All the great cities of the Roman empire doubtless vied with each other in dissoluteness of morals; but in this the palm probably belongs to Antioch. The decorous Roman, whom the severe moral-portrait-painter of Trajan’s time depicts, as he turns his back on his native place, because it had become a city of Greeks, adds that the Achaeans formed the least part of the filth; that the Syrian Orontes had long discharged itself into the river Tiber, and flooded Rome with its language and its habits, its street-musicians, female harp-players and triangle-beaters, and the troops of its courtesans. The Romans of Augustus spoke of the Syrian female flute-player, the _ambubaia_,[133] as we speak of the Parisian _cocotte_. In the Syrian cities, it is stated even in the last age of the republic by Posidonius, an author of importance, who was himself a native of the Syrian Apamea, the citizens have become disused to hard labour; the people there think only of feasting and carousing, and all clubs and private parties serve for this purpose; at the royal table a garland is put on every guest, and the latter is then sprinkled with Babylonian perfume; flute-playing and harp-playing sound through the streets; the gymnastic institutes are converted into hot baths--by the latter is meant the institution of the so-called Thermae, which probably first emerged in Syria and subsequently became general; they were in substance a combination of the gymnasium and the hot-bath. Four hundred years later matters went on after quite a similar fashion in Antioch. The quarrel between Julian and these townsmen arose not so much about the emperor’s beard, as because in this city of taverns, which, as he expresses himself, has nothing in view but dancing and drinking, he regulated the prices for the hosts. The religious system of the Syrian land was also, and especially, pervaded by these dissolute and sensuous doings. The cultus of the Syrian gods was often an appanage of the Syrian brothel.[134] [Sidenote: Antiochene ridicule.]