ASIA
786
ASIA
as everywhere in the empire, wa-s close and minute,
but not intolerable. Oocasionally the taxes were
remitteil and in periods of public calamity (earth-
quakes, inundations) the public treasury came to aid
the unhappy provincials. The revenues of the penin-
sula, deeply impaired by republican misgovernment,
the Mithradatic wars, and the campaigns against the
pirates, increased with rapidity; the fertile islands of
the archipelago together with Crete and Cyprus, cen-
turies ago hellenized in polity, tongue and civiUzed
institutions, were bee-hives of industry. Rhodes,
e. g., was the great workshop of Greek sculptors who
continued, though in a decadent way, the glorious
traditions of the Ionian and Pergamene ages. Every
available piece of ground on the coasts was intensely
cultivated, as the pitiful wreckage of agricultural
engineering yet shows, while in the interior the
plains of Galatia were covered with goats and sheep,
and those of Cappadocia with the finest breed of
horses known to the ancients. That all the indus-
trial virtues were highly cultivated is shown by a
list of occupations drawn from Christian inscriptions
of the fifth century (Cumont). They exhibit among
other callings oil-dealers, scribes, greengrocers,
potters, coppersmiths, skinners, mariners, money-
changers, and goldsmiths. In the imperial period
few new cities were added to the five hundred busy
urban hives of the western coast, but Greek civiliza-
tion went hand in hand with Roman law through
the interior and was welcomed, e. g. in the moun-
tains of uncouth Cappadocia and of rugged warlike
Isauria where the Attalids and Seleucids had never
been able to acclimatize it. For the better adminis-
tration of justice the land was divided into a certain
number of judicial districts {conventus juridici) and
assizes were regularly held in the chief towns of the
same.
A certain unity of religion was reached in the worship of Rome and Augustus, i. e. of the dead and later of the living emperors, to whom temples were built in the metropolitan cities (Augusteum, CiEsareura), and in the celebration of whose festivals the Asiatic provincial proclaimed his gratitude, exercised his new Roman patriotism, and felt him- self drawn nearer, if not to his fellow-Asiatics, at least to the marvellous darling of fortune enthroned upon the distant Tiber. The man of Asia Minor had long been subject to Persia without revolt, and then to the children of the brilliant marshals of Ale.xander; submission was natural to him, and this time it brought in its train all that was needed to make life perfect in so favoured a land, i. e. peace and prosperity. As high-priest of the provincial department of the imperial religion of Rome and Augustus his influence over all religious nxatters was great. The office seems at times to liave been closely identified with that of the president of the em[)eror's festival, and was the formal source of much of the persecution directed against the Chris- tians of the province, especially during the annual festival, when the deputies of tlie provincial cities met at the metropolis and manifested their patriot- ism, among other ways, by denouncing the followers of .lesus for refusing to adore the divinity (numen, genius) of the emperor. An ideal picture of the office, affected, however, by Christian institutions and experience, is given by Julian the .\postate in his famous letter to the Galatarch (Ep., xlix; cf. Eus., Hist. ICccl., VIII, xiv, 9). With the honour of president of the annual festival of the emperor went other distinctions, a speci.al title (.Xsiarcli, Bitliyni- arcli, (Jalatarch), in addition to various marks of honour. Only th<' ricli could protend to merit it, for the office carried with it the right and the duty to defray the expenses of such festivals. But there were many to claim it, for provincial pride w;is strong in Asia Minor, and tlie rivalry of the
metropolitan cities was very keen. The new wor-
ship of Rome and Augustus was not unlike a re-
ligion established by law, though it never interfered
with the older forms of Greek or Oriental worship,
or the numerous miraculous asylums, or even such
individual careers as those of ApoUonius of Tyana
or .\lexander of Abonoteichos. To the cities was
left their ancient liberty of internal administration,
the repartition of imperial assessments, and the
preservation of local order. Only the wealthy
could vote for the magistrates, and the time was
yet far off when their descendants would try in vain
to rid themselves of an hereditary dignity that in
the end carried with it the heaviest of financial
burtlens. Occasionally the imperial government
looked into the municipal book-keeping and even
controlled the municipal decrees; more frequently
it exercised a certain surveillance over the nomina-
tion of the chief of police (eirenarch). The pubHc
safety was assured in the early imperial times by a
small army of .5,000 auxiliary troops in Galatia,
and by the Black Sea fleet of forty ships stationed
at Trebizond. In the time of Vespasian two legions
were quartered in Cappadocia and along the upper
waters of the Euphrates. A few soldiers scattered
here and there through the provinces served the
Roman magistrates as messengers, sheriffs, bailiffs,
and the like. Asia Minor, in which both the senate
and the emperor exercised, in theory at least, a
co-ordinate jurisdiction until the end of the tliird
century, was too contented and loyal to call for
other troops than were necessary for protection
from the foreign enemy, or to repress brigandage.
The latter was, unliappily, never quite suppressed
in a land well fitted for the flight and concealment
of the lawless. Up to the time of Justinian certain
parts of Isauria and Cilicia were the home of bold
freebooters, despite the ever tightening military
cordons, the increase of civilization, and the growing
influence of Christian principles. There were often
in municipal life lack of integrity, corruption, and
waste, coupled with intrigues, rivalries, and factions,
but this is no more than might be expected amid
such unexampled prosperity, in a land where no
large political life existed, and where climate and the
narrow municipal horizon conspired to diminish
energy and magnify local and temporary interests.
"The calm sea" says Momm.sen, "easily becomes a
swamp, and the lack of the great pulsation of gen-
eral interest is clearly discernible also in .\sia Minor".
A complete description of the cities of Asia Minor
in the best days of the empire, their splendour
and magnificence, partly inherited and partly to
the credit of Rome, sounds to modern ears like
exaggeration. Their ruins, however, are convinc-
ingly eloquent. Marble and granite, exquisitely
and solidly worked, were the building materials of
the countless temples, baths, assembly-rooms,
gymnasia, deep-pillared porticoes and colonnades
that graced even the smallest of its cities, and were
very often the gifts of private individuals, who ex-
hibited thus in their httle "fatherland" (as the
Christian Bishop .\bercius calls his native city
Hierapolis), a power of self-sacrifice and affection
for the public weal for which no larger stage was
open. Countless art-works in marble and bronze,
often replicas of incomparable Greek originals
carried away in the republican period, decorated the
public buildings and the open squares; even these
copies seem at last to have been confiscated by
Constantine for his now city by the Golden Horn.
Aqueducts and reservoirs, embankments and levees,
saved and controlled the useful waters that are now
the ruin of the land. Terraces built with skill and
art multiplied the productive power of the fertile
soil. l'>om the city gates there radiated numerous
long lines of sculptufcd tombs, whoso broken in-
