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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-