divided between the poor citizens.[12.27] Like all cities of pleasure, Antioch had a lowest section of the people, living on the public or on sordid gains. The beauty of works of art and the infinite charm of nature[12.28] prevented this moral degradation from degenerating entirely into ugliness and vulgarity. The site of Antioch is one of the most picturesque in the world. The city occupied the interval between the Orontes and the slopes of Mount Silpius, one of the spurs of Mount Casius. Nothing could equal the abundance and beauty of the waters.[12.29] The fortified space, climbing up perpendicular rocks, by a real master-work of military architecture,[12.30] inclosed the summit of the mountains, and formed with the rocks at a tremendous height an indented crown of marvellous effect. This disposition of their ramparts, uniting the advantage of the ancient acropoles with those of the great walled cities, was in general preferred by the Generals of Alexander, as one sees in the Pierian Seleucia, in Ephesus, in Smyrna, in Thessalonica. The result was various astonishing perspectives. Antioch had within its walls mountains seven hundred feet in height, perpendicular rocks, torrents, precipices, deep ravines, cascades, inaccessible caves; in the midst of all these, delicious gardens.[12.31] A thick wood of myrtles, of flowering box, of laurels, of plants always green--and of the most tender green--rocks carpeted with pinks, with hyacinth, and cyclamens, give to these wild heights the aspect of gardens hung in the air. The variety of the flowers, the freshness of the turf, composed of an incredible number of minute grasses, the beauty of the plane trees which border the Orontes, inspire the gaiety, the tinge of sweet scent with which the beautiful genius of Chrysostom, Libanus, and Julian is, as it were, intoxicated. On the right bank of the river stretches a vast plain bordered on one side by the Amanus, and the oddly truncated mountains of Pieria; on the other side by the plateaus of Chyrrestica,[12.32] behind which is hidden the dangerous neighborhood of the Arab and the desert. The valley of the Orontes, which opens to the west, brings this interior basin into communication with the sea, or rather with the vast world in the bosom of which the Mediterranean has constituted from all time a sort of neutral highway and federal bond.