The Old Roman World : the Grandeur and Failure of Its Civilization Part 6

[Sidenote: Corinth.]

[Sidenote: The wonders of Corinth.]

[Sidenote: Its luxury.]

Corinth was another grand centre of Grecian civilization, richer and more luxurious than Athens. When taken by the Romans she possessed the most valuable pictures in Greece. Among them was one of Dionysus by Aristides for which Attalus offered 600,000 sesterces. Rich commercial cities have ever been patrons of the fine arts. These they can appreciate better than poetry or philosophy. The Corinthians invented the most elaborate style of architecture known to antiquity, and which was generally adopted at Rome. They were also patrons of statuary, especially of works in bronze, for which the city was celebrated. The Corinthian, vessels of terra cotta were the finest in Greece. All articles of elegant luxury were manufactured here, especially elaborate tables, chests, and sideboards. If there had been a great exhibition in Rome, the works of the Corinthians would have been the most admired, and would have suited the taste of the luxurious senators, among whom literature and the higher developments of art were unappreciated. There was no literature in Corinth after Periander, and among the ill.u.s.trious writers of Greece not a single Corinthian appeared. Nor did it ever produce an orator. What could be expected of a city whose patron G.o.ddess was Aphrodite! But Lais was honored in the city, and rich merchants frequented her house. The city was most famous for courtesans, and female slaves, and extravagant luxury. It was like Antioch and Tyre and Carthage. Corinth was probably the richest city in Greece, and one of the largest. It had, it is said, four hundred and sixty thousand slaves.

Its streets, three miles in length, were adorned with costly edifices.

Its fortress was one thousand eight hundred and eighty-six feet above the sea and very strong.

[Sidenote: Sparta.]

Sparta, of historic fame, was not magnificent except in public buildings. It had a famous portico, the columns of which, of white marble, represented the ill.u.s.trious persons among the vanquished Medes.

[Sidenote: Olympia.]

Olympia, the holy city, was celebrated for its temple and its consecrated garden, where stood some of the great masterpieces of ancient, art, among them the famous statue of Jupiter, the work of Pheidias,--an impersonation of majesty and power,--a work which furnished models from which Michael Angelo drew his inspiration.

[Sidenote: Delphi.]

Delphi, another consecrated city, was enriched with the contributions of all Greece, and was the seat of the Dorian religion. So rich were the shrines of its oracle that Nero carried away from it five hundred statues of bronze at one time.

[Sidenote: Greece enriches Rome.]

Such was Greece, every city of which was famous for art, or literature, or commerce, or manufacture, or for deeds which live in history. It had established a great empire in the East, but fell, like all other conquering nations, from the luxury which conquest engendered. It was no longer able to protect itself. Its phalanx, which resisted the shock of the Persian hosts, yielded to the all-conquering legion. When Aemilius Paulus marched up the Via Sacra with the spoils of the Macedonian kingdom in his grand and brilliant triumph, he was preceded by two hundred and fifty wagons containing pictures and statues, and three thousand men, each carrying a vase of silver coin, and four hundred more bearing crowns of gold. Yet this was but the commencement of the plunder of Greece.

[Sidenote: Islands colonized by Greeks.]

And not merely Greece herself, but the islands which she had colonized formed no slight addition to the glories of the empire. Rhodes was the seat of a famous school for sculpture and painting, from which issued the Laoc.o.o.n and the Farnese Bull. It contained three thousand statues and one hundred and six colossi, among them the famous statue of the sun, one hundred and five feet high, one of the seven wonders of the world, containing 3000 talents--more than 3,000,000 dollars. Its school of rhetoric was so celebrated that Cicero resorted to it to perfect himself in oratory.

[Sidenote: Asia Minor.]

[Sidenote: Its extent.]

[Sidenote: Cities.]

[Sidenote: Antioch.]

If we pa.s.s from Greece to Asia Minor and Syria, with their dependent provinces, all of which were added to the empire by the victories of Sulla and Pompey, we are still more impressed with the extent of the Roman rule. Asia Minor, a vast peninsula between the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Euxine seas, included several of the old monarchies of the world. It extended from Ilium on the west to the banks of the Euphrates, from the northern parts of Bithynia and Pontus to Syria and Cilicia, nine hundred miles from east to west, and nearly three hundred from north to south. It was the scene of some of the grandest conquests of the oriental world, Babylonian, Persian, and Grecian. Syria embraced all countries from the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean to the Arabian deserts. No conquests of the Romans were attended with more eclat than the subjection of these wealthy and populous sections of the oriental world; and they introduced a boundless wealth and luxury into Italy. But in spite of the sack of cities and the devastations of armies, the old monarchy of the Seleucidae remained rich and grand. Both Syria and Asia Minor could boast of large and flouris.h.i.+ng cities, as well as every kind of luxury and art. Antioch was the third city in the empire, the capital of the Greek kings of Syria, and like Alexandria a monument of the Macedonian age. It was built on a regular and magnificent plan, and abounded in temples and monuments. Its most striking feature was a street four miles in length, perfectly level, with double colonnades through its whole length, built by Antiochus Epiphanes. In magnitude the city was not much inferior to Paris at the present day, and covered more land than Rome. It had its baths, its theatres and amphitheatres, its fora, its museums, its aqueducts, its temples, and its palaces. It was the most luxurious of all the cities of the East, and had a population of three hundred thousand who were free. In the latter clays of the empire it was famous as the scene of the labors of Chrysostom.

[Sidenote: Ephesus.]

Ephesus, one of the twelve of the Ionian cities in Asia, was the glory of Lydia,--a sacred city of which the temple of Diana was the greatest ornament. This famous temple was four times as large as the Parthenon, and covered as much ground as Cologne Cathedral, and was two hundred and twenty years in building. It had one hundred and twenty-eight columns sixty feet high, of which thirty-six were carved, each contributed by a king--the largest of all the Grecian temples, and probably the most splendid. It was a city of great trade and wealth. Its theatre was the largest in the world, six hundred and sixty feet in diameter, [Footnote: Muller, _Anc. Art._] and capable of holding sixty thousand spectators. Ephesus gave birth to Apelles the painter, and was the metropolis of five hundred cities.

[Sidenote: Jerusalem.]

[Sidenote: The Temple.]

[Sidenote: The Acropolis.]

Jerusalem, so dear to Christians as the most sacred spot on earth, inclosed by lofty walls and towers, not so beautiful or populous as in the days of Solomon and David, was, before its destruction by t.i.tus, one of the finest cities of the East. Its royal palace, surrounded by a wall thirty cubits high, with decorated towers at equal intervals, contained enormous banqueting halls and chambers most profusely ornamented; and this palace, magnificent beyond description, was connected with porticos and gardens filled with statues and reservoirs of water. It occupied a larger s.p.a.ce than the present fortress, from the western edge of Mount Zion to the present garden of the Armenian Convent. The Temple, so famous, was small compared with the great wonders of Grecian architecture, being only about one hundred and fifty feet by seventy; but its front was covered with plates of gold, and some of the stones of which it was composed were more than sixty feet in length and nine in width. Its magnificence consisted in its decorations and the vast quant.i.ty of gold and precious woods used in its varied ornaments, and vessels of gold, so as to make it one of the most costly edifices ever erected to the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d. The Acropolis, which was the fortress of the Temple, combined the strength of a castle with the magnificence of a palace, and was like a city in extent, towering seventy cubits above the elevated rock upon which it was built. So strongly fortified was Jerusalem, even in its latter days, that it took t.i.tus five months, with an army of one hundred thousand men, to subdue it; one of the most memorable sieges on record. It probably would have held out against the whole power of Rome, had not famine done more than battering rams.

[Sidenote: Damascus and other cities.]

Many other interesting cities might be mentioned both in Syria and Asia Minor, which were centres of trade, or seats of philosophy, or homes of art. Tarsus in Cilicia was a great mercantile city, to which strangers from all parts resorted. Damascus, the oldest city in the world, and the old capital of Syria, was both beautiful and rich. Laodicea was famous for tapestries, Hierapolis for its iron wares, Cybara for its dyes, Sardis for its wines, Smyrna for its beautiful monuments, Delos for its slave-trade, Gyrene for its horses, Paphos for its temple of Venus, in which were a hundred altars. Seleucia, on the Tigris, had a population of four hundred thousand. Caesarea, founded by Herod the Great, and the princ.i.p.al seat of government to the Roman prefects, had a harbor equal in size to the renowned Piraeus, and was secured against the southwest winds by a mole of such ma.s.sive construction that the blocks of stone, sunk under the water, were fifty feet in length and eighteen in width, and nine in thickness. [Footnote: Josephus, _Ant_., xv.] The city itself was constructed of polished stone, with an agora, a theatre, a circus, a praetorium, and a temple to Caesar. Tyre, which had resisted for seven months the armies of Alexander, remained to the fall of the empire a great emporium of trade. It monopolized the manufacture of imperial purple. Sidon was equally celebrated for its gla.s.s and embroidered robes. The Sidonians cast gla.s.s mirrors, and imitated precious stones.

But the glory of both Tyre and Sidon was in s.h.i.+ps, which visited all the coasts of the Mediterranean, and even penetrated to Britain and India.

[Sidenote: Egypt.]

[Sidenote: Its ancient grandeur.]

[Sidenote: Glories of Egypt.]

[Sidenote: Thebes.]

But greater than Tyre, or Antioch, or any eastern city, was Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, which was one of the last provinces added to the empire. Egypt alone was a mighty monarchy--the oldest which history commemorates, august in records and memories. What pride, what pomp, what glory are a.s.sociated with the land of the Pharaohs, with its mighty river reaching to the centre of a great continent, flowing thousands of miles to the sea, irrigating and enriching the most fertile valley of the world! What n.o.ble and populous cities arose upon its banks three thousand years before Roman power was felt! What enduring monuments remain of a its ancient very ancient yet extinct civilization! What successive races of conquerors have triumphed in the granite palaces of Thebes and Memphis! Old, sacred, rich, populous, and learned, Egypt becomes a province of the Roman empire. The sceptre of three hundred kings pa.s.ses from Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, to Augustus Caesar, the conqueror at Actium; and six millions of different races, once the most civilized on the earth, are amalgamated with the other races and peoples which compose the universal monarchy. At one time the military force of Egypt is said to have amounted to seven hundred thousand men, in the period of its greatest prosperity. The annual revenues of this state under the Ptolemies amounted to about 17,000,000 dollars in gold and silver, beside the produce of the earth. A single feast cost Philadelphus more than half a million of pounds sterling, and he had acc.u.mulated treasures to the amount of 740,000 talents, or about 860,000,000 dollars. [Footnote: Napoleon, _Life of Caesar_.] What European monarch ever possessed such a sum? The kings of Egypt were richer in the gold and silver they could command than Louis XIV., in the proudest hour of his life. What monarchs ever reigned with more absolute power than the kings of this ancient seat of learning and art! The foundation of Thebes goes back to the mythical period of Egyptian history, and it covered as much ground as Rome or Paris, equally the centre of religion, of trade, of manufactures, and of government,--the sacerdotal capital of all who wors.h.i.+ped Ammon from Pelusium to Axume, from the Red Sea to the Oases of Libya. The palaces of Thebes, though ruins two thousand years ago as they are ruins now, were the largest and probably the most magnificent ever erected by the hand of man. What must be thought of a palace whose central hall was eighty feet in height, three hundred and twenty-five feet in length, and one hundred and seventy-nine in breadth; the roof of which was supported by one hundred and thirty-four columns, eleven feet in diameter and seventy-six feet in height, with their pedestals; and where the cornices of the finest marble were inlaid with ivory moldings or sheathed with beaten gold! But I do not now refer to the glories of Egypt under Sesostris or Rameses, but to what they were when Alexandria was the capital of the country,-- what it was under the Roman domination.

[Sidenote: Extent and population of Alexandria.]

[Sidenote: Library.]

[Sidenote: Public buildings.]

[Sidenote: Commerce.]

The ground-plan of this great city was traced by Alexander himself, but it was not completed until the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus. It continued to receive embellishments from nearly every monarch of the Lagian line. Its circ.u.mference was about fifteen miles; the streets were regular, and crossed one another at right angles, and were wide enough to admit both carriages and foot pa.s.sengers. The harbor was large enough to admit the largest fleet ever constructed; its walls and gates were constructed with all the skill and strength known to antiquity; its population numbered six hundred thousand, and all nations were represented in its crowded streets. The wealth of the city may be inferred from the fact that in one year 6250 talents, or more than 6,000,000 dollars, were paid to the public treasury for port dues. The library was the largest in the world, and numbered over seven hundred thousand volumes, and this was connected with a museum, a menagerie, a botanical garden, and various halls for lectures, altogether forming the most famous university in the empire. The inhabitants were chiefly Greek, and had all their cultivated tastes and mercantile thrift. In a commercial point of view it was the most important in the empire, and its s.h.i.+ps whitened every sea. Alexandria was of remarkable beauty, and was called by Ammia.n.u.s _Vertex omnium civitatum_. Its dry atmosphere preserved for centuries the sharp outlines and gay colors of its buildings, some of which were remarkably imposing. The Mausoleum of the Ptolemies, the High Court of justice, the Stadium, the Gymnasium, the Palaestra, the Amphitheatre, and the Temple of the Caesars, all called out the admiration of travelers. The Emporium far surpa.s.sed the quays of the Tiber. But the most imposing structure was the Exchange, to which, for eight hundred years, all the nations sent their representatives. It was commerce which made Alexandria so rich and beautiful, for which it was more distinguished than both Tyre and Carthage. Unlike most commercial cities, it was intellectual, and its schools of poetry, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and theology were more renowned than even those of Athens during the third and fourth centuries. For wealth, population, intelligence, and art, it was the second city of the world.

It would be a great capital in these times.

[Sidenote: Power of the empire seated in the western provinces.]

Such were Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Africa, all of which had been great empires, but all of which were incorporated with the Roman in less than two hundred years after Italy succ.u.mbed to the fortunate city on the Tiber. But these old and venerated monarchies, with their dependent states and provinces, though imposing and majestic, did not compose the vital part of the empire of the Caesars. It was those new provinces which were rescued from the barbarians, chiefly Celts, where the life of the empire centred. It was Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Illyric.u.m, countries which now compose the most powerful European monarchies, which the more truly show the strength of the Roman world.

And these countries were added last, and were not fully incorporated with the empire until imperial power had culminated in the Antonines.

From a comparative wilderness, Spain and Gaul especially became populous and flouris.h.i.+ng states, dotted with cities, and instructed in all the departments of Roman art and science. From these provinces the armies were recruited, the schools were filled, and even the great generals and emperors were furnished. These provinces embraced nearly the whole of modern Europe.

[Sidenote: Spain.]

[Sidenote: Its provinces.]

[Sidenote: Productions.]

[Sidenote: Its towns and cities.]

[Sidenote: Its commercial centres.]

Spain had been added to the empire after the destruction of Carthage, but only after a bitter and protracted warfare. It was completed by the reduction of Numantia, a city of the Celtiberians in the valley of the Douro, and its siege is more famous than that of Carthage, having defied for a long time the whole power of the empire, as Tyre did Alexander, and Jerusalem the armies of t.i.tus. It yielded to the genius of Scipio, the conqueror of Africa, as La Roch.e.l.le, in later times, fell before Richelieu, but not until famine had done its work. The civilization of Spain was rapid after the fall of Numantia, and in the time of the Antonines was one of the richest and most prized of the Roman provinces.

It embraced the whole peninsula, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pyrenees; and the warlike nations who composed it became completely Latinized. It was divided into three provinces--Boetica, Lusitania, and Tarraconensis--all governed by praetors, the last of whom had consular power, and resided in Carthago Nova, on the Mediterranean. Under Constantine, Spain, with its islands, was divided into seven provinces, and stood out from the rest of the empire like a round bastion tower from the walls of an old fortified town. This magnificent possession, extending four hundred and sixty miles from north to south, and five hundred and seventy from east to west, including, with the Balearic Isles, 171,300 square miles, with a rich and fertile soil and inexhaustible mineral resources, was worth more to the Romans than all the conquests of Pompey and Sulla, since it furnished men for the armies, and materials for a new civilization. It furnished corn, oil, wine, fruits, pasturage, metals of all kinds, and precious stones.

Boetica was famed for its harvests, Lusitania for its flocks, Tarraconensis for its timber, and the fields around Carthago Nova for materials of which cordage was made. But the great value of the peninsula to the eyes of the Romans was in its rich mines of gold, silver, and other metals. The bulk of the population was Iberian. The Celtic element was the next most prominent. There were six hundred and ninety-three towns and cities in which justice was administered. New Carthage, on the Mediterranean, had a magnificent harbor, was strongly fortified, and was twenty stadia in circ.u.mference, was a great emporium of trade, and was in the near vicinity of the richest silver mines of Spain, which employed forty thousand men. Gades (New Cadiz), a Phoenician colony, on the Atlantic Ocean, was another commercial centre, and numbered five hundred Equites among the population, and was immensely rich. Corduba, on the Boetis (Guadalquivir), the capital of Boetica, was a populous city before the Roman conquest, and was second only to Gades as a commercial mart. It was the birthplace of Seneca and Lucan.

[Sidenote: Richness of Gaul.]