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Transcriber's Notes which follow the Index.




THE PROVINCES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN

[Illustration: Printer's Mark]

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO




THE PROVINCES

OF THE

ROMAN EMPIRE

FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN

BY

THEODOR MOMMSEN

TRANSLATED

WITH THE AUTHOR’S SANCTION AND ADDITIONS

BY

WILLIAM P. DICKSON, D.D., LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

VOL. II

_WITH TWO MAPS BY PROFESSOR KIEPERT_

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON

1909


_First Edition 1886_

_Reprinted with corrections 1909_




CONTENTS


BOOK EIGHTH

_THE PROVINCES AND PEOPLE, FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN_

                                                            PAGE
CHAPTER IX.

  THE EUPHRATES FRONTIER AND THE PARTHIANS                    1

CHAPTER X.

  SYRIA AND THE LAND OF THE NABATAEANS                      116

CHAPTER XI.

  JUDAEA AND THE JEWS                                       160

CHAPTER XII.

  EGYPT                                                     232

CHAPTER XIII.

  THE AFRICAN PROVINCES                                     303

  APPENDIX                                                  347

  MAPS                                                I. to II.

  INDEX                                                     355




CHAPTER IX.

THE EUPHRATES FRONTIER AND THE PARTHIANS.


[Sidenote: The empire of Iran.]

The only great state with which the Roman empire bordered was the
empire of Iran,[1] based upon that nationality which was best known
in antiquity, as it is in the present day, under the name of the
Persians, consolidated politically by the old Persian royal family of
the Achaemenids and its first great-king Cyrus, united religiously by
the faith of Ahura Mazda and of Mithra. No one of the ancient peoples
of culture solved the problem of national union equally early and with
equal completeness. The Iranian tribes reached on the south as far
as the Indian Ocean, on the north as far as the Caspian Sea; on the
north-east the steppes of inland Asia formed the constant battle-ground
between the settled Persians and the nomadic tribes of Turan. On the
east mighty mountains formed a boundary separating them from the
Indians. In western Asia three great nations early encountered one
another, each pushing forward on its own account: the Hellenes, who
from Europe grasped at the coast of Asia Minor, the Aramaic peoples,
who from Arabia and Syria advanced in a northern and north-eastern
direction and substantially filled the valley of the Euphrates, and
lastly, the races of Iran, not merely inhabiting the country as far
as the Tigris, but even penetrating to Armenia and Cappadocia, while
primitive inhabitants of other types in these far-extending regions
succumbed under these leading powers and disappeared. In the epoch
of the Achaemenids, the culminating point of the glory of Iran, the
Iranian rule went far beyond this wide domain proper to the stock on
all sides, but especially towards the west. Apart from the times, when
Turan gained the upper hand over Iran and the Seljuks and Mongols ruled
over the Persians, foreign rule, strictly so called, has only been
established over the flower of the Iranian stocks twice, by Alexander
the Great and his immediate successors and by the Arabian Abbasids,
and on both occasions only for a comparatively short time; the
eastern regions--in the former case the Parthians, in the latter the
inhabitants of the ancient Bactria--not merely threw off again the yoke
of the foreigner, but dislodged him also from the cognate west.

[Sidenote: The rule of the Parthians.]

When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate
contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they
found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians. We
have formerly had to make mention of this state on several occasions;
this is the place to gather together the little that can be ascertained
regarding the peculiar character of the empire, which so often
exercised a decisive influence on the destinies of the neighbouring
state. Certainly to most questions, which the historical inquirer
has here to put, tradition has no answer. The Occidentals give but
occasional notices, which may in their isolation easily mislead us,
concerning the internal condition of their Parthian neighbours and
foes; and, if the Orientals in general have hardly understood how to
fix and to preserve historical tradition, this holds doubly true of
the period of the Arsacids, seeing that it was by the later Iranians
regarded, together with the preceding foreign rule of the Seleucids, as
an unwarranted usurpation between the periods of the old and the new
Persian rule--the Achaemenids and the Sassanids; this period of five
hundred years is, so to speak, eliminated by way of correction[2] from
the history of Iran, and is as if nonexistent.

[Sidenote: The Parthians Scythian.]

The standpoint, thus occupied by the court-historiographers of the
Sassanid dynasty, is more the legitimist-dynastic one of the Persian
nobility than that of Iranian nationality. No doubt the authors of the
first imperial epoch describe the language of the Parthians, whose home
corresponds nearly to the modern Chorasan, as intermediate between
the Median and the Scythian, that is, as an impure Iranian dialect;
accordingly they were regarded as immigrants from the land of the
Scythians, and in this sense their name is interpreted as “fugitive
people,” while the founder of the dynasty, Arsaces, is declared by
some indeed to have been a Bactrian, but by others a Scythian from the
Maeotis. The fact that their princes did not take up their residence
in Seleucia on the Tigris, but pitched their winter quarters in the
immediate neighbourhood at Ctesiphon, is traced to their wish not
to quarter Scythian troops in the rich mercantile city. Much in the
manners and arrangements of the Parthians is alien from Iranian habits,
and reminds us of the customs of nomadic life; they transact business
and eat on horseback, and the free man never goes on foot. It cannot
well be doubted that the Parthians, whose name alone of all the tribes
of this region is not named in the sacred books of the Persians, stand
aloof from Iran proper, in which the Achaemenids and the Magians are at
home. The antagonism of this Iran to the ruling family springing from
an uncivilised and half foreign district, and to its immediate
followers--this antagonism, which the Roman authors not unwillingly
took over from their Persian neighbours--certainly subsisted and
fermented throughout the whole rule of the Arsacids, till it at length
brought about their fall. But the rule of the Arsacids may not on that
account be conceived as a foreign rule. No privileges were conceded
to the Parthian stock and to the Parthian province. It is true that
the Parthian town Hecatompylos is named as residence of the Arsacids;
but they chiefly sojourned in summer at Ecbatana (Hamadan), or else
at Rhagae like the Achaemenids, in winter, as already stated, in the
camp-town of Ctesiphon, or else in Babylon on the extreme western
border of the empire. The hereditary burial-place continued in the
Parthian town Nisaea; but subsequently Arbela in Assyria served for
that purpose more frequently. The poor and remote native province of
the Parthians was in no way suited for the luxurious court-life, and
the important relations to the West, especially of the later Arsacids.
The chief country continued even now to be Media, just as under the
Achaemenids. Although the Arsacids might be of Scythian descent, not so
much depended on what they were as on what they desired to be; and they
regarded and professed themselves throughout as the successors of Cyrus
and of Darius. As the seven Persian family-princes had set aside the
false Achaemenid, and had restored the legitimate rule by the elevation
of Darius, so needs must other seven have overthrown the Macedonian
foreign yoke and placed king Arsaces on the throne. With this patriotic
fiction must further be connected the circumstance that a Bactrian
nativity instead of a Scythian was assigned to the first Arsaces. The
dress and the etiquette at the court of the Arsacids were those of the
Persian court; after king Mithradates I. had extended his rule to the
Indus and Tigris, the dynasty exchanged the simple title of king for
that of king of kings which the Achaemenids had borne, and the pointed
Scythian cap for the high tiara adorned with pearls; on the coins the
king carries the bow like Darius. The aristocracy, too, that came into
the land with the Arsacids and doubtless became in many ways mixed with
the old indigenous one, adopted Persian manners and dress, mostly also
Persian names; of the Parthian army which fought with Crassus it is
said that the soldiers still wore their hair rough after the Scythian
fashion, but the general appeared after the Median manner with the hair
parted in the middle and with painted face.

[Sidenote: The regal office.]

The political organisation, as it was established by the first
Mithradates, was accordingly in substance that of the Achaemenids. The
family of the founder of the dynasty is invested with all the lustre
and with all the consecration of ancestral and divinely-ordained rule;
his name is transferred _de jure_ to each of his successors and divine
honour is assigned to him; his successors are therefore called sons of
God,[3] and besides brothers of the sun-god and the moon-goddess, like
the Shah of Persia still at the present day; to shed the blood of a
member of the royal family even by mere accident is a sacrilege--all
of them regulations, which with few abatements recur among the Roman
Caesars, and are perhaps borrowed in part from those of the older
great-monarchy.

[Sidenote: Megistanes.]

Although the royal dignity was thus firmly attached to the family,
there yet subsisted a certain choice as to the king. As the new ruler
had to belong as well to the college of the “kinsmen of the royal
house” as to the council of priests, in order to be able to ascend the
throne, an act must have taken place, whereby, it may be presumed,
these same colleges themselves acknowledged the new ruler.[4] By the
“kinsmen” are doubtless to be understood not merely the Arsacids
themselves, but the “seven houses” of the Achaemenid organisation,
princely families, to which according to that arrangement equality
of rank and free access to the great-king belonged, and which must
have had similar privileges under the Arsacids.[5] These families
were at the same time holders of hereditary crown offices,[6] _e.g._
the Surên--the name is like the name Arsaces, a designation at once
of person and of office--the second family after the royal house, as
crown-masters, placed on each occasion the tiara on the head of the
new Arsaces. But as the Arsacids themselves belonged to the Parthian
province, so the Surên were at home in Sacastane (Seistân) and perhaps
Sacae, thus Scythians; the Carên likewise descended from western Media,
while the highest aristocracy under the Achaemenids was purely Persian.

[Sidenote: Satraps.]

The administration lay in the hands of the under-kings or satraps;
according to the Roman geographers of Vespasian’s time the state of the
Parthians consisted of eighteen “kingdoms.” Some of these satrapies
were appanages of a second son of the ruling house; in particular the
two north-western provinces, the Atropatenian Media (Aderbijan) and
Armenia, so far as it was in the power of the Parthians, appear to
have been entrusted for administration to the prince standing next
to the ruler for the time.[7] We may add that prominent among the
satraps were the king of the province of Elymais or of Susa, to whom
was conceded a specially powerful and exceptional position, and next
to him the king of Persis, the ancestral land of the Achaemenids.
The form of administration, if not exclusive, yet preponderant and
conditioning the title, was in the Parthian empire--otherwise than in
the case of the Caesars--that of vassal-kingdom, so that the satraps
entered by hereditary right, but were subject to confirmation by the
great-king.[8] To all appearance this continued downwards, so that
smaller dynasts and family chiefs stood in the same relation to the
under-kings as the latter occupied to the great-king.[9] Thus the
office of great-king among the Parthians was limited to the utmost
in favour of the high aristocracy by the accompanying subdivision of
the hereditary administration of the land. With this it is quite in
keeping, that the mass of the population consisted of persons half or
wholly non-free,[10] and emancipation was not allowable. In the army
which fought against Antonius there are said to have been only 400 free
among 50,000. The chief among the vassals of Orodes, who as his general
defeated Crassus, marched to the field with a harem of 200 wives and
a baggage train of 1000 sumpter-camels; he himself furnished to the
army 10,000 horsemen from his clients and slaves. The Parthians never
had a standing army, but at all times the waging of war here was left
to depend on the general levy of the vassal-princes and of the vassals
subordinate to these, as well as of the great mass of the non-free over
whom these bore sway.

[Sidenote: The Greek towns of the Parthian empire.]

Certainly the urban element was not quite wanting in the political
organisation of the Parthian empire. It is true that the larger
townships, which arose out of the distinctive development of the
East, were not urban commonwealths, as indeed even the Parthian royal
residence, Ctesiphon, is named in contrast to the neighbouring Greek
foundation of Seleucia a village; they had no presidents of their
own and no common council, and the administration lay here, as in
the country districts, exclusively with the royal officials. But
a portion--comparatively small, it is true--of the foundations of
the Greek rulers had come under Parthian rule. In the provinces of
Mesopotamia and Babylonia by nationality Aramaean the Greek town-system
had gained a firm footing under Alexander and his successors.
Mesopotamia was covered with Greek commonwealths; and in Babylonia,
the successor of the ancient Babylon, the precursor of Bagdad, and
for a time the residence of the Greek kings of Asia--Seleucia on the
Tigris--had by its favourable commercial position and its manufactures
risen to be the first mercantile city beyond the Roman bounds, with
more, it is alleged, than half a million of inhabitants. Its free
Hellenic organisation, on which beyond doubt its prosperity above all
depended, was not touched even by the Parthian rulers in their own
interest, and the city preserved not merely its town council of 300
elected members, but also the Greek language and Greek habits amidst
the non-Greek East. It is true that the Hellenes in these towns formed
only the dominant element; alongside of them lived numerous Syrians,
and, as a third constituent, there were associated with these the not
much less numerous Jews, so that the population of these Greek towns
of the Parthian empire, just like that of Alexandria, was composed of
three separate nationalities standing side by side. Between these, just
as in Alexandria, conflicts not seldom occurred, as _e.g._ at the time
of the reign of Gaius under the eyes of the Parthian government the
three nations came to blows, and ultimately the Jews were driven out of
the larger towns.

In so far the Parthian empire was the genuine counterpart to the Roman.
As in the one the Oriental viceroyship is an exceptional occurrence,
so in the other is the Greek city; the general Oriental aristocratic
character of the Parthian government is as little injuriously affected
by the Greek mercantile towns on the west coast as is the civic
organisation of the Roman state by the vassal kingdoms of Cappadocia
and Armenia. While in the state of the Caesars the Romano-Greek urban
commonwealth spreads more and more, and gradually becomes the general
form of administration, the foundation of towns--the true mark of
Helleno-Roman civilisation, which embraces the Greek mercantile cities
and the military colonies of Rome as well as the grand settlements
of Alexander and the Alexandrids--suddenly breaks off with the
emergence of the Parthian government in the East, and even the existing
Greek cities of the Parthian empire wane in the further course of
development. There, as here, the rule more and more prevails over the
exceptions.

[Sidenote: Religion.]

The religion of Iran with its worship--approximating to monotheism--of
the “highest of the gods, who has made heaven and earth and men
and for these everything good,” with its absence of images and its
spirituality, with its stern morality and truthfulness, with its
influence upon practical activity and energetic conduct of life,
laid hold of the minds of its confessors in quite another and deeper
way than the religions of the West ever could; and, while neither
Zeus nor Jupiter maintained their ground in presence of a developed
civilisation, the faith among the Parsees remained ever young till it
succumbed to another gospel--that of the confessors of Mohammed--or
at any rate retreated before it to India. It is not our task to set
forth how the old Mazda-faith, which the Achaemenids professed, and
the origin of which falls in prehistoric time, was related to that
which the sacred books of the Persians having their origin probably
under the later Achaemenids--the Avestâ--announce as the doctrine
of the wise Zarathustra; for the epoch, when the West is placed in
contact with the East, only the later form of religion comes under
consideration. Perhaps the Avestâ took first shape in the east of Iran,
in Bactria, but it spread thence to Media and from there it exercised
its influence on the West. But the national religion and the national
state were bound up with one another in Iran more closely than even
among the Celts. It has already been noticed that the legitimate
kingship in Iran was at the same time a religious institution, that
the supreme ruler of the land was conceived as specially called to the
government by the supreme deity of the land, and even in some measure
divine. On the coins of a national type there appears regularly the
great fire-altar, and hovering over it the winged god Ahura Mazda,
alongside of him in lesser size, and in an attitude of prayer, the
king, and over-against the king the imperial banner. In keeping with
this, the ascendency of the nobility in the Parthian empire goes hand
in hand with the privileged position of the clergy. The priests of
this religion, the Magians, appear already in the documents of the
Achaemenids and in the narratives of Herodotus, and have, probably
with right, always been regarded by the Occidentals as a national
Persian institution. The priesthood was hereditary, and at least in
Media, presumably also in other provinces, the collective body of the
priests was accounted, somewhat like the Levites in the later Israel,
as a separate portion of the people. Even under the rule of the Greeks
the old religion of the state and the national priesthood maintained
their place. When the first Seleucus wished to found the new capital
of his empire, the already mentioned Seleucia, he caused the Magians
to fix day and hour for it, and it was only after those Persians, not
very willingly, had cast the desired horoscope, that the king and his
army, in accordance with their indication, accomplished the solemn
laying of the foundation-stone of the new Greek city. Thus by his side
stood the priests of Ahura Mazda as counsellors, and they, not those
of the Hellenic Olympus, were interrogated in public affairs, so far
as these concerned divine things. As a matter of course this was all
the more the case with the Arsacids. We have already observed that in
the election of king, along with the council of the nobility, that of
the priests took part. King Tiridates of Armenia, of the house of the
Arsacids, came to Rome attended by a train of Magians, and travelled
and took food according to their directions, even in company with
the emperor Nero, who gladly allowed the foreign wise men to preach
their doctrine and to conjure spirits for him. From this certainly
it does not follow that the priestly order as such exercised an
essentially determining influence on the management of the state; but
the Mazda-faith was by no means re-established only by the Sassanids;
on the contrary, amidst all change of dynasties, and amidst all its own
development, the religion of the land of Iran remained in its outline
the same.

[Sidenote: Language.]

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language
of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having
ever been in public use under the Arsacids. On the contrary, it is the
Iranian land-dialect of Babylonia and the writing peculiar to this--as
both were developed before, and in, the Arsacid period under the
influence of the language and writing of the Aramaean neighbours--which
are covered by the appellation Pahlavi, _i.e._ Parthava, and thereby
designated as those of the empire of the Parthians. Even Greek did not
become an official language there. None of the rulers bear even as
a second name a Greek one; and, had the Arsacids made this language
their own, we should not have failed to find Greek inscriptions in
their empire. Certainly their coins show down to the time of Claudius
exclusively,[11] and predominantly even later, Greek legends, as they
show also no trace of the religion of the land, and in standard attach
themselves to the local coinage of the Roman east provinces, while
they retain the division of the year as well as the reckoning by years
just as these had been regulated under the Seleucids. But this must
rather be taken as meaning that the great-kings themselves did not
coin at all,[12] and these coins, which in fact served essentially for
intercourse with the western neighbours, were struck by the Greek towns
of the empire in the name of the sovereign. The designation of the king
on these coins as “friend of Greeks” (φιλέλλην), which already meets us
early,[13] and is constant from the time of Mithradates I., _i.e._ from
the extension of the state as far as the Tigris, has a meaning only if
it is the Parthian Greek city that is speaking on these coins. It may
be conjectured that a secondary position was conceded in public use to
the Greek language in the Parthian empire alongside of the Persian,
similar to that which it possessed in the Roman state by the side of
Latin. The gradual disappearance of Hellenism under the Parthian rule
may be clearly followed on these urban coins, as well in the emergence
of the native language alongside and instead of the Greek, as in the
debasement of language which becomes more and more prominent.[14]

[Sidenote: Extent of the Parthian empire.]

As to extent the kingdom of the Arsacids was far inferior, not merely
to the great state of the Achaemenids, but also to that of their
immediate predecessors, the state of the Seleucids. Of its original
territory they possessed only the larger eastern half; after the battle
with the Parthians, in which king Antiochus Sidetes, a contemporary of
the Gracchi, fell, the Syrian kings did not again seriously attempt to
assert their rule beyond the Euphrates; but the country on this side of
the Euphrates remained with the Occidentals.

[Sidenote: Arabia.]

Both coasts of the Persian Gulf, even the Arabian, were in possession
of the Parthians, and the navigation was thus completely in their
power; the rest of the Arabian peninsula did not obey either the
Parthians or the Romans ruling over Egypt.

[Sidenote: The region of the Indus.]

To describe the struggle of the nations for the possession of the Indus
valley, and of the regions bordering on it, to the west and east, so
far as the wholly fragmentary tradition allows of a description at all,
is not the task of our survey; but the main lines of this struggle,
which constantly goes by the side of that waged for the Euphrates
valley, may the less be omitted in this connection, as our tradition
does not allow us to follow out in detail the circumstances of Iran to
the east in their influence on western relations, and it hence appears
necessary at least to realise for ourselves its outlines. Soon after
the death of Alexander the Great, the boundary between Iran and India
was drawn by the agreement of his marshal and coheir Seleucus with
Chandragupta, or in Greek Sandracottos, the founder of the empire of
the Indians. According to this the latter ruled not merely over the
Ganges-valley in all its extent and the whole north-west of India, but
in the region of the Indus, at least over a part of the upland valley
of what is now Cabul, further over Arachosia or Afghanistan, presumably
also over the waste and arid Gedrosia, the modern Beloochistan, as well
as over the delta and mouths of the Indus; the documents hewn in stone,
by which Chandragupta’s grandson, the orthodox Buddha-worshipper Asoka,
inculcated the general moral law on his subjects, have been found, as
in all this widely extended domain, so particularly in the region of
Peshawur.[15] The Hindoo Koosh, the Parapanisus of the ancients, and
its continuation to the east and west, thus separated with their mighty
chain--pierced only by few passes--Iran and India. But this agreement
did not long subsist.

[Sidenote: Bactro-Indian empire.]

In the earlier period of the Diadochi the Greek rulers of the kingdom
of Bactra, which took a mighty impulse on its breaking off from the
Seleucid state, crossed the frontier-mountains, brought a considerable
part of the Indus valley into their power, and perhaps established
themselves still farther inland in Hindostan, so that the centre of
gravity of this empire was shifted from western Iran to eastern India,
and Hellenism gave way to an Indian type. The kings of this empire were
called Indian, and bore subsequently non-Greek names; on the coins the
native Indian language and writing appear by the side, and instead, of
the Greek, just as in the Partho-Persian coinage the Pahlavi comes up
alongside of the Greek.

[Sidenote: Indo-Scythians.]

Then one nation more entered into the arena; the Scythians, or, as
they were called in Iran and India, the Sacae, broke off from their
ancestral settlements on the Jaxartes and crossed the mountains
southward. The Bactrian province came at least in great part into their
power, and at some time in the last century of the Roman republic
they must have established themselves in the modern Afghanistan and
Beloochistan. On that account in the early imperial period the coast
on both sides of the mouth of the Indus about Minnagara is called
Scythian, and in the interior the district of the Drangae lying to
the west of Candahar bears subsequently the name “land of the Sacae,”
Sacastane, the modern Seistân. This immigration of the Scythians into