This people valued only the day. No Greek region has so few memorial-stones to show as Syria; the great Antioch, the third city in the empire, has--to say nothing of the land of hieroglyphics and obelisks--left behind fewer inscriptions than many a small African or Arabian village. With the exception of the rhetorician Libanius from the time of Julian, who is more well-known than important, this town has not given to literature a single author’s name. The Tyanitic Messiah of heathenism, or his apostle speaking for him, was not wrong in terming the Antiochenes an uncultivated and half-barbarous people, and in thinking that Apollo would do well to transform them as well as their Daphne; for “in Antioch, while the cypresses knew how to whisper, men knew not how to speak.” In the artistic sphere Antioch had a leading position only as respected the theatre and sports generally. The exhibitions which captivated the public of Antioch were, according to the fashion of this time, less strictly dramatic than noisy musical performances, ballets, animal hunts, and gladiatorial games. The applauding or hissing of this public decided the reputation of the dancer throughout the empire. The jockeys and other heroes of the circus and theatre came pre-eminently from Syria.[132] The ballet-dancers and the musicians, as well as the jugglers and buffoons, whom Lucius Verus brought back from his Oriental campaign--performed, so far as his part went, in Antioch--to Rome, formed an epoch in the history of Italian theatricals. The passion with which the public in Antioch gave itself up to this pleasure is characteristically shown by the fact, that according to tradition the gravest disaster which befell Antioch in this period, its capture by the Persians in 260 (p. 101), surprised the burgesses of the city in the theatre, and from the top of the mount, on the slope of which it was constructed, the arrows flew into the ranks of the spectators. In Gaza, the most southerly town of Syria, where heathenism possessed a stronghold in the famous temple of Marnas, at the end of the fourth century the horses of a zealous heathen and of a zealous Christian ran at the races, and, when on that occasion “Christ beat Marnas,” St. Jerome tells us, numerous heathens had themselves baptised. [Sidenote: Immorality.]