The new faith was propagated from one neighborhood to another with astonishing rapidity. The members of the Church of Jerusalem who had been dispersed immediately after the death of Stephen, pushing their conquests along the coast of Phœnicia, reached Cyprus and Antioch. They were as yet guided by an unvarying principle of refusing to preach the gospel to the Jews.[12.1] Antioch, "the metropolis of the East," the third city of the world,[12.2] was the centre of this Christendom of northern Syria. It was a city with a population of more than 500,000 souls, almost as large as Paris before its recent extensions,[12.3] and the residence of the Imperial Legate of Syria. Suddenly advanced to a high degree of splendor by the Seleucidæ, it had only to profit by the Roman occupation of it. In general, the Seleucidæ had surpassed the Romans in the taste for theatrical decorations as applied to great cities. Temples, aqueducts, baths, basilicas, nothing was wanting at Antioch in what constituted a grand Syrian city of that period. The streets flanked by colonnades, with their cross-roads decorated with statues, had there more of symmetry and regularity than anywhere else.[12.4] A _Corso_, ornamented with four ranges of columns, forming two covered galleries with a wide avenue in the midst, crossed the city from one side to the other,[12.5] the length of which was thirty-six stadia (more than a league).[12.6] But Antioch not only possessed immense edifices of public utility,[12.7] she had that also which few of the Syrian cities possessed--the noblest specimens of Grecian art, wonderfully beautiful statues,[12.8] classical works of a delicacy of detail which the age was no longer capable of imitating. Antioch, from its foundation, had been altogether a Grecian city. The Macedonians of Antigone and Seleucus had imported into that country of the lower Orontes their most lively recollections, their worship, and the names of their country.[12.9] The Grecian mythology was there adopted as it were in a second home; they pretended to exhibit in the country a crowd of "holy places" forming part of this mythology. The city was full of the worship of Apollo and of the nymphs. Daphne, an enchanting place two short hours distant from the city, reminded the conquerors of the pleasantest fictions. It was a sort of plagiarism, a counterfeit of the myths of the mother country, analogous to these adventurous transportations which the primitive tribes carried with them in their travels; their mythical geography, their Berecyntha, their Arnanda, their Ida, and their Olympus. These Greek fables constituted for them a very old religion, and one scarcely more serious than the metamorphoses of Ovid. The ancient religions of the country, particularly that of Mount Cassius,[12.10] contributed some little gravity to it. But Syrian levity, Babylonian charlatanism, and all the impostures of Asia, mingled at this limit of the two worlds, had made Antioch the capital