It speaks well for Roman rule that the cities of Asia Minor recovered so rapidly from the intermittent fever of these wars. Nicomedia became the capital of the province of Bithynia-Pontus and later the imperial seat of Diocletian; Nicaea would be immortalized by the most important council in the history of the Christian Church. The two cities so rivaled one another in building that Trajan had to send the younger Pliny to draw them back from bankruptcy. Nicomedia made her offering to literature in Flavius Arrianus, whom we have seen recording the discourses of Epictetus. Governor of Cappadocia for six years, archon of Athens for one, Arrian yet found time to write many histories, of which only the Anabasis of Alexander remains, with an appendix of Indica. It was written in clear and simple Greek, for Arrian took Xenophon as his exemplar in style as well as life. “This work,” he says, with the bold vanity of the ancients, “is, and has been from my youth up, equivalent to native land, and family, and public office for me; and therefore I do not deem myself unworthy to rank among the greatest authors in the Greek language.”72
Other cities along the Black Sea had goodly buildings and famous scholars. Myrlea had 320,000 inhabitants;73 Amastris (Amasra) impressed Pliny as “a neat and lovely city,” known for its fine box trees; Sinope flourished as a fishing center and an outlet for the timber and minerals of its countryside; Amisus (Samsun) and Trapezus made a living by trading across the waters with Scythia (southern Russia); and Amasea (Amasia) gave birth and a home to antiquity’s most celebrated geographer.
Strabo came of a rich family, related, he assures us, to the Pontic kings. He suffered from a peculiar squint still known by his name.74 He traveled extensively, apparently on diplomatic missions, and used every opportunity to gather geographical or historical information. He wrote a lost history continuing Polybius; and in 7 B.C. he issued his great Geography, of whose seventeen books time has preserved nearly all. Like Arrian he begins by proclaiming the virtues of his work:
I ask pardon of my readers, and appeal to them not to fasten the blame for the length of my discussion upon me rather than upon those who earnestly desire knowledge of things famous and ancient. . . . In this work I must leave untouched what is small, and devote my attention to what is noble and great . . . useful or memorable or entertaining. And just as, in judging the merits of colossal statues, we do not examine each individual part with minute care, but rather consider the general effect … so should this my book be judged. For it, too, is a colossal work . . . worthy of a philosopher.75
He borrows frankly from Polybius and Poseidonius, less frankly from Eratosthenes, brings them all sharply to account for their errors, and suggests that his own should be blamed on his sources.76 But he acknowledges his sources with rare candor and usually selects them with discrimination. He notes that the extension of the Roman Empire has widened geographical knowledge, but believes that there are whole continents still unknown—possibly in the Atlantic. He believes that the earth is spheroidal (but the word probably meant spherical), and that if one were to sail westward from Spain he would in time come to India. He describes coastlines as always changing through erosion or eruption and conjectures that subterranean disturbances may someday sever Suez and unite the seas. His work was a brave summary of the global knowledge of his age and must be ranked as one of the major achievements of ancient science.
Far more renowned than Strabo in his time was Dio Chrysostom—Dio of the Golden Mouth (A.D. 40-120). His family had long been distinguished in Prusa; his grandfather had exhausted a fortune in gifts to the Bithynian city and then had made another; his father had gone through the same experience; and Dio followed in their steps.77 He became an orator and a sophist, went to Rome, was converted to Stoicism by Musonius Rufus, and was banished from Italy and Bithynia by Domitian (82). Forbidden the use of his property or income, he wandered for thirteen years from country to country as a penniless philosopher, refusing money for his discourses, and earning his bread for the most part by the work of his hands. When Domitian was succeeded by Nerva, Dio’s exile was changed into honors; Nerva and Trajan befriended him and gave his city many favors at his request. He returned to Prusa and devoted most of his wealth to beautifying it. Another philosopher accused him of embezzling public funds; he was tried by Pliny and appears to have been exonerated.
Dio left behind him eighty orations. For us today they contain more wind than meat; they suffer from empty amplification, deceptive analogies, and rhetorical tricks; they stretch half an idea to half a hundred pages; no wonder a weary listener complained, “You are letting the sun go down with your interminable questions.”78 But the man had charm and eloquence, else he could hardly have become the most celebrated orator of the century, for whose speeches men would interrupt a war. “I don’t know what you mean,” said the honest Trajan, “but I love you as myself.”79 The barbarians on the Borysthenes (Dnieper) heard him as gladly as the Greeks gathered at Olympia, or the excitable Alexandrians; an army about to revolt against Nerva was mollified into acceptance by the impromptu address of the half-naked exile.
Probably what drew people to him was not his fine Attic Greek, but the courage of his denunciations. Almost alone in pagan antiquity he condemned prostitution; and few writers of his time so openly attacked the institution of slavery. (He was a bit vexed, however, when he found that his slaves had run away.)80 His address to the Alexandrians was a castigation of their luxury, superstition, and vice. He chose Ilium as the scene of an oration in which he argued that Troy had never existed and that “Homer was the boldest liar in history.” In the heart of Rome he expounded the case of the countryside against the city, painted in vivid narrative a touching picture of rural poverty, and warned his audience that the land was being neglected and the agricultural basis of civilization was in decay. At Olympia, amid a multitude of fanatical worldlings, he reproved the atheists and epicureans of the day. Though popular conceptions of deity may be absurd, said Dio, the wise man will understand that the simple mind needs simple ideas and pictorial symbols. In truth no man can conceive the form of the Supreme Being, and even Pheidias’ noble statue was an anthropomorphic assumption as unwarrantable as the primitive identification of God with a star or a tree. We cannot know what God is, but we have an innate conviction that he exists, and we feel that philosophy without religion is a dark and hopeless thing. The only real freedom is wisdom—i.e., the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong; the road to freedom lies not through politics or revolution, but through philosophy; and true philosophy consists not in the speculations of books, but in the faithful practice of honor and virtue according to the dictates of that inmost voice which is, in some mystic sense, the word of God in the heart of man.81