cultivated chiefly by the Orientals.
Attention has often been called to the fact that those men of letters that
were considered the purest representatives of the Greek spirit under the
empire belonged almost without exception to Asia Minor, Syria or Egypt. The
rhetorician Dion Chrysostom came from Prusa in Bithynia, the satirist
Lucian from Samosata in Commagene on the borders of the Euphrates. A number
of other names could be cited. {7} From Tacitus and Suetonius down to
Ammianus, there was not one author of talent to preserve in Latin the
memory of the events that stirred the world of that period, but it was a
Bithynian again, Dion Cassius of Nicea, who, under the Severi, narrated the
history of the Roman people.

It is a characteristic fact that, besides this literature whose language
was Greek, others were born, revived and developed. The Syriac, derived
from the Aramaic which was the international language of earlier Asia,
became again the language of a cultured race with Bardesanes of Edessa. The
Copts remembered that they had spoken several dialects derived from the
ancient Egyptian and endeavored to revive them. North of the Taurus even
the Armenians began to write and polish their barbarian speech. Christian
preaching, addressed to the people, took hold of the popular idioms and
roused them from their long lethargy. Along the Nile as well as on the
plains of Mesopotamia or in the valleys of Anatolia it proclaimed its new
ideas in dialects that had been despised hitherto, and wherever the old
Orient had not been entirely denationalized by Hellenism, it successfully
reclaimed its intellectual autonomy.

A revival of native art went hand in hand with this linguistic awakening.
In no field of intellect has the illusion mentioned above been so complete
and lasting as in this one. Until a few years ago the opinion prevailed
that an "imperial" art had come into existence in the Rome of Augustus and
that thence its predominance had slowly spread to the periphery of the
ancient world. If it had undergone some special modifications in Asia these
were due to exotic influences, undoubtedly {8} Assyrian or Persian. Not
even the important discoveries of M. de Voguee in Hauran[9] were sufficient
to prove the emptiness of a theory that was supported by our lofty
conviction of European leadership.

To-day it is fully proven not only that Rome has given nothing or almost
nothing to the Orientals but also that she has received q