rough the ornate gates in crenelated limestone walls. From miles away
the approaching caravans were overlooked by legionaries brought from
Gaul and Britain, quartered in the capitol on Mount Silpius at the
city's southern limit. The riches of the East, and of Egypt, flowed
through, leaving their deposit as a river drops its silt; were ever-
increasing. One quarter, walled off, hummed with foreign traders from
as far away as India, who lodged at the travelers' inns or haunted the
temples, the wine-shops and the lupanars. In that quarter, too, there
were barracks, with compounds and open-fronted booths, where slaves were
exposed for sale; and there, also, were the caravanserais within whose
walls the kneeling camels grumbled and the blossomy spring air grew
fetid with the reek of dung. There was a market-place for elephants and
other oriental beasts.

Each of Antioch's four divisions had its own wall, pierced by arched
gates. Those were necessary. No more turbulent and fickle population
lived in the known world--not even in Alexandria. Whenever an
earthquake shook down blocks of buildings--and that happened nearly as
frequently as the hysterical racial riots--the Romans rebuilt with a
view to making communications easier from the citadel, where the great
temple of Jupiter Capitolinus frowned over the gridironed streets.

Roman officials and the wealthier Macedonian Antiochenes lived on an
island, formed by a curve of the River Orontes at the northern end
within the city wall. The never-neglected problem of administration was
to keep a clear route along which troops could move from citadel to
island when the rioting began.

On the island was the palace, glittering with gilt and marble, gay with
colored awnings, where kings had lived magnificently until Romans saved
the city from them, substituting a proconsular paternal kind of tyranny
originating in the Roman patria potestas. There was not much sentiment
about it. Rome became the foster-parent, the possessor of authority.
There was duty, principally exacted from the governed in the form of
taxes and obedience; and there were privileges, mostly reserved for the
rulers and their parasites, who were much more numerous than anybody
liked. Competition made the parasites as discontented as their prey.

But there were definite advantages of Roman rule, which no Antiochene
denied, although their comic actors and the slaves who sang at private
entertainments mocke