The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  He tarnished his record as an experimentalist by a torrent of precipitate theory. He ridiculed magic and spells, accepted divination by dreams, and thought that the phases of the moon affected the condition of patients. He took up Hippocrates’ notion of the four humors (blood and phlegm, black and yellow bile),II added a dash of Pythagoras’ doctrine of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and tried to reduce all diseases to derangement of these humors or these elements. He was a firm vitalist, convinced that a pneuma, a vital breath or spirit, pervaded and activated every part of the body. Mechanistic interpretations of biology had been advanced by several physicians, as for example by Asclepiades, who held that physiology should be treated as a branch of physics; Galen objected that whereas a machine is merely the sum of its parts, an organism implies the purposive control of the parts by the whole. And just as purpose alone can explain the origin, structure, and function of organs, so the universe, Galen thought, can be understood only as the expression and instrument of some divine plan. God, however, operates solely through natural laws; there are no miracles, and the best revelation is Nature herself.

  Galen’s teleology and monotheism won him favor with Christians, as later with Moslems. Nearly all his writings were lost to Europe in the chaos of the barbarian invasions, but in the East they were preserved by Arab scholars, and were translated from Arabic into Latin from the eleventh century onward. Galen became then an uncriticized authority, an Aristotle for medieval medicine.

  The last creative age of Greek science ended with Ptolemy and Galen. Experiment ceased, dogma ruled; mathematics relapsed into restatements of geometry, biology into Aristotle, natural science into Pliny; and medicine marked time until the Arab and Jewish physicians of the Middle Ages renewed the noblest of the sciences.

  IV. POETS IN THE DESERT

  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 a
morous 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

  V. THE SYRIANS

  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.

  VI. ASIA MINOR

  North of Syria was the client kingdom—later the province—of Commagene, with a populous capital at Samosata, Lucian’s childhood home. Across the Euphrates stood the little realm of Osrhoene; Rome fortified its capital, Edessa (Urfa), as a base against Parthia; we shall hear more of it in Christian days. Westward
from Syria one passed into Cilicia (as now into Turkey) at Alexandria Issi (Alexandretta). This, Cicero’s province, was highly civilized along the southern Asia Minor coast, but still barbarous in the Taurus hills. Tarsus (Tersous), the capital, was “no mean city,” said its son Saint Paul, but was renowned for its schools and philosophers.

  Over against Cilicia, in the Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus pursued its immemorial life of mining copper, cutting cypress, building ships, and bearing patiently a succession of conquerors. The lucrative mines were owned by Rome and worked by slaves. Galen describes how in his time a mine there collapsed and crushed hundreds of workers—a periodical incident in the geological basis of human comforts and powers.

  North of Cilicia lay arid and mountainous Cappadocia, mining precious metals, and raising wheat, cattle, and slaves for export. West of it, Lycaonia would enter into history with the visits of Saint Paul to Derbe, Lystra, and Iconium. Again north was Galatia, settled and named by the Gauls in the third century B.C.; its most famous product was the Black Stone of Pessinus, sent to Rome as a symbol of Cybele; its chief city was Ancyra, capital of the Hittites 3500 years ago, and of Turkey today. West of Cilicia, the province of Pisidia counted fine cities within its borders, like Xanthus, now recovering from its mass suicide before Brutus, and Aspendus, whose theater is so well preserved that one easily imagines it filling again to hear Menander or Euripides.