of lies and the sink of every description of infamy. Besides the Greek population, indeed, which in no part of the East (with the exception of Alexandria) was as numerous as here, Antioch numbered amongst its population a considerable number of native Syrians, speaking Syriac.[12.11] These natives composed a low class, inhabiting the suburbs of the great city and the populous villages which formed a vast suburb[12.12] all around it, Charandama, Ghisira, Gaudigura, and Apate (chiefly Syrian names).[12.13] Marriages between the Syrians and the Greeks were common. Seleucus having formerly made naturalization a legal obligation binding on every stranger establishing himself in the city, Antioch, at the end of three centuries and a half of its existence, became one of the places in the world where race was most intermingled with race. The degradation of the people there was terrible. The peculiarity of these focuses of moral putrefaction is, to reduce all the races of mankind to the same level. The degradation of certain Levantine cities, dominated by the spirit of intrigue, delivered up entirely to low cunning, can scarce give us a conception of the degree of corruption reached by the human race at Antioch. It was an inconceivable medley of merry-andrews, quacks, buffoons,[12.14] magicians, miracle-mongers, sorcerers,{12.15} priests, impostors; a city of races, games, dances, processions, fêtes, debauches, of unbridled luxury, of all the follies of the East, of the most unhealthy superstitions, and of the fanaticism of the orgy.[12.16] By turns servile and ungrateful, cowardly and insolent, the people of Antioch were the perfect model of those crowds devoted to Cæsarism, without country, without nationality, without family honor, without a name to keep. The great _Corso_ which traversed the city was like a theatre, where rolled, day after day, the waves of a trifling, light-headed, changeable, insurrection-loving[12.17] populace--a populace sometimes _spirituel_,[12.18] occupied with songs, parodies, squibs, impertinence of all sorts.[12.19] The city was very literary,[12.20] but literary only in the literature of rhetoricians.{12.21} The sights were strange; there were some games in which bands of naked young girls took part in all the exercises, with a mere fillet around them;[12.22] at the celebrated festival of Näiouma, troupes of courtezans swarmed in public in basins[12.23] filled with limpid water.[12.24] This fête was like an intoxication, like a dream of Sardanapalus, where all the pleasures, all the debaucheries, not excluding some of a more delicate kind, were unrolled pell-mell. This river of dirt, which, making its exit by the mouth of the Orontes, was about to invade Rome,[12.25] had here its principal sources. Two hundred decurions were employed in regulating the religious ceremonies and celebrations.[12.26] The municipality possessed great public domains, the rents of which the decemvirs