s conferred on them.
Autonomy was bestowed on Antioch on the Orontes, the most important
city of Roman Asia and but little inferior to the Egyptian Alexandria
and to the Bagdad of antiquity, the city of Seleucia in the Parthian
empire; as also on the neighbour of Antioch, the Pierian Seleucia,
which was thus rewarded for its courageous resistance to Tigranes;
on Gaza and generally on all the towns liberated from the Jewish rule;
on Mytilene in the west of Asia Minor; and on Phanagoria
on the Black Sea.
Aggregate Results
Thus was completed the structure of the Roman state in Asia,
which with its feudatory kings and vassals, its priests made
into princes, and its series of free and half-free cities puts
us vividly in mind of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.
It was no miraculous work, either as respects the difficulties
overcome or as respects the consummation attained; nor was it made
so by all the high-sounding words, which the Roman world of quality
lavished in favour of Lucullus and the artless multitude in praise
of Pompeius. Pompeius in particular consented to be praised,
and praised himself, in such a fashion that people might
almost have reckoned him still more weak-minded than he really was.
If the Mytilenaeans erected a statue to him as their deliverer
and founder, as the man who had as well by land as by sea terminated
the wars with which the world was filled, such a homage might
not seem too extravagant for the vanquisher of the pirates
and of the empires of the east. But the Romans this time surpassed
the Greeks. The triumphal inscriptions of Pompeius himself enumerated
12 millions of people as subjugated and 1538 cities and strongholds
as conquered--it seemed as if quantity was to make up for quality--
and made the circle of his victories extend from the Maeotic Sea
to the Caspian and from the latter to the Red Sea, when his eyes had
never seen any one of the three; nay farther, if he did not exactly
say so, he at any late induced the public to suppose that the annexation
of Syria, which in truth was no heroic deed, had added
the whole east as far as Bactria and India to the Roman empire--
so dim was the mist of distance, amidst which according to his
statements the boundary-line of his eastern conquests was lost.
The democratic servility, which has at all times rivalled
that of courts, readily entered into these insipid extravagances.
It was not satisfied by the pompous triumphal processi
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