LITMIR.BIZ

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who have largely descended from them, the proverbial passions of the Gauls were for war and for the art of speaking; but at our date the former passion was decaying and the latter gaining ground. The Gaulish provinces united at a point on the Rhone, near which necessarily arose the largest city of that part of the world, namely, Lugdunum, or Lyons, which speedily became not only a seat of administration but a noted school of eloquence.

      Of Britain there is as yet little to say. For the last twenty years the Romans had done their best to conquer the Celtic tribes, who suffered, as Celtic tribes were always apt to suffer, from their own disunion. They had now reached the Trent—or rather a line from Chester to Lincoln—had just punished Boudicca (or Boadicea) for her vigorous effort at retaliation and her slaughter of 70,000 Romans or adherents of Rome, and were following the true Roman practice of securing what they had won by building military roads and establishing strong posts of control, as at Colchester, Chester, and Caerleon-on-Usk. Some amount of iron-working was being done in Britain, but its chief exports were, as they had long been, tin, salt, and hides. The British themselves had no towns. The places so called were nothing more than collections of huts, surrounded by rampart and ditch, in some easily defensible spot amid wood or marsh.

      Along the Rhine it is enough to note that the Germans were being kept in hand. South of the Danube the region now known as Styria and Carinthia was rich in iron, and both here and all along the mountainous tract of the Tyrol and neighbourhood Rome was steadily pushing her language and habits by means of settlement, trading, and military occupation. It may be remarked by the way that at this date there were in use practically all the Alpine passes now familiar to us—the Mont Genèvre, the Little and Great St. Bernard, the Simplon, the St. Gothard, and the Brenner.

      The Upper Balkans were necessarily under military occupation, but Macedonia was a flourishing graecized province with Thessalonica—the modern Salonika—for its capital. Greece proper, known officially as Achaia, had declined in every respect since the classical age of Athens. The monuments of that city were, indeed, as sumptuous as ever; a number had been added in Roman times, though generally in inferior taste. Athens was still a sort of university, but its professors were for the most part sophists or rhetoricians, beating over again the old straws of philosophies which had once possessed a living meaning and exercised a living force. Athens herself had never properly recovered from the migration of learning to Alexandria. Delphi, the great oracular seat of the Greek world, had also declined in importance, although it could still boast of an imposing array of buildings and memorials. The centre of commerce and of official life, a Roman colony in the midst of Greece, a cosmopolitan and a dissolute place, was Corinth on the Isthmus. Here Nero had intended to cut a canal through from sea to sea—he had turned the first sod with his own hand—but his personal extravagance caused an insufficiency of funds, and the project met with the fate of the first enterprise at Panama. It was, therefore, still necessary for a traveller proceeding to the East to cross the Isthmus and reship at Cenchreae. The rest of Greece was almost all poor and sparsely populated, and many ancient sites and monuments were already suffering from neglect and dropping into ruin.

      [Illustration: Fig. 6—THE ACROPOLIS AT ATHENS (From D'Ooge.)]

      Across the Aegean, Asia Minor was in a condition of unprecedented prosperity. It contained no less than five hundred towns of considerable repute, chief among them being Smyrna and Ephesus, with their handsome public buildings, open squares, theatres, gardens, and promenades. Smyrna in particular boasted of its wide marble-paved streets crossing each other at right angles, and provided with arcades running along their sides. Its one defect was the want of proper sewers. Among the sights of the world was the huge temple at Ephesus, dedicated to Artemis, the "Great Diana" of the Acts of the Apostles. This temple, the largest in the ancient world, was 425 feet long, 220 wide, and its columns were 60 feet in height and numbered 127.

      South-east of the Aegean was situated the opulent Rhodes, the handsomest and strongest port in the Mediterranean, provided with fine harbour buildings, a seat of learning, and so full of art that it contained no less than 3000 statues. In the somewhat desolate interior of Asia Minor were spacious runs for sheep and horses, but wheat also was grown, and the country could at least produce tall and sturdy slaves. In northern Galatia the common people had not yet forgotten the Celtic tongue which they had brought from Gaul over three centuries ago. In the south-east, opposite Cyprus, lay Tarsus, the birthplace of Paul, a city which combined the art of manufacturing goats' hair into tent-cloth with the pursuit of what may be called a university instruction in philosophy, science, and letters. In both these local avocations the apostle employed his youth to good purpose. Across the water Cyprus produced the copper which still bears its name.

      [Illustration: FIG. 7.—PLAN OF ANTIOCH.]

      Of Syria, rich in corn and fruits, the chief city—the third in the empire—was Antioch, a town splendidly laid out upon the Orontes in a strikingly modern fashion. A broad street with colonnades extended in a straight line through and beyond the city for four miles, and was crossed by others at right angles. This street is said to have been lighted at nights, while the Roman streets remained dark and dangerous. In the neighbourhood of the city was the celebrated park called Daphne, where the voluptuous and almost incredible dissipation of the ancient world perhaps reached its acme. Like Alexandria, Antioch was furiously addicted to horseracing.

      Further down the coast Sidon produced its famous glass, and Tyre its famous purple dye. Inland from these lay the handsome city of Damascus, famed for its gardens and for its work in fine linen. Still farther south was Hierosolyma, or Jerusalem, of which it is perhaps not necessary here to give details. Its population was reckoned at a quarter of a million.

      On the coast of Egypt, after you had caught sight, some thirty miles away, of the first glint from the huge marble lighthouse standing 400 feet high upon the island of Pharos, you arrived at Alexandria, the second city of the Roman world and the great emporium for the trade of Egypt, of all Eastern Africa as far as Zanzibar, and of India. From it came the papyrus paper, delicate glass-work, muslin, embroidered cloths, and such additions to luxury as roses out of season. Alexandria, built like Antioch on a rectangular plan, with its chief streets 100 feet in width, contained a Jewish quarter, controlled by a Jewish headman and a Sanhedrin; an Egyptian quarter; and a Greek quarter, in which were the splendid buildings of the Library with its 600,000 volumes, and the University, devoted to all branches of learning and science—including medicine—and provided with botanical and zoological gardens. Here also were the temple of Caesar and the fine harbour buildings. Its population, exceedingly money-loving and pleasure-loving, and comprising representatives of every Oriental people, may have numbered three-quarters of a million. The circuit of the city was about thirteen miles, and its chief street some four miles in length.

      [Illustration: FIG. 8.—EMBLEM OF ANTIOCH.]

      Behind it lay Egypt, with its irrigation and traffic canals kept in good order; with its monuments in far better preservation than now—the pyramids, for example, being still coated with their smooth marble sides, and not to be mounted by the present steps, from which the marble has been torn; with its rich corn-lands, its convict mines and quarries, the Siberia of antiquity; with its string of towns along the Nile and its seven or, eight millions of inhabitants—mostly speaking Coptic—and full of strange superstitions and peculiar worship of animals.

      Coming westward we reach the prosperous Cyrene, and then, by the rather out-of-the-world Bight of Tripoli, Africa proper, where once ruled mighty Carthage, the colony of Tyre, and where the Phoenician or Punic language still survived among the population of mixed Phoenicians and Berbers. Here, too, are wide and luxuriant stretches of corn-land, upon which Rome depends only next, if next, to those of Alexandria. Further west are the Berber tribes of Mauretania, governed by Rome but hardly yet fully assimilated into the Roman system.

      [Illustration: FIG. 9.—EMBLEM OF ALEXANDRIA.]

      In the Mediterranean Sea lie Crete, a place which had now become of little importance; Sicily, as much Greek as Roman, fertile in crops and possessed of many a splendid Greek temple and theatre; Sardinia, an unhealthy island infested by banditti, and employed as a sort of convict station, producing some amount of grain and minerals; and Corsica, which bore much the same character for savagery as it did in times comparatively recent,

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