthless exploitation. Ptolemaic state capitalism continued in another form. The smallest agricultural matters were determined and controlled by the government: bureaucrats, whose numbers increased daily, decided what grains and how much should be sown, determined the necessary seed each year, received the harvest in state warehouses, exported Rome’s quota, collected the grain tax, and sold the surplus in the market. Wheat and flax, from sowing to sale, were under state monopoly. Brick production, perfume, and sesame oil were also, at least in the Fayum, a state monopoly. Private enterprise was permitted in other fields, but subject to strict regulations. All mineral resources belonged to the state, and the extraction of marble and precious stones was a state privilege.
Domestic industries, which had existed in Egypt from ancient times, later flourished more in the Ptolemaic cities of Memphis, Thebes (Theba), Oxyrhynchus, Sais, Bubastis, Naucratis, and Heliopolis. In Alexandria, this bustling capital, domestic industry accounted for half the people’s activity. The papermaking industry apparently reached the capitalist stage, for Strabo tells how the owners of papyrus plantations limited their production to raise its price. Priests used temple precincts for installing their handicraft factories, and produced fine textiles for themselves and for sale. There were not many slaves in Egypt employed in anything but household work, for free workers barely earned more than enough for subsistence. Workers sometimes struck (“anachoresis” = withdrawal) by stopping work and sitting in the temples until hunger or promises calmed them. Sometimes when their wages were increased, prices also rose, and consequently no change occurred in their condition. Guilds were permitted, but guilds were essentially for merchants or managers of enterprises. The government used their existence for collecting taxes and organizing compulsory labor in canals, dams, and other institutions.
Internal trade was lively but slow. Roads were unsuitable, and for land transport men, donkeys, and camels were used. At that time the camel in Africa was used as a pack animal instead of the horse. Most trade was carried out by inland waterways. A large canal fifty meters wide, whose excavation was completed in Trajan’s time, connected the Mediterranean through the Nile and the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. From the Red Sea ports of Arsinoë, Myos Hormos, and Berenice ships sailed daily to Africa or India. The banking system, which financed production and trade, was completely under government supervision. Each district had a state bank that handled tax collection and the safekeeping of public funds. Farmers, industrialists, and merchants could borrow from the state, from priests managing temple treasuries, or from private money changers. Every product, every enterprise, every sale, export and import, even tombs and funerals, was taxed. In addition, occasionally an extra head tax was collected from the poor and from the rich, according to the custom of paying public service costs, a sum was levied. From Augustus’s time to Trajan’s, the condition of Egypt, or at least of its ruling classes, was good; after this period of prosperity, the country became exhausted and helpless under the pressure of endless taxes and tribute and the lethargy resulting from a tightly controlled economy.
Except for Alexandria and Naucratis, the rest of Egypt, in isolation and calm, remained Egyptian. The process of Romanization did not extend beyond the mouths of the Nile. Even Alexandria, the greatest Greek city, in the second century A.D. increasingly took on the character, language, and flavor of an Eastern metropolis. Of Egypt’s 8,500,000 inhabitants, 800,000 lived in the capital (in 1930 its population was 573,000), and in this respect it ranked second after Rome. In industry and commerce it also led the entire empire. In a letter attributed to Hadrian it is written that in Alexandria everyone is busy, everyone has a profession; even the crippled and blind find work. There, among thousands of other goods, glass, paper, and cloth were produced on a large scale. Alexandria was the center of clothing and fashion of the age, and prepared models and ready-made garments. The length of its great harbor pier was fourteen kilometers. Its merchant fleet had created an extensive trading network from this port that covered many seas. Alexandria was also a center of tourism, equipped with inns, guides, and interpreters for travelers who came to see the pyramids and the magnificent temples of Thebes. Its main street, twenty-two meters wide and five kilometers long, was adorned with columns, arches, and interesting shops offering the finest products of the industries and crafts of antiquity. At many crossroads there were squares called plateiai, meaning “broad ways,” from which the Italian word piazza (in English plaza and police) is also derived. Magnificent buildings adorned Alexandria’s great streets: a vast theater, an emporion or exchange, temples of Poseidon, Caesar, and Saturn, a Serapeum or famous temple of Serapis, and a complex of university buildings known worldwide as the Museum, the abode of the Muses. The city was divided into five districts, one of which contained almost exclusively the palaces, gardens, and administrative buildings of the Ptolemies, now used by the Roman prefect. The city’s founder, Alexander the Great, was kept in a beautiful tomb in this very place, mummified in honey and in a crystal coffin.
Elements from almost all Mediterranean nations, whether Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Italian, Arab, Phoenician, Iranian, Ethiopian, Syrian, Libyan, Cilician, Scythian, Indian, or Nubian, were found among Alexandria’s population. Together they formed a noisy and fiery mixture of aggressive and disorderly men, very intelligent in thought and mind, witty and inconsiderate, shameless and bold in speech, skeptical yet superstitious, morally unrestrained, cheerful, and passionate lovers of theater, music, and public contests. Dio Chrysostom likens life in Alexandria to “a perpetual festival … of dancers, shouters, and killers.” At night the canals were full of the uproar of night revelers who traveled eight kilometers in special boats to the resort town of Canopus on the city’s outskirts. Music contests, as much as horse races, excited the people and made them applaud.
If we accept Philo’s words, forty percent of Alexandria’s population were Jewish. Most Alexandrian Jews worked in industry and commerce, and lived very poor lives. Many were also merchants and shopkeepers, and a few lent money, while some were rich enough to occupy enviable government positions. These Jews, who initially lived in one of the five districts, later became so numerous that they occupied another district as well. They had their own laws and elders, and Rome preserved the privilege granted by the Ptolemies that they were not required to observe any regulations contrary to their religion. The Jews prided themselves on their magnificent central synagogue, which was a very large colonnaded basilica. This synagogue was so vast that a series of signs had to be used so that listeners too far from the pulpit (who could not hear the rabbi’s words) could give the appropriate response to the rabbi at the right moment. As Josephus writes, the moral life of the Jews was exemplary compared to the sexual license of the “Gentile” society. They enjoyed active intellectual culture, and especially contributed significantly to the progress of philosophy, historiography, and science. Racial hostility repeatedly plunged this city into turmoil. In Josephus’s treatise Against Apion (an anti-Jewish leader), we find all the causes, all the arguments, and all the legends that still to the present day disturb relations between Jews and non-Jews. In A.D. 38, a group of Greek commoners seized the synagogues and insistently demanded that a statue of Caligula as a god be placed in each of them. Avillius Flaccus, the Roman prefect, revoked the title of Alexandrian citizenship from the Jews, and gave those living outside the original Jewish quarter a few days to return to that quarter. As soon as the deadline passed, the Greek commoners set fire to four hundred Jewish houses, killed or beat many Jews outside the quarter. Thirty-eight members of the Jewish gerousia (council of elders or senate) were arrested and flogged in a theater before the people. Thousands of Jews lost their homes, property, work, and savings. Flaccus’s successor referred the matter to the emperor, and two separate delegations, consisting of five Greeks and five Jews, went to Rome to defend their claims before Caligula (A.D. 40). This emperor died before he could give his opinion. Claudius restored the rights of the Alexandrian Jews, confirmed their title of citizenship, and strictly ordered both groups to maintain peace and calm.
Philo
The head of the Jewish delegation sent to Caligula was the philosopher Philo, brother of the superintendent of Jewish export trade in Alexandria. According to Eusebius, Philo came from an old priestly family. This is almost the only thing we know about his life; but his erudition and piety are reflected in the numerous works he wrote to make the Jewish religion known to the Greek world. Philo, raised in a religious environment, was deeply loyal to his people, yet he was also fascinated by Greek philosophy. He made it the goal of his life to reconcile the Jewish scriptures and customs with Greek thought and, above all, with the “most sacred” philosophy of Plato. For this purpose, he adopted the principle that all events, persons, rites, and laws mentioned in the Old Testament have, in addition to their literal meaning, an allegorical meaning as well, symbolizing certain ethical or psychological truths. With the help of this method he could prove anything. He wrote carelessly in Hebrew, but in Greek so excellently that his admirers said: “Plato writes like Philo.”
Philo was more a theologian than a philosopher; he was a mystic whose extreme asceticism anticipated the asceticism of Plotinus and the spirit of the Middle Ages. In Philo’s opinion, God is the essence of existence, incorporeal, eternal, and indescribable. Reason can perceive His existence, but cannot attribute any quality to Him, for every quality is itself a kind of limitation. The representation of God in human form results from yielding to human sensory imagination. God is everywhere. “Where can one find a place where God is not,” but God is not everything: matter is also eternal and ancient, but until it is mixed with divine power it has neither life, nor motion, nor form. In creating the world by shaping matter, and to establish a relationship with man, God employed an army of intermediary beings that in Jewish rites are called “angels,” in Greek rites “gods,” and in Plato’s philosophy “ideas.” Philo says: “These powers may generally be personified, but in reality they exist only in God’s mind as divine thoughts and powers.”
These powers together constitute what the Stoics called the Logos or the divine creative and guiding reason of the world. Philo, oscillating between philosophy and theology, and between idea and human form, sometimes considers the Logos as a person; in a poetic interpretation, he calls it “God’s first creature,” the son of God from the virgin Wisdom, and says that God revealed Himself to man through the Logos. Since the soul is a part of God, through reason it can attain a mystical vision, not of God Himself, but of the Logos. Perhaps if we could free ourselves from the bondage of matter and the senses, and with severe asceticism and prolonged contemplation become a pure spirit for a moment, we might find it possible to see God Himself in a moment of ecstasy.
Philo’s Logos is one of the most influential and penetrating ideas in the history of human thought. Its antecedents are clear in Heraclitus, Plato, and the Stoics. Philo was probably familiar with the new Jewish literature, which had personified God’s wisdom as a distinct creator of the world, and apparently was influenced by the lines of the Book of Proverbs (8:22-8), where Wisdom says: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” Philo was a contemporary of Jesus, apparently never heard anything about him, yet without knowing it he helped shape Christian theology. The rabbis objected to his allegorical interpretations and thought it could serve as an excuse for neglecting complete obedience to the Law; they were suspicious of the doctrine based on the Logos and thought it harmed monotheism; and Philo’s fascination with Greek philosophy was seen as a threat to the assimilation of Jewish culture into other cultures, the corruption of the race, and thus the destruction of the Jews scattered throughout the world. But the Church Fathers looked with wonder at this Jew’s ascetic revelation, made abundant use of his allegorical principles to answer Jewish critics, and like the Gnostics and Neoplatonists accepted the mystical vision of God as the height of human aspirations. Philo had tried to build a bridge between Greek and Jewish culture. From the viewpoint of the Jewish religion he failed in this aim, but from the historical viewpoint he succeeded; and the result is the first chapter of the Gospel of John.
The Progress of Science
Alexandria was the unrivaled pioneer of science in the Hellenistic world. Claudius Ptolemy must be ranked among the most influential astronomers of antiquity; for, despite Copernicus, the Ptolemaic system still survives in the world. This scholar was born in Ptolemais on the Nile and his name derives from there. He spent most of his life in Alexandria and there from A.D. 127 to 151 engaged in observation and study. He is remembered mainly for rejecting Aristarchus’s theory that the earth revolves around the sun. This eternal error of Ptolemy is contained in a work called The Mathematical Arrangement of the Stars. The Arabs called this work Almagest, derived from the Greek superlative meaning “the greatest”; this title was corrupted in the Middle Ages into Almagest, by which name it became known in history. This work ruled the heavens until Copernicus turned the world upside down. Nevertheless, Ptolemy claimed nothing more than to organize and arrange the writings and observations of earlier astronomers, especially Hipparchus. He pictures the universe as a sphere that revolves daily around an earth that is also spherical but motionless. Although this theory may seem strange to us (though it is not clear what a future Copernicus will make of our present Ptolemies), this geocentric hypothesis allowed the calculation of the positions of the stars and planets with greater precision than belief in a heliocentric system could have allowed at that time. In addition, Ptolemy proposed a theory called eccentrics to explain the orbits of the planets, and discovered the periodic irregularity of the moon’s motion due to the sun’s gravitational force. He measured the distance from the moon to the earth by parallax, which is still used, and estimated it at fifty-nine times the earth’s radius, which is almost equal to our usual estimate; but Ptolemy, like Posidonius, knew the earth’s diameter to be less than it is.
Just as the Almagest finalized ancient astronomy, Ptolemy’s geographical researches also summarized and collected ancient knowledge about the earth’s surface. Here too his precise tables of longitudes and latitudes of the world’s major cities were incorrect, because they were based on Posidonius’s incorrect research on the dimensions of the world; but Christopher Columbus owed his belief in the possibility of sailing to India in a reasonable time by sailing westward to this encouraging error that Ptolemy transmitted. Ptolemy was the first to use the terms “parallel” and “meridian” in geography; and in his maps he successfully projected a spherical surface onto a flat map. But he was more a mathematician than an astronomer or geographer. His work was essentially to establish mathematical formulas. He divided the earth’s radius into sixty parts of first minutes, which are our ordinary “minutes,” and each of these minutes into sixty parts of second minutes, which are our present “seconds.”
Although Ptolemy made many mistakes, he had the nature, patience, and perseverance of a true scholar. He tried to base all his inferences on observation, observations that were rarely his own. He performed many experiments in one field: his work called Optics, which is a study of the refraction of light, has been called “the most important experimental research of antiquity.” Interestingly, this man—who was the greatest astronomer, geographer, and mathematician of his time—also has a work called Tetrabiblos or “Four Books” on the dominance of the stars over human life.
At the same time, a little Archimedes was giving the ancient world a new possibility to create an industrial revolution. This inventor and excellent author, whose name we know only as Hero, published many treatises on mathematics and physics in this age in Alexandria, some of whose Arabic translations survive. He explicitly announces to his readers that the propositions and inventions he presents to them are not necessarily his own, but collections of several centuries. In a treatise called Dioptra he describes an instrument similar to a theodolite and establishes principles for measuring the position that allow one to measure, by estimation, the distances of points that are inaccessible. In Mechanica, another of his treatises, he explains the uses and combinations of simple tools such as the wheel, axle, pulley, wedge, and screw. In Pneumatica he examines atmospheric pressure through seventy-eight experiments. These experiments often have a pleasant magical character; for example, he shows that if we have a vessel divided by a wall into two parts and each part has a hole at the top and the vessel has a common outlet hole at the bottom, if we fill these two parts with water and wine, by closing each of the air holes at the top of the vessel, water or wine flows from the outlet hole.
These amusements led him to construct a pressure pump, a fire-engine pump with piston and valve, a water clock, a water organ, and a steam engine. In this steam engine, steam from boiling water reached a hollow sphere through a pipe and came out from oblique holes opposite each other, causing the hollow sphere to rotate in the opposite direction of the steam’s exit. Hero’s playful inclination prevented him from perfecting this invention and applying it in industry. He used steam to keep a balloon in the air, to make an artificial bird sing, and to make a statue blow a trumpet. In a treatise called Catoptrica he studies the reflection of light and shows how mirrors can be made with which one can see behind oneself or upside down, with three eyes, double vision, and so on. He taught conjurers how to perform tricks with hidden devices. By putting a coin in the slot of a fountain, he made water flow from it. He built a hidden machine that poured heated water into a bucket and the gradual increase in the weight of this bucket, with the help of several pulleys, opened the doors of a temple. With these and hundreds of other works, Hero succeeded in being a miracle worker, but in return he could no longer become the James Watt of his time.
Alexandria had long been the main center of medical education. Famous medical schools existed in Marseilles, Lyon, Saragossa, Athens, Antioch, Cos, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum, but students of medicine came to Alexandria from all provinces. Even in the fourth century A.D., when Egypt was declining, Ammianus Marcellinus writes: “To confirm and attest to a physician’s skill, it is enough to say that he was trained in Alexandria.” Specialization was progressing, and Philostratus (c. 225) writes: “No one can be a general practitioner. Specialists are needed for wounds, fevers, eye diseases, and tuberculosis.” In Alexandria the dead were dissected. It is said that even vivisection was performed there. Surgery apparently in the first century A.D. in Alexandria was as advanced as anywhere in Europe before the nineteenth century. There were also not few women physicians. One of them, Metrodora, wrote a detailed treatise on uterine diseases. The medical history of this age is adorned with great names: Rufus of Ephesus, who described the anatomy of the eye, distinguished motor nerves from sensory nerves, and improved the method of stopping bleeding in surgery; Marinus the Alexandrian, famous for operations he performed on the skull; and Antyllus, the greatest ophthalmologist of his time. Dioscorides of Cilicia (A.D. 40–90) published a treatise called On Medicinal Plants and described six hundred medicinal plants so practically and excellently that this book remained the main reference in its subject until the Renaissance. This scholar prescribed the use of contraceptive coverings to prevent pregnancy. And his prescription of dried wine for producing anesthesia in surgery succeeded in 1874.
Soranus of Ephesus, around A.D. 116, published a treatise on women’s diseases, childbirth, and postnatal care; this work, among the surviving medical works of antiquity, holds a place second only to the Hippocratic corpus and Galen’s works. In this book he describes an instrument for examining the vagina and a special obstetric chair; he gives a brilliant description of the uterus; he suggests modern dietary regimens and practical recommendations such as washing the newborn’s eyes with oil; he offers fifty methods for preventing pregnancy, most of them by placing medicine in the vagina; and, unlike Hippocrates, he considers abortion permissible if the mother’s life is in danger. Soranus was the greatest gynecologist of antiquity. From his time to Ambroise Paré, that is, for fifteen centuries, nothing was added to his instructions. If all forty of his treatises had survived, this man might have ranked with Galen.
The most famous physician of that age was the son of an architect from Pergamum who named his child Galen (meaning calm and peace-loving), hoping that this child would not follow his mother. At the age of fourteen this boy found his first love in philosophy and until the end of his life could not escape its dangerous snare. At seventeen he turned to medicine and studied this science in Cilicia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, and Alexandria (the characteristic itinerary of students of the time). He became a surgeon in the gladiatorial school of Pergamum and practiced medicine for a while in Rome (A.D. 164–168). His successful treatments attracted many wealthy patients, and his lectures drew distinguished listeners. He became so famous that letters were written to him from all provinces asking for medical advice, and he sent his prescriptive opinions confidently by post. His kind father, who had forgotten why he had named him Galen (calm–peace-loving), advised him not to join any party or religious sect and always to speak the truth. Galen followed his father’s advice and exposed the ignorance and money-loving of many Roman physicians; as a result, within two years he was forced to flee from his enemies. Marcus Aurelius recalled him to take charge of treating and caring for young Commodus (A.D. 169) and tried to take him with him to the war against the Marcomanni; but Galen was clever enough to return to Rome very soon. After that we have no information about him except from his works.
The number of Galen’s writings is almost as great as Aristotle’s. Of the five hundred volumes attributed to him, one hundred and eighteen survive, totaling twenty thousand pages and covering almost all branches of medicine and several philosophical fields. These writings today have little medical value, but among them there is diverse information and evidence that Galen had a lively, strong, and critical mind. His passion for philosophy gave him the bad habit of drawing broad inferences from limited inductions. His belief in his own knowledge and ability often led him to a dogmatism incompatible with the truly scientific spirit, and his authority as an authority preserved important errors for centuries. Nevertheless, he was a precise observer and more experimental than all ancient physicians. He says: “I confess that throughout my life I have suffered from one disease, which is not to trust any matter … until I have tested it myself as much as possible.” Since the Roman government prohibited the dissection of living or dead humans, Galen dissected animal carcasses and also living animals. Sometimes, in the case of human anatomy, he drew conclusions from the study of monkeys, dogs, cows, and pigs that were too hasty.
Galen, despite his limitations, contributed more than any other expert of antiquity to the progress of anatomy. He described the bones of the skull and spine, the milk ducts, the muscular network, the ducts of the sublingual and jaw glands, and the heart valves with precision. He showed that the heart, when detached, can continue to beat outside the body. He proved that, contrary to what the Alexandrian school had taught for four years, blood flows in the arteries, not air. He almost anticipated Harvey’s theory in antiquity. He believed that most blood goes and returns through the veins and the rest mixes with air from the lungs and flows in the arteries. Galen was the first to describe the nature of breathing, and brilliantly guessed that the main element of the air we breathe is the same as that active in combustion. He distinguished pleurisy from pneumonia, described and diagnosed aneurysm (dilation of artery walls), cancer, and tuberculosis, and determined that tuberculosis has an infectious nature. Above all, he founded experimental neurology. He performed the first experimental divisions of the spinal cord, specified the sensory and motor functions of each part, discovered the existence of the sympathetic nervous system, recognized seven pairs of the twelve cranial nerves, and by deliberately cutting the laryngeal nerve caused muteness to occur. He showed that injuries to one side of the brain cause disturbances in the other side of the body. He cured the numbness of the fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand of the sophist Pausanias by stimulating the brachial plexus that controls the root of this nerve. He was so skilled in diagnosing disease symptoms that he preferred to say what the patient’s illness was without asking the patient. He often resorted to diet, exercise, and massage, but he was also expert in pharmacology and traveled extensively to obtain rare medicines. He condemned the prescription of urine or feces that some of his contemporaries still paid attention to. For colic he prescribed dried ginger, put goat dung on glands and boils, and considered theriac the cure for many diseases—this theriac was the famous medicine that Mithridates the Great used as an antidote, Marcus Aurelius ate it every day, and it contained snake meat.
What damages Galen as an experimenter are his hasty theories. He mocked magic and sorcery and instead believed in inspiration in dreams and thought that the moon’s quadratures affect patients. He adopted Hippocrates’ theory of the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile), added a touch of Pythagoras’ theory of the four elements (earth, air, water, fire) to it, and tried to reduce all diseases to a disturbance in the balance of these humors or elements. Galen was a staunch vitalist, and believed that a vital breath or spirit pervades all parts of the body and sets them to work. Several physicians had made mechanistic interpretations in biology. For example, Asclepiades believed that physiology should be considered a branch of physics. Galen rejected his opinion and said that a machine is nothing but the sum of its component parts, whereas in a living being the parts must be under the supervision and purposeful dominance of the body as a whole. Just as only purpose can explain the origin, structure, and function of organs, so the world cannot be understood except as the manifestation and instrument of a divine plan. Of course God acts only through natural laws, there are no miracles, and the best manifestation of God’s existence is nature.
Galen’s theology and monotheism caused him to be favored by Christians and then Muslims. Almost all his writings were lost in the turmoil of the barbarian invasions in Europe, but scholars in the East preserved them, and from the eleventh century onward they were translated from Arabic into Latin. After that Galen became the undisputed authority and the Aristotle of medicine.
The last creative period of Greek science ended with Galen and Ptolemy. After that, experiment and experience were abandoned, and immutable principles prevailed; mathematics was confined to repeating geometric problems, biology to Aristotle, and natural sciences to Pliny. Medicine also stagnated until Arab and Jewish physicians in the Middle Ages revived this noblest branch of science.
Poets of the Desert
Arabia extends along the Red Sea and is separated from Egypt by this sea. Neither the Pharaohs, nor the Achaemenids, nor the Seleucids, nor the Ptolemies, nor the Romans could conquer this mysterious peninsula. In desert Arabia only nomadic Arabs lived, but in the southwest, a chain of mountains and streams flowing from these mountains gave Arabia Felix (Yemen) a milder climate and better vegetation. In these remote corners of the country lay the small kingdom of Sheba, called Sheba in the “Torah.” This land was so rich in frankincense, myrrh, pearls, cinnamon, aloes, spikenard, gum, and precious stones that its inhabitants were able to build cities with magnificent temples, palaces, and porticoes in Ma’rib and elsewhere. Arab merchants not only sold their country’s products at exorbitant prices, but also had significant commercial relations with southwestern Asia and by sea with Egypt, the Parthian country, and India. In 25 B.C., Augustus sent Aelius Gallus to annex this land to the empire. The Roman legions could not take Ma’rib and returned to Egypt with heavy losses due to disease and heat. Augustus was content with destroying the Arab port of Adana (Aden) and thereafter gained control of trade between Egypt and India.
The great trade highway to the north, which started from Ma’rib, passed through northwestern Arabia, that is, from the region formerly known as Stony Arabia or Arabia Petraea (its capital was Petra). The city of Petra (Al-Batra) was located about sixty-five kilometers south of Jerusalem. The name of this city itself was a ring of high, steep rocks that gave Petra a good strategic position in the middle. It was here that the Nabataean Arabs in the second century B.C. founded a kingdom that gradually became so rich from the income of caravan transit that it extended its power from Leuke Kome on the Red Sea to the eastern border of Palestine, and through Gerasa and Bostra to Damascus. In the reign of King Aretas IV (9 B.C.–A.D. 40), this country reached the height of its greatness. Petra became a Greek city whose language was Aramaic, whose art was Greek, and whose streets’ beauty and splendor were on a par with Alexandria. The most beautiful gigantic tombs, carved into the rocks outside the city, and simple yet powerful facades with double Corinthian columns, sometimes reaching thirty meters in height, belong to this period. After Trajan annexed Stony Arabia in A.D. 106, Bostra became the capital of Arabia and in its turn its architecture, a manifestation of wealth and power, developed. At this time Petra was declining because Bostra and Palmyra became the crossroads of desert caravans, and the great tombs turned into “night shelters for the herds of nomads.”
The most astonishing aspect of the vast Roman Empire was the multitude of populous cities. Never since that time has urbanization been so intense. Lucullus, Pompey, Caesar, Herod, and the Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors prided themselves on creating new cities and beautifying old ones. Thus, when traveling along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean from south to north, every thirty kilometers we encounter a city: Rafia (Rafah), Gaza, Ashkelon, Joppa (Jaffa), Apollonia, Samaria-Sebaste, and Caesarea. Although these cities were in the land of Palestine, half their inhabitants were Greek and their language, institutions, and culture were predominantly Greek and served as Greek bridgeheads for the pagan invasion of Judea. Herod spent vast sums to make Caesarea worthy of Caesar Augustus, after whom the city was named. He built a beautiful harbor, a magnificent temple, a theater, an amphitheater, “magnificent palaces and many buildings of white stone.” Other Greek cities were built more in the interior of Palestine, such as: Livias, Philadelphia, Gerasa (Jerash), and Gadara (Jedara). In Gerasa, along its main street, one hundred columns and the ruins of several temples, a theater, a bath, and an aqueduct still stand and testify to the flourishing of this city in the second century A.D.
Jedara, whose two surviving theaters still recall the Greek plays performed in them, was famous for its schools, teachers, and writers. It was here that, in the third century B.C., Menippus, the Cynic philosopher and satirist, lived and in his satires showed that, except for a just and honorable life, everything is vain; this philosopher became the model for Lucilius, Varro, and Horace. Here in the “Syrian Athens,” almost a hundred years before Christ, Meleager, the Anacreon of his time, wrote epigrams for beautiful women and graceful boys and wore out his pen with love:
Cup, bright, until on the sweet lips of Zenophila, this darling of love, it smiles.
How pleasant it would be if those red lips were on mine and drank my soul with a long kiss.
One of the sparks of his love, which soon faded, always shone in his memory in a special way—Heliodora, with whom he fell in love in Tyre.
I want to mix white violets with green myrtle leaves;
I want to mix narcissus with shining jasmines;
sweet saffron with blue hyacinth;
and then the rose, the true hostage of love;
may all these become a crown of beauty
and rest upon the delightful hair of my Heliodora.
Now “Hades has snatched her, and the earth has darkened the fresh-blooming flower of her. O earth, O mother, I beg you to press her with love in your bosom.”
Meleager made his name immortal by collecting a collection called Garland, which contained Greek elegies from the poems of Sappho to his own. This collection and similar others were combined with each other, causing the emergence of the Greek Anthology. In this anthology Greek jokes appear with their best and worst aspects. Sometimes smooth and polished like a jewel, and sometimes like an empty display. Gathering these four thousand “flowers” from their branches to make a withering garland was not wise. Some pieces recall great and forgotten men or famous statues, or a dead relative; others are, so to speak, poems written for tombstones, for example about a woman who died after giving birth to triplets with a lamenting tone: “After this, will women still want children?” Other flowers are arrows thrown at physicians, contractors, trainers, rebellious women, and deceived husbands; or a beggar is seen who is weak and comes to his senses with the smell of a penny; or a grammarian whose grandson repeatedly tells him that the noun has three genders; or a boxer who has stopped boxing, taken a wife, and receives far more blows than he endured in the boxing ring; or a dwarf whom a mosquito has lifted and who thinks he has been violated like Ganymede, a short satire “praising that famous woman who slept with only one man.” In some other verses, pleasures hidden in wine are praised, pleasures wiser than wisdom. A prayer poem praises the adulteress who, because of a shipwreck, went to the bottom of the sea in the arms of her lover. Some pieces are funeral songs inspired by pagan beliefs, and their subject is the shortness of life; others indicate Christian certainty and faith in a happy resurrection. Obviously, most of these poems praise the beauty of women and boys as well as the painful ecstasy of love. What literature later could say about the pain of love, concisely or at length, with themes far more delicate than those of the Elizabethan age, exists in these poems. Meleager makes a mosquito his messenger and commissions it to deliver a message to his beloved of the moment. And his fellow citizen, Philodemus, Cicero’s philosophical adviser, addresses Xantho with a sad tone:
White-haired cheeks, a breast scented with perfume,
eyes deep as the abode of the goddesses of art,
lips sweet that give complete pleasure,
O pale Xantho, sing your song for me, sing.
How soon the music stops. Again,
again strike up your sad but delightful melody,
with your fragrant fingers, play the strings of the instrument;
O pleasure of love, O pale Xantho, sing.
The Syrians
Farther north on the coast lay the old Phoenician cities, which, like Palestine, were part of the conquered province of Syria. Their skilled workers and craftsmen, their suitable position as ancient trading ports, and their wealthy and shrewd merchants, who sent their ships and agents everywhere, had kept these cities alive through a thousand years of events. Tyre had larger palaces than those of Rome and at the same time worse slums. The unpleasant smell of its dye workshops permeated the city, but in return they were comforted that their colorful fabrics and especially their purple silk fabrics were worn throughout the world. Sidon, which apparently discovered the glassmaking industry, now specialized in glass and bronze. Berytus (Beirut) was famous for its medical, rhetorical, and law schools and probably great jurists like Ulpian and Papinian went from this university to Rome.
None of the conquered provinces of the empire was more industrially advanced and flourishing than Syria. In a city where today three million people live a meager life, in Trajan’s time ten million lived. Fifty cities enjoyed drinking water, public baths, underground sewers, beautiful markets, gymnasiums, stadiums, music and lecture halls, schools, temples, great churches, colonnades, and picture galleries that were characteristic of Greek-influenced cities in the first century A.D. The oldest city in this land was Damascus, which lay beyond Lebanon after Sidon, a desert that surrounded it made it fortified; and it had almost become a garden in the open arms and side branches of a river, which out of gratitude they called the “Golden River.” Many caravan roads led to it, and these caravans brought the products of three continents to this city’s markets.
Traveling through the eastern highlands and following the dusty roads northward, the modern traveler is surprised to find the ruins of two magnificent temples in the village of Baalbek, which has a portico and in ancient times was the pride of the Syrian-Greek-Roman Heliopolis, “City of the Sun.” Augustus established a small colony there and as a result this city, that is, the seat of Baal the Phoenician sun god and the crossroads of Damascus, Sidon, and Beirut, developed. In the time of Antoninus Pius and his successors, Greek, Roman, and Syrian architects and engineers built a magnificent sacred place for Jupiter Heliopolitanus on the site of an old Baal temple. This building was of huge monolithic stones extracted from a nearby quarry. The size of one of its stones is about twenty meters by five meters by three meters. This stone alone is enough to build a large house. Fifty-one marble steps twenty meters wide extended the portico of the great temple, and this portico was colonnaded and in the Corinthian style. Beyond two walls of the colonnaded part stood the great temple, of which fifty-seven columns still remain. Nearby are the remains of a smaller temple attributed to Venus, Bacchus, and Demeter. Of this building nineteen columns and a large door with delicate architecture remain. The columns of these temples, which stand majestic and shining under a cloudless sky in this secluded and remote corner, are among the most beautiful masterpieces created by human hands. Seeing them, one feels the glory of Rome even more than in Italy itself, and realizes the greatness of the wealth, ambition, taste, and talent that was able to erect in all these scattered cities temples larger and more magnificent than what the densely populated capital of Rome had seen.
A traveler who heads east through the desert, that is, from Homs (ancient Emesa) to Tadmor, which the Greeks called Palmyra, meaning the city of thousands of palm trees, also encounters such a scene. Tadmor’s suitable position and fertile land, located around two gushing springs between the roads between Emesa and Damascus and the Euphrates, caused it to flourish so much that it became one of the greatest cities of the East. Its distance from other cities allowed it to maintain its independence in practice, despite nominal subjection to the Seleucid kings or Roman emperors. In the middle of this city’s wide highway, shaded colonnades consisting of four hundred and fifty-four columns were placed. At its main crossroads great arches were erected, one of which remains and one can judge the others by analogy. The city’s pride was the Temple of the Sun, which in A.D. 30 was dedicated to the three high gods, namely Baal, Yarhibol (Sun), and Aglibol (Moon). Its dimensions indicate the continuation of the ancient Assyrian tradition that paid attention to gigantic buildings. The portico of this temple, the widest portico in the entire Roman Empire, had an unparalleled colonnade one thousand three hundred meters long, most of which consisted of Corinthian columns arranged in four consecutive rows. In the portico, and in the temple, there were carvings and paintings whose surviving samples show that Palmyra is a neighbor to the Parthian country, both artistically and geographically.
East of Palmyra, a great road reached the Euphrates at Dura-Europos. It was here that in A.D. 100, merchants built a half-Greek, half-Indian temple for dividing their profits with the Palmyrene trinity (the three gods mentioned). An Eastern painter also adorned its walls with murals that clearly show that Byzantine art and Christian art originally had an Eastern origin. Farther north, at the great river, other important crossroads existed in the cities of Thapsacus and Zeugma. From Thapsacus, turning westward, the traveler passed through Beroea (Aleppo) and Apamea and reached Laodicea, which is still called by its old name Latakia and is still an active port, on the Mediterranean. Between Latakia and Apamea, the Orontes River flowed northward and along its two banks were prosperous estates. This river flowed to Antioch, the capital of Syria. The Orontes and a dense network of roads brought the products of the East to Antioch. At the same time its port on the Mediterranean, called Seleucia Pieria and located twenty-two kilometers downstream on the Orontes, was the entry point for Western goods to Antioch. Most of this city was on the slope of a mountain at whose foot the Orontes flowed. Its scenic views helped it to compete with Rhodes as the most beautiful Greek city in the East. Antioch’s streets, which at night had a bright lighting network, and its security at night was ensured. Its main street, seven kilometers long, was paved with basalt and on both sides had a covered colonnade so that people could traverse the entire city without harm from rain and sun. Drinking water was abundant in every house. Its mixed population consisted of six hundred thousand Greeks, Syrians, and Jews who were famous for their cheerfulness; they spent time in unrestrained hedonism and were known for mocking the showy Romans who came there to rule. Its inhabitants went from the circus to the amphitheater and from brothels to baths, and made full use of its famous park in the suburbs, called Daphne. Many festivals were held there. Aphrodite always had her share of these festivals. One of its contemporaries says that during the Bromalia, which they held for most of December, the whole city resembled a tavern, and all night the sound of songs and noisy revelries echoed in the streets. Antioch had schools of rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine but was not an educational center. Its people were intensely concerned with spending their day pleasantly and living, and when they needed religion they turned to astrologers, sorcerers, claimants of miracles, and charlatans.
The general appearance of Syria in the Roman period indicates a flourishing and prosperity that lasted longer than in any other province. Most workers, except those who did household work, were free. The upper classes lived with Greek manners and culture, while the lower classes remained Eastern. In this very city, Greek philosophers walked side by side with temple prostitutes and castrated priests; until Hadrian’s time children were still occasionally sacrificed to the gods, sculpture and painting took a half-Eastern, half-medieval form. In government and literature Greek was mostly used, but the native languages, especially Aramaic, were the language of the common people. There was no shortage of scholars and scientists and their transient fame spread throughout the world. Nicolaus of Damascus was not only the guide of Antony, Cleopatra, and Herod, but also undertook the heavy task of writing a general history. He himself says that even Hercules would retreat before such a labor. Time, with kindness, has destroyed all his works, just as it will do to ours as soon as we find leisure.
Mithridates the Great
Along the northern coasts of Asia Minor, Bithynia and Pontus extended, whose interior was mountainous, but rich in timber and mineral stones. A mixture of Thracians, Greeks, and Iranians overshadowed the old Hittite race there. A line of Greek-Thracian kings ruled Bithynia, these kings built a capital for themselves in Nicomedia (modern Izmit), and founded great cities in Prusa and in Nicaea (modern Iznik). Around 302 B.C., an Iranian nobleman, called Mithridates in Persian style, formed a country for himself from Cappadocia and Pontus and founded a line of powerful kings educated in Greek manners and culture whose capitals were Comana Pontica and Sinope. Their rule expanded until it clashed with Roman economic and political interests. The Mithridatic Wars that followed this are rightly named after a king worthy of respect who united western Asia and the European part of Greece in a revolt that, had it succeeded, would have changed the face of history.
Mithridates VI inherited the throne of Pontus at the age of eleven. His mother and guardians tried to kill him to succeed him. For this reason he fled from the palace, changed his appearance, and for seven years lived in the forests as a hunter and wore animal skins. Around 115 B.C., with a coup he deposed his mother and came to power. Since he was exposed to plots characteristic of Eastern courts, he cautiously drank a little poison every day to gain immunity against most types of toxins that his entourage had access to. During his travels he discovered several antidotes. He became interested in medicine because of this, and in this field acquired such valuable knowledge that Pompey ordered them to be translated into Latin. His austere life in the forest had given strength to his body and will. His limbs had become so large that he sent his armor to the temple of Delphi for the amusement and entertainment of visitors. He was a skilled rider and warrior, so much so that it is said he could outrun a deer, drive a sixteen-horse chariot, and cover two hundred kilometers in one day. He boasted that no one could eat or drink more than him at a table, and he had a large harem. Roman historians say he was cruel and treacherous and killed his mother, brother, three sons, and three daughters; but Rome has not transmitted his own opinion on this matter. He was a relatively cultured man, familiar with twenty-two languages, and never used an interpreter. He had studied Greek literature, loved Greek music, enriched Greek temples; and scholars, poets, and Greek philosophers were present in his court. He collected works of art, and ordered coins to be struck that are very remarkable in quality. Yet with all this, he shared in the sensuality and roughness of his semi-barbarian environment and accepted the superstitions of his time. Against Rome he defended himself not with the calculated maneuvers of a great general or statesman, but with the innate bravery of a wild animal in a trap.
Such a person could not be content with having a small country that his mother had partly lost. With the help of Greek mercenary officers and soldiers, he conquered Armenia and the Caucasus, crossed the Kuban River and the Kerch Strait and entered the Crimea, and subjugated all the Greek cities on the eastern, northern, and western shores of the Black Sea. The collapse of Greek military power had left the people of these regions almost defenseless against internal barbarians, and they welcomed Mithridates’ Greek soldier groups as their saviors. The cities thus subjugated were Sinope (Sinop), Trapezus (Trabzon), Panticapaeum (Kerch), and Byzantium, but Bithynian control over the Hellespont (Dardanelles) placed Pontus’s trade in the Mediterranean in the hands of hostile kings. When Nicomedes II died in 94 B.C., his two sons disputed the succession. One of them sought Roman support and the other, named Socrates, sought help from the king of Pontus. Mithridates used the party disputes in Italy to occupy Bithynia and depose Socrates. Rome, which did not want the Bosporus to fall into enemy hands, ordered Mithridates and Socrates to evacuate Bithynia. Mithridates complied, but Socrates did not. The governor of Asia deposed him and made Nicomedes III king. This new king, encouraged by the Roman governor Manius Aquillius, occupied Pontus and thus the first Mithridatic War began (88–84 B.C.).
Mithridates felt that his only path to survival was to stir the Hellenistic East against the Italian masters. He declared himself the liberator of Greece and sent groups of soldiers to liberate the Greek cities of Asia by force if necessary. Since he encountered opposition from merchants in the cities, he befriended the democratic parties and promised them semi-socialist reforms. Meanwhile his fleet, consisting of four hundred ships, sank the Roman fleet in the Black Sea, and his army of two hundred and ninety thousand defeated the forces of Nicomedes and Aquillius. This victorious king, to show his aversion to Roman greed, poured molten gold into the throat of the captured Aquillius—who was rejoicing in his success in suppressing the slave revolt in Sicily. The Greek cities of Asia Minor, deprived of Roman support, opened their gates to Mithridates’ soldiers and declared loyalty to him. At Mithridates’ suggestion, on a designated day, all Italians, men, women, and children, were massacred in their homes. The number of those killed was eighty thousand (88 B.C.). Appian says about this:
The people of Ephesus dragged out the refugees who had taken refuge in the temple of Artemis and were hanging on the statues of this goddess and killed them. The people of Pergamum shot the Romans who had taken refuge in the temple of Asclepius with arrows. The people of Adramyttium pursued those who wanted to escape by swimming into the sea and killed themselves and drowned their children. The inhabitants of Caunus (in the province of Caria) followed the Italians who had taken refuge around the statue of “Vesta,” killed the children before the eyes of their mothers, then the mothers, and then the men. … Thus it was clearly seen that the hatred of the inhabitants toward the Romans was more involved in these atrocities than their fear of Mithridates.
Undoubtedly the poorer classes, who had suffered most from Roman domination, led this savage massacre. The wealthy classes, whom Rome had long supported, must have trembled at such a vengeful and violent uprising. Mithridates tried to calm the affluent by exempting the Greek cities from paying taxes for five years or granting them complete autonomy. Appian writes: “He announced the cancellation of debts, freed the slaves, confiscated many estates, and redistributed the lands.” Some notables of the populations plotted against him. He discovered this plot and ordered sixteen hundred of them to be killed. The lower classes, with the help of philosophers and university professors, seized power in many Greek cities and even in Athens and Sparta, and declared war on both Rome and the wealthy. The Greeks of Delos, out of the excitement of freedom, massacred twenty thousand Italians in one day. Mithridates’ fleet captured the Cyclades, and his soldiers occupied the islands of Euboea, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace. The loss of rich “Asia,” the source of tribute that until then had flowed into the Roman treasury, as well as the profits that Roman moneylenders received, dried up and plunged Italy into a financial crisis. This financial crisis probably had some effect on the revolutionary movement of Saturninus and Cinna. Italy itself was torn by discord, for the Samnites and Lucanians offered an alliance to the king of Pontus.
The Senate, beset by war and revolution from all sides, sold the silver and gold reserves of the Roman temples to pay the expenses of Sulla’s soldiers. It is superfluous here to repeat how Sulla captured Athens, defeated the rebels, preserved the empire for Rome, and made a peace mixed with tolerance with Mithridates. The king returned to his capital and there calmly set about preparing another land and sea force. Murena, the Roman commander’s deputy in Asia, decided to attack him before Mithridates became strong again. When in this second Mithridatic War (83–81 B.C.) Murena was defeated, Sulla rebuked him for violating the peace treaty and ordered him to cease hostilities. Six years later, Nicomedes III bequeathed Bithynia to Rome. Mithridates realized that if Roman power, which at the same time held the Bosporus, reached the borders of Paphlagonia and Pontus, his country too would soon perish. In the third Mithridatic War (75–63), Mithridates made his last effort and fought for twelve years against Lucullus and Pompey; his allies and companions betrayed him, and he fled to the Crimea. There this old warrior, at the age of sixty-nine, tried to organize an army to cross the Balkan mountains and conquer Italy from the north. His son, Pharnaces, rebelled against him, his soldiers refused to enter this adventure, and Mithridates, abandoned by all, tried to kill himself. The poison he drank had no effect on him, for his constitution was immune to poison; then he tried to pierce his body with a sword, but his hand was too weak to press it. His friends and protégés, who were ordered by his son to kill him, ended his life with sword and spear.
Prose
The fact that the cities of Asia Minor quickly recovered from the fever of these wars is evidence in favor of Roman rule. Nicomedia, the capital of Bithynia-Pontus, and later the residence of Emperor Diocletian. Since the most important religious council in the history of the Christian Church was held in Nicaea, the name of this city became immortal. These two cities competed so much in building buildings that Trajan was forced to send Pliny the Younger there to prevent their bankruptcy. Nicomedia presented Flavius Arrian to the world of literature. We saw that this man collected the discourses of Epictetus. Arrian was governor of Cappadocia for six years and archon of Athens for one year; nevertheless he found time to write several books. Of these works only one called Anabasis of Alexander and its appendix called Indica remain. This book is written in clear and simple Greek, for Arrian took Xenophon as his model both in style and in life. He himself says with the self-praise peculiar to his predecessors: “This work, since my youth, has been for me equal to my birthplace, family, and government service. For this reason I do not consider myself unworthy to be counted among the greatest writers of the Greek language.”
Beside the Black Sea, other cities also had important buildings and famous scholars. Myrela had three hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. Amastris (Amasra) seemed to Pliny “a beautiful and lovely city,” and was famous for its delightful box trees. Sinope flourished as a center of fisheries and a port for exporting timber and mineral stones from this region. Amisus (Samsun) and Trebizond traded by sea with Scythia (southern Russia), and Amasia was the birthplace and home of the most famous geographer of antiquity, namely Strabo.
Strabo came from a wealthy family that, according to himself, was related to the kings of Pontus. He suffered from a particular type of squint and for this reason the word strabismus has been coined meaning “squint” and “double vision.” He traveled extensively and apparently had political missions on these travels and took every opportunity to collect geographical and historical information. He wrote a history that has now been lost, and was a continuation of Polybius’s history. In the seventh year B.C., he published the great book of geography, of which almost all seventeen volumes have survived. He too, like Arrian, begins his book by praising the merits of his work:
I ask pardon of my readers and request that they not attribute the guilt of the long discussions of this book to me, but to those who sincerely desire to acquire knowledge of famous and ancient matters. … In this book we must set aside what is not so important and devote our attention to what is original and grand … useful, unforgettable, or entertaining. Just as when judging the artistic values of gigantic statues we consider the overall effect instead of examining each part with great care … my book should also be evaluated in the same way, for it is also a gigantic work … and worthy of a philosopher.
Strabo borrows matters directly from Polybius and from Posidonius, and indirectly from Eratosthenes, holds them responsible for their mistakes, and says that his own mistakes also stem from his sources. Of course he mentions these sources with unparalleled honesty and generally selects them with discernment and discrimination. He notes that the expansion of the Roman Empire caused the expansion of geographical knowledge, but believes that there are still completely undiscovered continents—perhaps beyond the Atlantic. He believes that the earth is a hemisphere (but the term he used probably also means “spherical”), and that if someone sails westward from Spain, he will probably eventually reach India. He says that coasts are always changing due to alluvium or eruption and guesses that the disintegration of the earth’s lower parts may one day split the Suez Canal and unite the two seas. His book is a very good summary of the knowledge of his time about the earth. It should be considered one of the outstanding achievements of ancient knowledge.
But Dio Chrysostom was more famous in his age than Strabo (A.D. 40–120). Dio came from an old and distinguished family of Prusa, and his grandfather had spent all his wealth on giving gifts to the city of Bithynia, then accumulated another fortune. His father had had the same experience, and he himself followed them. He became an orator and sophist and went to Rome, was converted to Stoicism through Musonius Rufus, and then Domitian exiled him from Italy and Bithynia (A.D. 82). Deprived of using his property and income, he traveled for thirteen years as a penniless philosopher, but refused to receive payment for his lecture sessions, and often earned a living through manual labor. When Nerva succeeded Domitian, Dio’s exile also turned into honor and respect. Nerva and Trajan treated him friendly and at his request greatly favored his city. After that he returned to Prusa and spent most of his wealth on adorning it. Another philosopher accused him of embezzling public funds. Pliny investigated the matter and apparently Dio was acquitted.
Eighty speeches of Dio remain. Most of the content of these speeches today is more rhetoric than substance. Endless empty verbiage, deceptive analogies, and rhetorical tricks are abundant in them. Explaining half an idea in them blackens fifty pages. It is not surprising if a weary listener cried out: “With your endless matters you bring the sun to setting.” Nevertheless, his style is not without charm and eloquence, otherwise he could not have become the most famous orator of his century, an orator for whose words people would stop fighting. The noble Trajan said: “I do not know what you want to say, but I love you as much as myself.” The barbarians of Borysthenes (Dnieper) listened to his speech with the same pleasure that the Greeks gathered in Olympia or the impressionable Alexandrians listened to his words. An army that was about to revolt against Nerva was softened and calmed by hearing an impromptu speech by this half-naked exile.
Probably his popularity was not due to his Attic eloquence, but to the courage he had in branding things he disapproved of. Dio is almost the only one throughout the pagan period of antiquity who condemned prostitution, and few of his contemporaries attacked the system of slavery so openly. (Of course, when his slaves fled, he was offended.) In a speech for the people of Alexandria, he condemned their love of luxury, superstition, and moral vices. He chose the city of Ilium to deliver a speech claiming that the city of Troy never existed and that “Homer was the greatest liar in history.” In the heart of Rome, he raised the case of the Roman countryside against this city and drew a lively and touching picture of the poverty of the peasants and drew the listeners’ attention to the fact that agriculture is neglected and the foundation of Roman civilization is declining. In Olympia, among a fanatical crowd, he criticized the atheists and Epicureans of his age. Dio said that although the popular conception of divinity may be irrational, the wise man understands that every simple mind needs simple ideas and pictorial symbols. In truth no one can have a conception of God in mind, and even Phidias’s original statue is nothing but a hypothesis based on the anthropomorphic form of God and is as unacceptable as the barbarians’ comparison, who likened God to a star or a tree. We cannot know what God is, but we are instinctively certain that He exists, and we feel that philosophy without religion is something dark and mixed with despair. The only true freedom is wisdom, that is, knowledge of what is right and what is false; the path of freedom does not pass through politics or revolution, but through philosophy; and true philosophy is not pondering books, but honestly practicing honor and virtue according to what our inner voice inspires us, and this inner voice, in a mystical sense, is God’s word in the human heart.
The Eastern Tide
Religion, which had long been lying in wait for a suitable opportunity and had strengthened its roots throughout the period of sophisticated and popular skepticism in the Periclean and Hellenistic age, now in the second century, as philosophy, unable to answer human eternity and hope, confessed to its limitations and abandoned its authority, rose again and replaced philosophy. The people themselves had never lost faith; most of them vaguely accepted Homer’s description of life after death, offered religious sacrifices before every journey, and still put a coin in the mouth of the dead to pay his passage over the Styx. Roman statesmen welcomed the help of the established clergy and sought to gain the people’s support by building expensive temples for local gods. Throughout Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor the wealth of the clergy increased. Hadad and Atargatis were still worshiped by the Syrians and had a magnificent shrine in Hierapolis. The resurrection of Tammuz was still welcomed in Syrian cities with the cry “Adonis (that is, the Lord) has risen,” and his ascension to heaven was celebrated with joy and cheers in the final scene of the Tammuz festival. In the Greek rite too similar ceremonies were held in memory of the death, death, and resurrection of Dionysus. The worship of the goddess “Ma” had spread from Cappadocia to Ionia and Italy. The priests of this goddess, called fanatici (that is, belonging to the fanum or temple), danced in a dizzying manner to the sound of trumpets and drums, cut themselves with knives, and sprinkled their blood on the goddess and her followers. In the spring festival of Cybele, her worshipers fasted, prayed, and mourned the death of Attis; the priests cut their arms and drank their blood; and a group of people with special pomp and splendor carried the young god to the grave. But the next day the streets were filled with a crowd that with shouts of joy celebrated the resurrection of Attis and the return of the earth’s youth. The priests sang: “O initiates, be brave! The god is saved and salvation for you will soon come.” On the last day of the festival, the image of the “Great Mother” was triumphantly paraded among the crowd that greeted her, and in Rome they called her Nostradomina (Our Lady).
Isis, the goddess of the Egyptians, the grieving mother, the merciful comforter, the goddess who brings the gift of eternal life, was worshiped even more than Cybele. All the peoples around the Mediterranean were familiar with the death of Isis’s great husband Osiris and his rising from among the dead. Almost in all the important cities of the Mediterranean the memory of this happy resurrection was celebrated with great pomp and splendor. The worshipers joyfully sang: “We have found Osiris.” Isis was shown in images and statues holding her heavenly son Horus in her arms, and people greeted her as “Queen of Heaven,” “Star of the Sea,” “Mother of God” with special prayers and invocations. In terms of the touching nature of the story, delicacy and subtlety in performing the ceremonies, the dignified yet joyful atmosphere of the shrine, the exciting music of the rites, the conscientious and faithful supervision of the white-robed, shaved priests, the honoring of women and the respect shown to them, and the open-armed welcome of every nationality and class, this rite was closer to Christianity than all the pagan rites. The religion of Isis spread from Egypt to Greece in the fourth century B.C., to Sicily in the third century, and to Italy in the second century and from there to all parts of the empire. Images of her have been found in the countries of the Danube, Rhine, and Seine coasts. Even in London a temple of Isis has been unearthed. The Mediterranean spirit has never ceased worshiping the divine creative power and maternal care of woman.
Meanwhile the worship of Mithras (Mithraism), this male god, reached from Iran to the farthest borders of Rome. In late Zoroastrian theology Mithras, the son of Ahura Mazda, was the god of light. Mithras himself was the god of light, truth, purity, and honor; sometimes he was likened to the sun, which in heaven leads the struggle against the forces of darkness. He was always the mediator between his father and his followers and supported and encouraged them in the struggle of life against evil, lies, impurity, and other works of Ahriman, the lord of darkness. When Pompey’s soldiers brought this religion from Cappadocia to Europe, a Greek artist depicted Mithras kneeling on the back of a bull, plunging his dagger into its throat. This image became the universal symbol of this cult. The seventh day of every week was the holy day of the sun god (Mithras). Around the end of December, his followers celebrated the anniversary of Mithras the “Invincible Sun,” which at the time of the winter solstice “the first of Dey,” reached its annual victory over the forces of darkness, and after that gave more light day by day.
Tertullian mentions the clergy of the Mithraic religion and its “high priest,” and the unmarried men and virgin women who served this god; every day a sacrifice was offered to his altar, the worshipers shared in the sacred bread and wine, and the sound of a bell announced the climax of the rites. In front of the cave where the image of the young god slaying the bull was depicted, a fire was always burning. The Mithraic religion (Mithraism) was based on high morals and forced its “soldiers” to pursue the war against evil, in whatever form it might be, throughout life. Its priests said that all humans after death appear before the court of Mithras, and at that time impure souls are handed over to Ahriman to be tortured forever, and pure souls pass through seven spheres and in each sphere shed one mortal element until they are accepted in the pure radiance of heaven in the presence of Ahura Mazda himself. These hopeful myths spread throughout western Asia and Europe (except Greece) in the second and third centuries A.D., and erected their shrines as far as the northernmost point where Hadrian’s Wall extended. When the Church Fathers found so many similarities between their own religion and the Mithraic religion, they were astonished and claimed that the Mithraic religion had stolen these rites from Christianity, or that this religion was the devil’s misleading trick. It is difficult to prove which of these two cults borrowed things from the other. Perhaps both absorbed the prevailing ideas of the time, which were in the religious environment of the East.
Each of the great religions of the Mediterranean countries had “mysteries.” These mysteries usually consisted of rites of purification, sacrifice, initiation, inspiration, and revival of the soul that revolved around the death and resurrection of the god. In the initiation rites of the cult of Cybele, the volunteers were placed in a pit and a bull was slaughtered above it. The blood of the sacrificed animal that poured on the volunteer’s head purified him of sin and gave him a new, spiritual, and eternal life. The genitals of the bull, which symbolized its sacred fertility, were placed in a sacred vessel and offered to the god. The Mithraic religion also had similar rites known in the ancient world as “bull-throwing” (taurobolium). Apuleius, with ecstatic expressions, describes the stages of entering the service of Isis: a long period of apprenticeship accompanied by fasting, chastity, and prayer, then ritual bathing in holy water, and finally the ecstatic vision of the goddess who gives eternal blessing. In Eleusis, the volunteer had to confess his sins (Nero disliked this), for a period abstained from eating certain foods, washed himself in the bay of that land to purify body and soul, and then sacrificed an animal—usually a pig. In the festival of Demeter, the initiates mourned with this goddess for three days because of the abduction of her daughter and taking her to the abode of the dead (Hades). During this time, they lived only on consecrated sweets and a mysterious mixture of flour, water, and mint. On the third night a religious play of the resurrection of Persephone was performed and the officiating priest promised the same rebirth to every pure soul. The Orphic sect in Greece, influenced by the Hindu or Pythagorean cult, with a change in the subject of the rites taught that the soul is imprisoned in a series of sinful bodies and can only be freed from this base reincarnation by rising to ecstasy of union with Dionysus. The members of the Orphic brotherhood in their sessions drank the blood of a bull that had been sacrificed for the dying and atoning savior—and was considered identical with him. The distribution of sacred food and drink among the congregation often existed in these cults of the Mediterranean peoples. They believed that food acquires power through the sanctification of divine powers, and then mysteriously transfers these powers to the participant in the rite.
All the great religious sects considered magic and sorcery possible. The Magi had spread their art throughout the East and given new names to old tricks. The Mediterranean world was rich in sorcerers, miracle workers, soothsayers, fortune-tellers, holy ascetics, and dream interpreters. Every unusual event was considered a divine omen for future events. The word askesis, which the Greeks used to mean “athletic training,” now took on the meaning of “taming the body of the soul.” People whipped themselves, mutilated themselves, weakened themselves by starvation, or chained themselves here and there. Some of them died from the tortures they inflicted on themselves or from complete neglect of the body. In the Egyptian desert, near Lake Mareotis, a group of Jews and non-Jews, men and women, lived in separate cells, had no sexual relations, gathered for communal prayer on Saturday, and called themselves Therapeutae, meaning “healers of the soul.” Millions believed that the writings attributed to Orpheus, Hermes, Pythagoras, and the Sibyls were inspirations or emanations from God. Preachers who claimed divine inspiration traveled from city to city and performed apparently miraculous healings. Alexander of Abonuteichos had trained a snake that hid its head under his armpit and held a half-human mask tied to its tail. He claimed that this snake was Asclepius, one of the gods, who had come to earth for divination. He had placed reeds in that artificial head and by interpreting the sounds that came from these reeds he made a fortune.
Apart from such charlatans, there were probably thousands of sincere preachers of pagan cults as well. In the early third century, Philostratus draws an imaginary picture of such a preacher in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. This person at the age of sixteen joined the strict brotherhood of the Pythagoreans, abstained from marriage, meat, and wine, never shaved his beard, and spent five years in silence. He divided his inheritance among his relatives and like a monk begged his way traveling in Iran, India, Egypt, western Asia, Greece, and Italy. The rites of the Magi, Brahmins, and Egyptian ascetics permeated him. He visited the temples of every cult and begged the priests with entreaties not to sacrifice animals; he worshiped the sun, accepted the gods and said that beyond them there is one God, superior and unknowable. His life full of self-restraint and asceticism caused his disciples to claim that he was the son of God; but he himself introduced himself only as the son of Apollonius. Many miracles have been attributed to him: he entered through closed doors, understood all languages, cast out demons, and revived a girl. But he was more a philosopher than a sorcerer. He was familiar with Greek literature and loved it. He presented morals that were simple but strict. He asked the gods: “Give me little and grant that I desire nothing.” A king begged him to ask for a gift; he replied: “Dried fruit and bread.” Since he believed in reincarnation, he advised his followers not to do evil to any living creature and not to eat meat. He urged them to avoid enmity, slander, envy, and hatred; he said: “If we are philosophers, we cannot hate people, that is, our fellow human beings.” Philostratus writes: “Sometimes he discussed communal life and said that we must support each other.” He was accused of sedition and sorcery, and he himself came to Rome on foot to defend himself before Domitian. He was thrown into prison, but escaped from there. He died in old age around A.D. 98. His disciples claimed that after death he appeared to them and then ascended to heaven with his body.
What characteristics caused half of Rome, half of the empire to be conquered by these new cults? Part of this matter relates to their non-class and non-racial character; these cults accepted all nationalities, free men, and slaves equally and paid no attention to inequalities of lineage and wealth. Their shrines were spacious enough to accommodate both the masses and the gods. Cybele and Isis were mother goddesses who knew sorrow and, like millions of grieving women, mourned. They understood something that the Roman gods rarely knew—the broken hearts of the defeated long more for return to the stronger mother than attachment to the father; in times of extreme joy or distress it is the name of the mother that involuntarily comes to the tongue; therefore men as well as women found comfort and refuge with Isis and Cybele. Even today the Mediterranean worshiper pronounces the name of Mary far more than the name of the father (God) or the son, and his favorite prayer that he constantly repeats is not addressed to the Holy Virgin, but to the Holy Mother who has been blessed through “the fruit of her womb.”
The new cults not only penetrated deeper into hearts, but also benefited more from the imagination of individuals through groups and choirs sometimes mournful and sometimes joyful, and through highly effective symbolic rites that gave heart to souls weary of the monotony of life. These new clergy were not politicians who occasionally performed sacred rites with pomp and splendor, but men and women from every class, ranging from extreme ascetic monks to permanent priests. With their help, a soul that realized it had committed a sin could be purified. Sometimes a sick body might also be healed with a word or an inspiring rite, and the “mysteries” held by these clergy symbolized this hope that even death could be overcome.
In the old days people quenched their thirst for greatness and immortality by honoring and ensuring the survival of their family and tribe, and later of a country that was their creation and sum. Now the characteristics of the old tribes were disappearing in the new mobility of peace and calm, and the imperial country was only the spiritual embodiment of the ruling class, not the embodiment of the masses who were deprived of participation in government and union with it and thus laid the foundation of individualism in the depths and among the common people. The promise of an individual survival, an endless happiness after a lifetime of submission, subjugation, poverty, and boredom was an irresistible attraction with which the Eastern cults and Christianity gathered, enchanted, and ruled over the spirit of the people. It seemed that all the world had joined hands to pave the way for Jesus.
Written & researched by Dr. Shahin Siami