Page:PhilipK.Hitti-SyriaAShortHistory.djvu/104

Rh especially in the second and third centuries, sprang up along all the coasts of the Mediterranean and inland on the trade routes. The islands of Delos and Sicily, the ports of Naples and Ostia, the cities of Lyons and Aries were especially favoured. Syrian ships once again dotted the sea and the old Phoenician energy, adaptability, love of lucrative trade and ability to make bargains and close large and small deals were reactivated.

As importers Syrian merchants monopolized a great deal of the trade of the Latin provinces with the Levant; as bankers they had no rivals. Wines, spices, grain, glassware, fabrics and jewellery were their chief commodities. Wherever Syrian merchants settled, there they established their temples. As carriers of the Christian religion these merchants and Syriac-speaking colonists, soldiers and slaves were no less enthusiastic than as carriers of pagan cults. Their influence on its development in the West was manifest in the direction of asceticism, monasticism and a more emotional form of worship. Devotion to the cross and its adoption as a religious emblem were other Christian elements introduced by Syrians into Europe. In Rome their colony was strong enough to furnish the church with a number of popes, two of whom achieved canonization.

During the third century, while Syrian religious and economic influences were penetrating Latin as well as Greek provinces, all was not well with the empire. Its cultural homogeneity was being fragmented by resurgent provincial patriotisms. Its prosperity was being wrecked by exorbitant taxes unjustly apportioned. Its security was being undermined by protracted civil wars and repeated foreign invasions. Its tottering intellectual and spiritual pillars were subjected to the onslaught of new waves of Christian ideas. A new culture and state, the Byzantine, were emerging to replace those of Rome. Rh