Across the Red Sea from Egypt lay Arabia. Neither the Pharaohs nor the Achaemenids nor the Seleucids nor the Ptolemies nor the Romans had been able to conquer the mysterious peninsula. Arabia Deserta knew only Arab nomads, but in the southwest a mountain range and its streams gave milder temperatures and fruitful vegetation to Arabia Felix, the Yemen of today. In those recesses the little kingdom of Saba hid, the Sheba of the Bible, so rich in frankincense and myrrh, cassia and cinnamon, aloes and nard, senna and gum and precious stones that the Sabateans could build at Mariaba and elsewhere cities proud with temples, palaces, and colonnades.40 Arab merchants not only sold Arab products at high prices, but carried on a caravan trade with northwestern Asia and an active commerce by sea with Egypt, Parthia, and India. In 25 B.C. Augustus sent Aelius Gallus to absorb the kingdom into the Empire; the legions failed to take Mariaba and returned to Egypt decimated by disease and heat. Augustus contented himself with destroying the Arab port at Adana (Aden) and thereby secured control of the trade between Egypt and India.
The main commercial route running north from Mariaba went through the northwest corner of the peninsula, known to the ancients as Arabia Petraea from its capital at Petra, some forty miles south of Jerusalem. The city had been named from the circle of steep crags within which it was strategically placed. There, in the second century B.C., the Nabatean Arabs established a kingdom that slowly grew rich on passing caravans, until its rule extended from Leuce Come on the Red Sea along the eastern border of Palestine through Gerasa and Bostra to Damascus. Under King Aretas IV (9 B.C..-A.D. 40) the country reached its zenith; Petra became a Hellenistic city, Aramaic in speech, Greek in art, Alexandrian in the splendor of its streets. To this time belong the finest of the giant tombs that were carved into the rocks outside the city—crude but powerful façades of double-tiered Greek colonnades, sometimes a hundred feet in height. After Trajan annexed Arabia Petraea into the Empire (106), Bostra became the capital of the province of Arabia, and raised in its turn the architectural symbols of wealth and power. Petra decayed as Bostra and Palmyra became the crossroads of the desert caravans, and the great tombs lapsed into “the nightstalls of nomad flocks.”41
The most striking feature of the great Empire was its numerous and populous cities. Never again till our own century has urbanization been so pronounced. Lucullus, Pompey, Caesar, Herod, Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors prided themselves on founding new cities and embellishing old ones. So, moving northward along the eastern Mediterranean coast, one could hardly go twenty miles without encountering a city—Raphia (Rafa), Gaza, Ascalon, Joppa (Jaffa) Apollonia, Samaria-Sebaste, and Caesarea (Kaisaria). These cities, though in Palestine, were half Greek in population and predominantly Greek in language, culture, and institutions; they were Hellenistic bridgeheads in the pagan invasion of Judea. Herod spent large sums making Caesarea worthy of Augustus, for whom it was named; he provided it with a fine harbor, a lofty temple, a theater, an amphitheater, “sumptuous palaces, and many edifices of white stone.”42 Farther inland were other Greek Palestinian cities—Livias, Philadelphia, Gerasa (Djerasch), and Gadara (Katra). At Gerasa stand a hundred columns of the colonnade that lined the main street; and the ruins of temples, theater, baths, and aqueduct proclaim the affluence of the town in the second century A.D.
Gadara, where the remains of two theaters echo with memories of Greek plays, was famous for its schools, professors, and authors. Here, in the third century B.C., had lived Menippus, the Cynic philosopher and humorist whose satires taught that everything is vain except an upright life, and gave a model to Lucilius, Varro, and Horace. Here in his “Syrian Athens,” some hundred years before Christ, Meleager, the Anacreon of the age, polished epigrams to fair ladies and handsome boys and wore out his pen with love.
Brightly the goblet smiles since rested here
Zenophila’s sweet mouth, to Love so dear.
How blest would she to mine her rose-lips place,
And drink my soul out in a long embrace.43
One of these flames, too soon snuffed out, burned with especial brightness in his memory—Heliodora, whom he loved in Tyre.
I’ll twine white violets, and the myrtle green;
Narcissus will I twine, and lilies sheen;
I’ll twine sweet crocus, and the hyacinth blue;
And last I’ll twine the rose, love’s token true:
That all may form a wreath of beauty, meet
To deck my Heliodora’s tresses sweet.44
Now “Hades has snatched her, and the dust has tarnished her flower in bloom. O Mother Earth, I pray thee, clasp her gently to thy breast.”45
Meleager immortalized himself by gathering into a “garland” (stephanos) the elegiac verse of Greece from Sappho to Meleager; out of this and like collections grew, by merger, the Greek Anthology.III Here is the Greek epigram at its best and worst, polished like a jewel or empty as a pose; it was unwise to pluck these 4000 “flowers” from their branches to make this fading wreath. Some of the verses commemorate forgotten great men, or famous statues, or dead relatives; some, so to speak, are autotaphs, as when a woman who died of triplets says pithily, “After this let women pray for children.”46 Some are barbs aimed at physicians, shrews, undertakers, pedagogues, cuckolds; or the miser who, fainting, is revived by the smell of a penny; or the grammarian whose grandchild displayed successively all three genders; 47 or the pugilist who retires, marries, and gets more blows than he ever received in the ring; or the dwarf who, carried off by a mosquito, thinks he is suffering the rape of Ganymede. A single epigram celebrates “that famous woman who slept with only one man.” Others dedicate offerings to the gods: Lais hangs up her mirror as useless now that it does not show her as she was; Nicias, after fifty years of serving men, surrenders her complaisant girdle to Venus. Some stanzas glorify the arterial dilation of wine as wiser than wisdom. One honors the unceasing monogamy of the adulterer who was buried by a wreck in the arms of his mistress. Some are pagan dirges on the brevity of life; some are Christian assurances of a happy resurrection. Most of them, of course, toast the beauty of women and boys and sing the painful ecstasy of love: everything that later literature has said about amorous itching is here said in brief and in full, with more than Elizabethan conceits. Meleager makes a mosquito his pander by charging it with a message to his lady of the hour. And his townsman Philodemus, philosophic mentor of Cicero, tunes a melancholy note to his Xantho:
White waxen cheeks, soft scented breast,
Deep eyes wherein the Muses nest,
Sweet lips that perfect pleasure bring—
Sing me your song, pale Xantho, sing. . . .
Too soon the music ends. Again,
Again repeat the sad, sweet strain,
With perfumed fingers touch the string;
O Love’s delight, pale Xantho, sing.48