SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3813, 25 September 1936, Page 4

SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

(By

H. V. Morton)

ANTIOCH TH EGOLDEN. Antioch, “the Beautiful and the Golden,” still deserves her ancient titles, but her beauty is no longer the beauty of temple and colonnade: and her gold is no longer that of wealth, it is the glittering sun on desolate hill-sides. I saw Antioch on a spring day, the gardens alight with a pink foam of apricot blossom and the wheat kneehigh in the fields; for in the hot valley of the Orontes the corn is cut in May. Anu' I thought that seldom have I seen a town camped in a more lovely place. High mountains shield it, the Orontes, pale green with melted show, rushes arch-high beneath the bridge; and the broad shoulder of Mount Silpius towers majestically above a cluster of one-storied Arab houses over whose flat roofs, like slender white candles, ridfe the minarets of Islam. That is Antioch to-day. The student of history, who comes to such a place with his mind full of its ancient splendour, suffers at first a profound shock.

How is it possible, he wonders, that once mighty cities, famed in an age of marble for their splendour, distinguished in an age of art and architecture for their beauty, known in an age of opulence for their wealth, how is it possible that such cities can vanish from the earth and leave nothing but a ramshackle Arab town of mean wooden houses and a few mosques ?

The answer is three-fold: earthquakes, war, and the coming of a people with different social, commercial and military traditions. Earthquakes have probably done more even than man to destroy a city that was still splendid in Crusading times. Terrible convulsions, in which thousands have perished, have from time to time altered the flow of the Orontes. They have changed the lie of the land and have even destroyed all trace of the famous island in the river on which Seleucus 11. and Antiochus 11. built a great palace. Great cities also die naturally with the Empire that created them. How could Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria, situated with a harbour on the Mediterranean, designed to fulfil the needs of a great maritime State, serve as the capital of an Arab kingdom whose natural capital was Damascus ?

So it has happened that a city, the most important and the wealthiest in the Roman Empire, after Rome and Alexandria, has become a town smaller than Damascus or Aleppo. It is only when you look up on the immense slopes of Mount Silpiu.s that you get an idea of the size of ancient Antioch. Up there, outlined against the sky, is the ruin of the city wall, a thing that clings perilously to precipices and runs for miles. On the desolate mountain, where Arab boys had climbed in search of tombs and coins, is nothing but bleak rock; but this rock still bears evidence that in ancient days thousands of houses once rose tier upon tier on the mountain-side.

Sometimes in a field, miles from modern Antioch, you see a marble pillar lying in a vineyard. A farmer’s spade may strike the foundation of a great building among the apricot-trees, a reminder that the modern town covers only a small portion of the ground occupied by its predecessor. When St Paul, came to Antioch—probably about A.D. 44 the city was already nearly three hundred years old. It was one of sixteen cities named Antioch, founded by Hellenistic kings. When Rome gained possession of the city, in 64 8.C., it bad grown into an enormous city whose very name was a byword for vice.

In order to realize why Antioch was so large, so rich, and so profligate, you must realize that .Roman Syria, *well irrigated, well farmed, peaceful, with all the eastern trade routes aimed at her harbours, was one of the most prosperous portions cf the Empire; and her lovely capital was full of rich merchants, rich manufacturers, wealthy retired people, who had gone there for the di-

mate, attracting to them the crowds who pander always to wealth. The export trade of Antioch in St Paul’s time included silk, dye-stuffs, glass work, linen, fruit, oil, spices, ointments, slaves and all the luxuries sent overland from India, Mesopotamia, and the Far East. The big Syrian mercantile houses had branch offices all over the Mediterranean, and, so great were the riches of Antioch, that the harbour of Seleucia was too small for the cargo ships of Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, and Cyprus that crowded it. The city that Paul knew was built on what we would call the American plan. It was constructed on the grid-iron principle in imitation of Alexandria. Its great feature, and one that later was copied by all the Hellenistic cities of Syria and Asia Minor, was a colonnaded street over four miles in length,, which crossed the city from east to west. The famous Street Called Straight in Damascus was another of these characteristic colonnades. Antioch’s four-mile-long street of marble pillars must have been one of the world’s, wonders. Where to-day is there anything to compare with it?

Princes Street, in Edinburgh, one of the finest straight streets of modern timfes, is less than a mile in length. It gives one a vivid idea of the size and proportions of ancient Antioch to realize that its main corso was four times the length of Princes Street, and that from it, at right angles, stretched miles of marble avenues lined by public buildings, baths, and statues of the emperors and the gods. Imagine the sun glittering on white marble, on the gilded tips of obelisks, on painted statues on triumphal arches, on the gold sceptres of sculptured emperors and gold crowns of sculptured gods; and you will know why the Antioch of St Paul’s day was called the Beautiful and the Golden.

But this outwardly lovely place combined the climate of Hollywood with the morals of Port Said. It reeked with the jungle creeds of Asia, the strange nature cults that seem more suited to a tribe of bushmen than to an age that read Plato and Homer, that admired the work of Praxiteles, that loved the plays of Aeschylus. The ten-mile grove at Daphne, a place of cyprus-trees, myrtle and running water, was famous, and infamous, all over the Western World. The Romans despised the Greek and Syrian population of Antioch, believing, very truly, that such a mixture in such a climate propagates all the vices and none of the virtues of both races.

The people of this-city were lightminded, witty, pleasun'e-loving, devoted only to races, games, theatres dancing and wine. “In no city of antiquity,” wrote Mommsen, “was the enjoyment of life so much the main thing, and its duties so incidental.” In all material things Antioch was supreme. Probably no film star tooay owns a finer bathroom than those of ancient Antioch, where bathing was a cult. “With us the public fountains flow for ornament,” wrote the Antiochene, Libanus, “since everyone has water within his doors.”

And at night the four-mile corso was lit by thousands of lamps and the long streets around glowed like jewels in the darkness. “With us night is distinguished from day only by the difference of the lighting,” wrote Libanus, the only reference, I believe, to street lighting in ancient literature.

Yet this city held within it the germ of the Christian world. The Hellenistic Jews who had settled there for centuries played their part in the city’s commerce, but not in its religion or its feasts. Hated for their exclusiveness and perhaps for the purity of their morals, they occupied a quarter of their own where they worshipped God in their synagogues. Many Greeks, especially Greek women, sickened by the life r.round them, sought consolation in the Jewish faith. Gradually the name of Jesus Christ, who ten years or so before had suffered on the Cross in Judea, was mentioned in these synagogues. And slowly, like an opening seed in the earth, those who believed in Jes-

us left the synagogues and worshipped Him in their own houses. And at this time Paul was summoned to Antioch. All this came to my mind as I sat on a hill-side above the mean Arab town that is now Antioch, a town like a nomad encampment, a town rather like a circus, with sheds and side-shows that might be here today and gone in the morning. And as I walked through the picturesque streets, where donkeys and camels pressed forward among crowds whose faces still proclaim their Syrian Phoenician or Jewish ancestry, I determined to discover if there were in this changed city any relic of the Apostolic Church.

(To be continued)