Roman Empire on holiday

                                 Petra Jordan

Empire on holiday 

It was artfully contrived by Augustus that in the enjoyment of plenty the Romans should lose the memory of freedom.' When he delivered himself of this judgement, Gibbon may have done an injustice to the first emperor's aims, but as the historian of Empire he did not mistake the consequence of his actions. Internal war was at an end; and not only Rome but the whole Empire came to look to the Palatine as the source of all govern/ ment. Thanks to what the Greeks had done, the Empire as a political unity was not so much a collection of provinces as a vast network of cities whose status was that of municipalities. The cities were the centres of education and culture; and to a large extent they relieved the imperial government of the bur/ dens of administration and assumed responsibility for security, communications and tax/collection. As a way of life the Greek city triumphed; indeed, it was so self/assured in its cultural heritage that practically speaking no Greek ever heard the names of Horace or Virgil. But politically it had to stomach the loss of the independence it had so long fought for; and there was perhaps a certain wryness in the remark of the unctuous Aelius Aristides that 'of course, it is more blessed to pay taxes to Rome than to receive tribute from others.'
Publius Aelius Aristides was the spokesman for the Greeks of his age. Born in the Mysian backwoods where city life was introduced about the time of his birth by the emperor Hadrian, he settled at Smyrna and with the help of a strong constitution devoted himself to the care of his health. He nevertheless found leisure for rhetorical exercises, and the address that he delivered to the Romans about ad 143 strikes the keynote of the 'Golden Age': 'As though on holiday,' he tells the Romans, 'the world has shed its burden of arms and devotes itself freely to beautification
and festivity of every kind. The cities have relinquished their old feuds; and a single rivalry possesses every one of them -to be the best and most beautiful of all. Everywhere are gymnasia,
fountains, arches, temples, town halls and schools. The ailing world has been, so to speak, scientifically restored to complete health. Donations flow perpetually from you to the cities; and no one can tell who gets the largest share because your bounty is so impartial. The cities positively gleam with radiance and charm, and the whole earth is a pleasure garden. The smoke of burning homes and warning beacons is gone with the wind from the face of land and sea; instead we are confronted with spectacles of manifold charm and an infinitude of public games. Thus, unquenchable like a sacred flame, the fair never stops but passes on from place to place; and it is always continuing somewhere, for the whole world has quahv fied for these blessings.'
They had never had it so good. 'There is no need of garrisons in the cities, because in each one the greatest and most powerful of the citizens act as Rome's guardians. . .. The masses are protected from the powerful ones by the authority of Rome, so that rich and poor are equally contented and equally benefited.' This amicable concord was part of the system that Roman rule had built up in the provinces. The wealth became concent trated in the hands of a few leading families. These were Rome's friends; they acquired Roman citizenship and, like Aristides himself, two Latin names; and local government was firmly placed in their hands. They did not always exert their
introduced about the time of his birth by the emperor Hadrian, he settled at Smyrna and with the help of a strong constitution devoted himself to the care of his health. He nevertheless found leisure for rhetorical exercises, and the address that he delivered to the Romans about ad 143 strikes the keynote of the 'Golden Age': 'As though on holiday,' he tells the Romans, 'the world has shed its burden of arms and devotes itself freely to beautification and festivity of every kind. The cities have relinquished their old feuds; and a single rivalry possesses every one of them -to be the best and most beautiful of all. Everywhere are gymnasia, fountains, arches, temples, town halls and schools. The ailing world has been, so to speak, scientifically restored to complete health. Donations flow perpetually from you to the cities; and no one can tell who gets the largest share because your bounty is so impartial. The cities positively gleam with radiance and charm, and the whole earth is a pleasure garden. The smoke of burning homes and warning beacons is gone with the wind from the face of land and sea; instead we are confronted with spectacles of manifold charm and an infinitude of public games. Thus, unquenchable like a sacred flame, the fair never stops but passes on from place to place; and it is always continuing somewhere, for the whole world has quahv fied for these blessings.'
They had never had it so good. 'There is no need of garrisons in the cities, because in each one the greatest and most powerful of the citizens act as Rome's guardians. . .. The masses are protected from the powerful ones by the authority of Rome, so that rich and poor are equally contented and equally benefited.' This amicable concord was part of the system that Roman rule had built up in the provinces. The wealth became concent trated in the hands of a few leading families. These were Rome's friends; they acquired Roman citizenship and, like Aristides himself, two Latin names; and local government was firmly placed in their hands. They did not always exert their powers for the benefit of the whole community. Those who wielded power in the cities must often have been torn between two conflicting ambitions - to use the public funds to make their cities more impressive, or to enlarge their own private fortunes. We occasionally read of popular indignation against magnates who contributed too little for improvements or entertainments in their cities; and though public works and spectacles were not the only legitimate objects of expenditure, the surviving remains and inscriptions of the cities are often a good index of the social conscience that prevailed.
In Bithynia and Pontus very little trace survives of the famous cities - even of Nicomedia and Nicaea which kept up a bitter rivalry for precedence in the province. As against this, we have an authoritative record of conditions there in the correspondence of Pliny the Younger, who was sent out by Trajan in the year in as a special commissioner to correct abuses. Before Pliny's arrival, public works had been sanctioned on a considerable scale in several cities and the money had been paid out from the city treasuries; but there was surprisingly little to show for it all. Nicomedia had spent the equivalent of some tens of thousands of gold pounds on two successive schemes for an aqueduct, and both had been abandoned. At Nicaea the substructures laid for a theatre were condemned as unsound after £100,000 had been spent on them. Leading citizens were owing large sums to the treasuries, and they had been refusing to pay the fees due from them. There was a reluctance in some places to submit accounts for scrutiny; and from Pliny's ingenuous statement the experienced emperor had no difficulty in surmising that money paid out for public works had been going into private pockets. We have also an interesting sidelight on imperial policy in the correspondence. A fire had raged unchecked in Nicomedia and destroyed many buildings, and Pliny recommended that a fire brigade should be formed. But Trajan forbade this on grounds of public policy; for he feared that - as happened in American towns of the nineteenth century
- the fire brigades would develop into well-organised political clubs. On the other hand the practical emperor, who was so much concerned with waterways, was gready interested by the Nicomedians' project of cutting a canal to connect their lake by locks with the sea.
In Bithynia we see the evil effects of the Roman system. By way of contrast, the public buildings and civic munificence of the cities of the south coast of Asia Minor cannot fail to excite our admiration. The cities there had handsome shopping avenues flanked by broad side/walks under the shelter of colonnades.
They had grand theatres and vaulted stadiums, ornamental gateways, and monumental buildings inside the wall circuit. Here, as in the leading cities of Ionia, Aelius Aristides' sermon is not belied; and granting that the southern cities have been fortunate in the chances of survival, it seems nevertheless true that the very ruins of a place like Pamphylian Perge amount to more than the magnates of Nicaea ever erected. At the neighbouring site of Aspendus, which was never a city of much consequence, a theatre over 300 feet across was built out at the foot of the citadel hill in the second century after Christ; made of local stone by a local architect, it has successfully withstood time and the elements; and only the loss of the marble facing of the stage background mars the clean lines of the original construction.
Haifa mile away, the ruined aqueduct, with its single tier of arches, still courses for many hundreds of yards across the plain. As it approached the citadel, the water was piped up to a tank raised on arches 100 feet above ground level, and from there it was carried by normal flow into the town.
Cyprus and Phoenicia flourished under Roman rule. Egypt, won from the Ptolemies, was the emperor's special domain. Never at rest, Judaea blew up in the time of Hadrian. South of the Dead Sea, in the region of the rift valley that extends to the Gulf of Akaba, the wilderness had once been awakened to agricultural and industrial life by Solomon. After the time of Alexander the Great it was brought to life again by the Nabataean Arabs, who commanded the caravan routes centring on Petra and by their works of water conservancy made the desert habitable. Allied to Rome, they were only brought inside the Empire in ad 106.
Coele Syria between the Orontes and Jordan valleys belonged to the Ituraean Arabs and had relatively little urban development. But in Roman times a colony was formed at Ba'albek, whose Greek name was Heliopolis (City of the Sun); and here on the watershed between Lebanon and Antilebanon a huge sanctuary was built. In terms of sheer acreage, weight of stone, dimensions of individual blocks, and the amount of carving, this precinct can scarcely have had a rival in the GraecoRoman world.
The sacred enclosure of Ba'albek measured about 300 yards in length, the whole forming a great platform. At the east end stood a propylaea between two towers, approached by a stairs-way 150 feet broad. Inside this was a hexagonal forecourt giving access to the main temple court. The latter was surrounded by a colonnade, behind which the wall was diversified by alternating semicircular and oblong bays fronted by columns. The west side of this court was closed by the great temple of Baal, which was 100 yards long and stood on a podium 45 feet high. A row of half a dozen columns 65 feet high still stands in position, and the entablature over them is elaborately carved; but so little else remains of this gigantic structure that the visitor is left wondering whether it was ever more than a fragment. Alongside this podium a smaller temple was erected at a lower level; and this second building, itself no smaller than the Parthenon, is still standing almost intact. Its spacious interior is articulated by engaged Corinthian columns; they carry a complete entablature on which the ceiling rested, and between them were arched and gabled niches which will have enshrined statues of deities. Finally, outside the precinct stood a little temple which consisted of a circular cella entered through a normal porch. This little building shows some architectural subtlety; the outer columns of the rotunda carried a lunate entablature which helped to take the thrust of the dome; and the capitals, cut with five sides to conform to the unusual design, reproduce on a smaller scale the arcs of the entablature above.
The architects employed at Ba'albek were no doubt skilled in their profession; indeed, the neighbouring city of Damascus produced the most famous architect of Trajan's reign. The workmanship at Ba'albek was equal to the best of its time; and the architectural facades will have been enlivened by innumerable statues in the niches. Yet the sheer opulence and endless repetition of the same motifs of imperial baroque induce in the spectator a feeling of satiety. The Roman world was incomparable in its engineering; but in its artistic sensibility, as in its taste for food and literature, it had a unique immunity from any feeling of indigestion. Magnificence was an end in itself, irrespective of what might lie behind; and it is characteristic of Roman imperial architecture that the same grandiose facade, with its ornate composite or Corinthian order and two/storeyed bays and niches, could with scarcely any modification serve for a gateway, a theatre scene, a city fountain, a public library, or simply as a screen to exclude the outer world.


 

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