Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/22

 under Vespasian after the succession of short reigns that followed Nero; but the years of turmoil throughout the Roman Empire, for several years after the death of Nero, were not years of prosperous trade such as the Periplus describes. This reference indicates a date early in the reign of Nero, before the memory of his predecessor Claudius had faded; roughly, any time between 54 and 60 A. D.

In §23 is a reference to the recent destruction of Arabia Eudaemon. Our present knowledge of Arabian history does not give us any positive date for the war leading to the destruction of this Sabaean port, but the inscriptions discovered and commented on by Glaser point to a time after the middle of the first century.

In §2 our author mentions the city of Meroe. This capital of the Nubian kingdom was severely treated by the Romans soon after their occupation of Egypt; and an expedition sent out against her under Petronius annihilated her army and destroyed many of her cities, including that of Napata. This was in B. C. 22. That another queen Candace of NUbia retained considerable power in the first half of the first century A. D. is shown in Acts VIII, 27. After this Pliny relates, the savage tribes of the neighboring deserts came down, and plundered what was left of the Nubian Kingdom, so that an expedition of inquiry sent by the emperor Nero (Pliny, VI, 35) when he was contemplating a campaign in the South, ventured as far as Meroe and reported that they had met with nothing but deserts on their routes; that the buildings of Meroe itself were but few in number and were still ruled over by a queen named Candace, that name having passed from queen to queen for many years. This state of things can be fixed at about 67 A. D. It is obviously later than the account in the Periplus.

Very soon after Pliny's time Meroe must have been destroyed, as the name does not appear again for several centuries.

A suggestive fact is that the Periplus tells only of the great increase in trade with India, and has no mention of a cessation or decline of that trade consequent upon the burning of Rome, July 19–25 in the year 64. Ten out of the fourteen districts of the city were destroyed. The loss was not equalized; fire insurance did not exist. It is true that this great calamity hardly receives mention in Pliny's work. He refers to the baseless story of Nero's having started the fire, and in several passages to the destruction of buildings, temples and the like, always with some reticence. In many places, however, once in so many words, he mentions the crisis through which Rome passed in the later years of Nero and his short-lived successors, and of the "rest