Northward along the coast lay the ancient cities of Phoenicia, part, with Palestine, of the province of Syria. Their industrious workers skilled in handicrafts, their favored position as traditional ports of trade, their rich and subtle merchants sending ships and agents everywhere, had kept them alive through all the vicissitudes of a thousand years. Tyre (Sur) had taller dwellings than Rome’s49 and worse slums; it stank with the smell of its dyeing establishments, but it consoled itself with the thought that the whole world bought its richly colored textiles, above all its purple silks. Sidon had probably discovered the art of blowing glass and now specialized in glass and bronze. Berytus (Beirut) was distinguished for its schools of medicine, rhetoric, and law; very likely from this university the great jurists Ulpian and Papinian went to Rome.
No province of the Empire surpassed Syria in industry and prosperity. Where now 3,000,000 inhabitants find a precarious existence, 10,000,000 lived in Trajan’s time.50 Half a hundred cities here enjoyed the pure water, the public baths, the underground drainage system, the clean markets, the gymnasia and palaestras, the lectures and music, the schools and temples and basilicas, the porticoes and arches, the public statuary and picture galleries, characteristic of the Hellenistic cities in the first century after Christ.51 The oldest of them was Damascus, over the Lebanons from Sidon, fortified by the surrounding desert, and turned almost into a garden by the spreading arms and tributaries of a stream gratefully called “the river of gold.” Many caravan routes converged here, and poured into the bazaars the products of three continents.
Returning over the Anti-Lebanon hills and moving north over dusty roads, the modern traveler is astonished to find, in the tiny village of Baalbek, the ruins of two majestic temples and a propylaeum, once the pride of Heliopolis, the Greco-Roman-Syrian City of the Sun. Augustus planted a small colony there, and the town grew as the sacred seat of Baal the Sun-God and as the meeting point of roads to Damascus, Sidon, and Beirut. Under Antoninus Pius and his successors Roman, Greek, and Syrian architects and engineers raised, on the site of an old Phoenician temple to Baal, an imposing shrine to Iuppiter Heliopolitanus. It was built of huge monoliths from a quarry a mile away; one block measures sixty-two by fourteen by eleven feet, and contains enough stone for a commodious house. Fifty-one marble steps 150 feet wide lead up to the propylaeum, a Corinthian portico. Beyond a colonnaded forecourt and court rose the main temple, of which fifty-eight columns still tower sixty-two feet into the air. Near it are the remains of a smaller temple, variously attributed to Venus, Bacchus, and Demeter; nineteen of its columns survive, and a handsome portal delicately carved. Resplendent in their solitary grandeur under the unclouded sun, the columns of these temples are among the fairest extant works of man. Seeing them we feel, better than in Italy, the grandeur that was Rome, the wealth and courage, skill and taste that could build, in so many scattered cities, temples greater and more majestic than the crowded capital ever knew.
A similar sight meets the traveler who strikes eastward across the desert from Horns, the ancient Emesa, to Tadmor, which the Greeks translated into Palmyra, City of a Myriad Palms. Its fortunate position and fertile soil around two gushing springs on the roads from Emesa and Damascus to the Euphrates made it grow in affluence until it was one of the major cities of the East; and its distance from other settlements enabled it to maintain practical independence despite nominal allegiance to Seleucid kings or Roman emperors. Its wide central thoroughfare was flanked by shady porticoes containing 454 columns; and at the four main crossings were stately arches, of which one remains to let us judge the rest. The glory of the city was the Temple of the Sun, dedicated (A.D. 30) to the supreme trinity of Bel (Baal), Yarhibol (the sun), and Aglibol (the moon). Its size continued Assyrian traditions of immensity. Its court, the largest in the Empire, had an unrivaled colonnade 4000 feet long, much of it composed of Corinthian columns running four abreast. Within the court and the temple were paintings and sculptures whose extant examples reveal the approach of Palmyra to Parthia in art as in geography.
A main route eastward from Palmyra reached the Euphrates at Dura-Europus. There (A.D. 100) the merchants shared their gains with the Palmyrene trinity by rearing a temple half Greek and half Indian; and an eastern painter adorned the walls with frescoes that vividly illustrate the Oriental origin of Byzantine and early Christian art.52 Farther north on the great river were other important crossing towns at Thapsacus and Zeugma. Turning westward from Thapsacus the traveler passed through Beroea (Aleppo) and Apamea to the Mediterranean at Laodicea—still keeping its ancient name as Latakia, and still an active port. Between it and Apamea the river Orontes flowed north, between shores largely pre-empted by rich estates, to Antioch (Antakia), capital of Syria. The river, and a great network of roads, brought the goods of the East to Antioch, while its Mediterranean port, Seleucia Pieria, fourteen miles down the stream, brought in the products of the West. Most of the city rose on a mountain slope and had the Orontes at its feet; it was a picturesque location, that helped Antioch rival Rhodes as the most beautiful city of the Hellenic East. It had a system of street lighting that made it safe and brilliant at night. The main avenue, four and a half miles long, was paved with granite and had a covered colonnade on either side, so that people could walk from one end of the town to the other immune to rain and sun. Pure water was supplied in abundance to every home. The complex population of 600,000 Greeks, Syrians, and Jews was notoriously gay, pursuing pleasure relentlessly, laughing at the pompous Romans who came to govern them, oscillating between the circus and the amphitheater, the brothels and the baths, and taking full advantage of Daphne, their famous suburban park. Festivals were numerous, and Aphrodite had a share in all of them. During the feast of Brumalia, lasting through most of December, the whole city, says a contemporary, resembled a tavern, and the streets rang all night with song and revelry.53 There were schools of rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine, but Antioch was not a center of learning. Its populace lived intensely for the day; and when it needed religion it flocked to astrologers, magicians, miracle-workers, and charlatans.
The general picture of Syria under Roman rule is one of prosperity more continuous than in any other province. Most of the workers were freemen, except in domestic service. The upper classes were Hellenized, the lower remained Oriental; in the same town Greek philosophers rubbed elbows with temple prostitutes and emasculated priests; and even till Hadrian children were now and then offered as sacrifices to the gods.54 Sculpture and painting took on a semi-Oriental, half-medieval face and form. The Greek language prevailed in government and literature, but native tongues—chiefly Aramaic—remained the speech of the people. Scholars were plenty and made the world ring with their moment’s fame. Nicolaus of Damascus, besides mentoring Antony, Cleopatra, and Herod, undertook the weary task of writing a universal history—a labor, he tells us, that Hercules himself would have shunned.55 Time in its tenderness has buried all his works, as at its leisure it will cover ours.