To help us in realising this urban character of Roman provincial life, we may compare it with that of our fellow-subjects in India at the present day. India is in the main a rural country, and by far the great majority of its inhabitants live on the land and support themselves by agriculture. Only about 30,000,000 live in towns, as against 235,000,000 in the rural districts, and the few great cities are rather industrial and commercial centres than homes of culture and amusement. The economic unit of India is the village, and this simple fact is enough to explain why India never has been Anglicised. Instinctively the Romans perceived that if a province were to be Romanised, the process could not be set going in villages; and where there were only villages, they gave the districts the opportunity of developing towns in their midst. The opportunity, we may reasonably suppose, was rarely missed, for at all times in their history the Romans had a wonderful power of making their subjects eager to imitate their own institutions. Thus Spain, Gaul, and even Britain, became rich in towns after the Roman model—towns which served to humanise the people, while making them obedient subjects. Let us now see, with the help of a few striking examples, how, by the second century of our era, the Empire was covered with towns. For Italy and Greece we do not need illustrations—we are already well aware of the fact. But even far away in the East, in regions where the Greeks had never settled, if the Romans came to stay they left cities behind them. Look, for example, at a map of Syria or Palestine, and note the great caravan route leading from Damascus southwards on the east side of the Jordan, a road important to Rome because it carried the merchandise of the Far East to Damascus and the Mediterranean by way of the Persian Gulf and Petra. Before the traveller of to-day has gone far south from Damascus he will come on the splendid ruins of two successive cities built by the Romans in this period, Gerasa and Philadelphia, where the sheep now graze among the ruins of temples, theatres, and baths. A famous English traveller[15] wrote of them long ago that they enabled him to form some conception of the grandeur and might of the Roman Empire: “That cities so far removed from the capital, and built almost in the desert, should have been adorned with so many splendid monuments, afforded one of the most striking proofs of the marvellous energy and splendid enterprise of that great people who had subjected the world.” The mention of Damascus may remind us of a traveller of the first century A.D. whose journeys are fortunately recorded and admirably illustrate the fact that in Asia Minor and Greece the life of the people was centred in the great cities. St. Paul went from city to city, choosing by preference for his missionary work the most populous ones, such as Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth and Athens.