atefully honour Pompeius as their founder. The organization
of Roman Asia by Lucullus and Pompeius may with all its undeniable
defects be described as on the whole judicious and praiseworthy;
serious as were the evils that might still adhere to it,
it could not but be welcome to the sorely tormented Asiatics
for the very reason that it came attended by the inward
and outward peace, the absence of which had been so long
and so painfully felt.

The East after the Departure of Pompeius

Peace continued substantially in the east, till the idea--merely
indicated by Pompeius with his characteristic timidity--of joining
the regions eastward of the Euphrates to the Roman empire was taken
up again energetically but unsuccessfully by the new triumvirate
of Roman regents, and soon thereafter the civil war drew the eastern
provinces as well as all the rest into its fatal vortex.
In the interval the governors of Cilicia had to fight constantly
with the mountain-tribes of the Amanus and those of Syria with the hordes
of the desert, and in the latter war against the Bedouins especially
many Roman troops were destroyed; but these movements had no farther
significance. More remarkable was the obstinate resistance,
which the tough Jewish nation opposed to the conquerors. Alexander,
son of the deposed king Aristobulus, and Aristobulus himself
who after some time succeeded in escaping from captivity,
excited during the governorship of Aulus Gabinius (697-700)
three different revolts against the new rulers, to each of which
the government of the high-priest Hyrcanus installed by Rome impotently
succumbed. It was not political conviction, but the invincible repugnance
of the Oriental towards the unnatural yoke, which compelled them
to kick against the pricks; as indeed the last and most dangerous
of these revolts, for which the withdrawal of the Syrian army
of occupation in consequence of the Egyptian crisis furnished
the immediate impulse, began with the murder of the Romans
settled in Palestine. It was not without difficulty
that the able governor succeeded in rescuing the few Romans,
who had escaped this fate and found a temporary refuge
on Mount Gerizim, from the insurgents who kept them blockaded there,
and in overpowering the revolt after several severely contested
battles and tedious sieges. In consequence of this the monarchy
of the high-priests was abolished and the Jewish land was broken up
as Macedonia had formerly been,