Produced by Jake Jaqua
by Talbot Mundy
Golden Antioch lay like a jewel at a mountain's throat. Wide,intersecting streets, each nearly four miles long, granite-paved, andmarble-colonnaded, swarmed with fashionable loiterers. The gayAntiochenes, whom nothing except frequent earthquakes interrupted frompursuit of pleasure, were taking the air in chariots, in litters, and onfoot; their linen clothes were as riotously picturesque as was thefruit displayed in open shop-fronts under the colonnades, or as theblossom on the trees in public gardens, which made of the city, as seenfrom the height of the citadel, a mosaic of green and white.
The crowd on the main thoroughfares was aristocratic; opulence wasaccented by groups of slaves in close attendance on their owners; butthe aristocracy was sharply differentiated. The Romans, frequently lesswealthy (because those who had made money went to Rome to spend it)—frequently less educated and, in general, not less dissolute—despisedthe Antiochenes, although the Romans loved Antioch. The cosmopolitanAntiochenes returned the compliment, regarding Romans as mere duffers indepravity, philistines in art, but capable in war and government, andconsequently to be feared, if not respected. So there was not muchmingling of the groups, whose slaves took example from their masters,affecting in public a scorn that they did not feel but were careful toassert. The Romans were intensely dignified and wore the toga, palliumand tunic; the Antiochenes affected to think dignity was stupid and itstrappings (forbidden to them) hideous; so they carried the contrarypose to extremes. Patterning herself on Alexandria, the city had becometo all intents and purposes the eastern capital of Roman empire. North,south, east and west, the trade-routes intersected, entering the citythrough the ornate gates in crenelated limestone walls. From miles awaythe approaching caravans were overlooked by legionaries brought fromGaul and Britain, quartered in the capitol on Mount Silpius at thecity's southern limit. The riches of the East, and of Egypt, flowedthrough, leaving their deposit as a river drops its silt; were ever-increasing. One quarter, walled off, hummed with foreign traders fromas far away as India, who lodged at the travelers' inns or haunted thetemples, the wine-shops and the lupanars. In that quarter, too, therewere barracks, with compounds and open-fronted booths, where slaves wereexposed for sale; and there, also, were the caravanserais within whosewalls the kneeling camels grumbled and the blossomy spring air grewfetid with the reek of dung. There was a market-place for elephants andother oriental beasts.
Each of Antioch's four divisions had its own wall, pierced by archedgates. Those were necessary. No more turbulent and fickle populationlived in the known world—not even in Alexandria. Whenever anearthquake shook down blocks of buildings—and that happened nearly asfrequently as the hysterical racial riots—the Romans rebuilt with aview to making communications easier from the citadel, where the greattemple of Jupiter Capitolinus frowned over the gridironed streets.
Roman officials and the wealthier Macedonian Antiochenes lived on anisland, formed by a curve of the River Orontes at the northern endwithin the city wall. The never-neglected problem of administration wasto keep a clear route along which troops could move from citadel toisland when the rioting began.
On the island was the palace, glittering with gilt and marble, gay withcolored awnings, where kings had lived magnif