CHAPTER XI

EASTERN HELLENISM UNDER THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE.

IN passing from West to East, from the newer acquisitions to the proper seat of the Greek life inaugurated by Alexander, we feel that we are provided with surer evidence and more details to guide us. In the first place the indications of Strabo, which were hitherto (except for Rome and some spots in Italy) based upon hearsay, or upon the books of far older authors, and which even for Greece itself seem to rest upon second-hand knowledge, are upon Asia Minor and Egypt full and personal. Our author tells us frequently what he has himself seen, not what he has copied from others. In the next place we have, for the times of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, not only the fabulous life and acts of Apollonius of Tyana-a most characteristic figure, but the orations of Dion Chrysostom, which give us many valuable details upon the city life of those days. The inscriptions from these parts of the Empire are also very numerous, and agree in suggesting that here rather than in Greece proper should we now look for the spiritual life of the Greeks. The prosperity of Asia remained, while that of Greece was ruined; a dozen cities in the former were richer and

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subjects of the Empire. This was indeed the Roman peace, which, if it turned many parts of Italy and Greece into a solitude, produced in Asia a prosperity greater than had ever been attained in that most populous and prosperous home of the Hellenic race. For the old Greek civilisation east of the Ægean had been a mere fringe on the coast, not reaching inland save in a few isolated spots. Now the whole heart of the peninsula was settled in great and flourishing polities-free cities with their territories, dynasts of more or less moderation under Roman supervision, and what is perhaps more curious, religious polities, under the sovranty of a high priest either hereditary, or appointed by the local king from his immediate family.

These things remind us at once of medieval parallels. The abbot of Monte Cassino, with his large territory and enormous wealth, was not unfrequently the brother of the Norman king of Apulia and Sicily. There were in modern Germany even in the present century prince - bishops, at Salzburg, Fulda, Würzburg, with similar secular powers, and this was so to some extent with our Bishop of Durham. Such was Pessinus, then a great mart for trade, and still ruled by priests who had been dynasts under the Attalid kings, and whose temple had been adorned by these kings in Hellenistic splendour. Such was Comana,] the great entrepot for Armenian goods, to which all the Asiatic world streamed together when the goddess was brought out in solemn procession. Strabo speaks of it as another Corinth, with its luxurious life, its crowds of temple slaves living 'by their bodies.' Such were to a lesser extent Zela and Mylasa, each with their high priest ruling in sacrosanct dignity. Such, as we now know, was the famous sanctuary and asylum of Hecate at Stratoniceia in Caria, which was a

1 Strabo, xii. 3, § 36.

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separate community, with its own population and precincts, under a ruling high priest, though close beside the city.1 Strabo even mentions in his own day a certain Cleon,2 who was a bandit chief, at first useful to Pompey, then siding with Antony and Labienus, who changed over so cleverly at the critical moment before Actium as to receive great rewards and consideration from the Octavian party; so he dropped the bandit trade and turned dynast, using as his cloak of respectability the fact that he was priest of the Abrettene Zeus, a Mysian god. At last he was promoted to the priesthood of Comana, which he had only held a month when he died, people said as a visitation for bringing swine's flesh into the priest's residence-an abomination as great there as it was to the Jews.

These sanctuaries seem all to have promoted trade and to have injured morals, even if we make some allowance for the naturalism sanctioned by many Asiatic cults. For the deities worshipped were in all cases Asiatic, even when called by Greek names, and their worship was of that orgiastic character which is called nature-worship, and is generally opposed to those civilised cults, which recoil from this conception of religion. The Romans did not interfere with such things more frequently than we do with the rites and cults of our Indian subjects, and yet they kept as much control over the dynasts, priests, and free cities as we do in India. Thus with a great deal of communal freedom, and the survival of dignities and emoluments, as well as even of titular sovranty, there was a certain solidarity attained

1 Cf. BCH xi. 156. It was ravaged by Labienus and the Parthians. We have lists (op. cit. p. 35) of great sacerdotal families, members of whom, including women, had enjoyed one year's high priesthood, which was the culmination of a series of lesser priesthoods. Here then the title ἱερεύς ἐξ ἱερέων means noble.

2 xii. 8, § 9.

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under the headship of Rome which was eminently useful in obviating border wars, privateering, and the other evils of multiplied independencies.

We shall do well to verify these general statements by some of the details to be found in our two authorities. For we may now quote Dion Chrysostom as well as Strabo, seeing that there was no serious change in life or society, though Dion's life and work in Asia Minor were two generations later than those of the geographer. The volcanoes had indeed subsided, and some emperors had supervened not so wise as Tiberius, but on the whole the management of the provinces was little altered, and the evidence of Dion, so far as we can judge, may be used in our sketch of this period.1 Dion was also a traveller, indeed a far greater traveller than Strabo, and went about not only professionally, but also to see the world and its social curiosities. Like Strabo, he was a native of northern Asia Minor, of Prusa in Bithynia, and his many orations to Asiatic cities concerning his and their affairs show an intimacy with the same lands which Strabo knew personally. The information we obtain from Dion is fortunately of a different kind from that supplied by the geographer; it concerns the inner life, the jealousies, the quarrels of such rivals as Nicea and Nicomedia; the disturbances at Apamea; the peculiarities of life in Rhodes, Tarsus, Alexandria. It is evidence to be supplemented, not only by the invaluable letters of Pliny from Bithynia, which sometimes tell the very same facts from an official point of view, but by the allusions in the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles of S. Paul, which date from about the same period.

1 In the same way we may say that, socially at least, the Greece of Plutarch had changed but little even from the Greece of Polybius, hardly at all from the Greece of the end of the first century B.C. this inference may yet be considerably modified by further discoveries.

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