Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/232

1 62 General History of Europe Mediterranean. There was a proverb that you could get anything in Alexandria except snow. A vast system of trade routes by sea and land covered the world of the time, from the frontiers of China and India on the east, to the harbors of the Atlantic and Britain on the west. 258. What a Tourist might see. The Roman citizens of this period often made tours of the Mediterranean much as the mod- ern sight-seer does. As the traveler passed through the towns of the provinces, he found everywhere evidences of the public spirit of the citizens. There were fountains, theaters, music halls, baths, and gymnasiums, erected by wealthy men and given to the com- munity. There were schools for boys and girls with teachers paid by the government. To a traveler wandering in Greece and looking back some six hundred years to the Age of Pericles or the Persian Wars of Athens, Greece seemed to belong to a distant and ancient world, of which he had read in the histories of Thucydides and Herod- otus ( 122, 147). The Roman visitor who strolled through Athens or Delphi noticed many an empty pedestal, and he recalled how the villas of his friends at home were now adorned with the statues which had once occupied them. As the traveler passed eastward through the flourishing cities of Asia Minor and Syria, he might feel justifiable pride in what Roman rule was accomplishing. In the western half of the Fertile Crescent, especially just east of the Jordan, where there had formerly been only a nomad wilderness, there were now pros- perous towns, with long aqueducts, baths, theaters, of which the ruins fill even us of today with astonishment. Beyond the desert behind these towns lay the former empires of Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia, with their great cities already reduced to mounds of rubbish. On visiting Alexandria our traveler might have found himself joining a group of other tourists, who, after viewing the great commercial town founded by Alexander the Great, could make their way up the Nile into the midst of a much earlier world the earliest civilization of which they knew. At Memphis and