umns, the splendid capitals, the cornices and pedi- ments, all in the highest ornament, are thrown into unsighth' heaps."
As above noted, in Pergamos was one of the seven churches of Asia, to which the Apocalypse is addressed. This church is commended fur its fidelity and firmness in the midst of persecutions, and in a city so eminently addicted to idolatry. " I know," it is said, " th}' works, and where thou dwellesf, ecen where Satari's seat is" (Kev. ii, 13). Now there was at Pergamos a celebrated and much frequented temple of iEsculapius, who probably there, as in other places, was worshipped in the form of a living serpent, fed in the temi)le, and considered as its divinity. Hence /Esculapius was called the god of Per- gamos, and on the coins struck by the town ^scula- pius often appears with a rod encircled by a serpent (Berger, Thesaur. i, 492). As the sacred writer men- tions the great dragon and the old serpent (Rev. xii, 9), there is reason to conclude that when he says in the above passage that the Church of Pergamos dwelt "where Satan's seat is," he alludes to the worship of the serpent as there practiced. The great wealth which accrued to Eumenes II from his large accession of ter- ritory he employed in laj'ing out a magnificent resi- dential city, and adorning it witii temples and other public buildings. His passion, and that of his suc- cessor, for literature and the fine arts, led them to form a library wliich rivalled that of Alexandria ; and the impulse given to the art of preparing sheepskins for the purpose of transcription, to gratify the taste of the ro}-al di'ettanti, has left its record in the name ^arcA- ment. Eumenes's successor, Attalus If, is said to have bid six hundred thousand sesterces for a picture by the painter Aristides, at the sale of the plunder of Cor- intli ; and b}' so doing to have attracted the attention of tlie Roman general Mummiusto it, who sent it cff at once to Rome, where no foreign artist's work had then been seen. For another picture b}' the same art- ist he paid one hundred talents. But the great glory of the city was the so-called Nicephorium, a grove of extreme beauty, laid out as a thank-offering for a vic- tory over Antiochus, in which was an assemblage of temples, probabh' of all the deities, Zeus, Athena, Apol- lo, ^sculapius, Dionysus, and Aphrodite. The temple of the last was of a most elaborate character. Its ftigade was perhaps inlaid after the manner oipietradura work ; for Philip Vof Macedonia, who was repulsed in an at- tempt to surprise Pergamos during the reign of Atta- lus II, vented his spite in cutting down the trees of the
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grove, and not only destroying the Aphrodisium, but injuring the stones in such a way as to prevent their being used again. At the conclusion of peace it was made a special stipulation that this damage should be made good. The immense wealth which was directly or indirectly derived from the legacy of his dominions by Attalus III to the Romans contributed perhaps even more than the spoils of Cartilage and Corinth to the demoralization of Koman statesmen. The sumptu- ousness of the Attalic princes had raised Pergamos to the rank of the first city in Asia as regards splendor, and Pliny speaks of it as without a rival in the province. Its prominence, however, was not that of a commercial town, like Ephesus or Corinth, but arose from its pe- culiar features. It was a sort of union of a pagan ca- thedral city, a university town, and a royal residence, embellished during a succession of years b}' kings who all had a passion for expenditure and ample means of gratifying it. Two smaller streams, which flowed from the north, embracing the town lietween them, and then fell into the Caicus, aftbrded am[)le means of storing water, without whicli, in those latitudes, ornamental cultivation (or indeed cultivation of any kind) is out of the question. The larger of these streams — the Berga- ma-tchai, or Cetius of antiquity — has a fall of more than 150 feet between the hills to the north of Pergamos and its junction with the Caicus, and it brings down a verj' considerable body of water. Both the Nicephorium, which has been spoken of above, and the Grove of iEs- culapius, which became yet more celebrated in the time of the Roman empire, doubtless owed their existence to the means of irrigation thus available ; and furnished the appliances for those licentious rituals of pagan an- tiquity which flourished wherever there were groves and hill-altars. Under the Attalic kings, Pergamos became a city of temples, devoted to a sensuous wor- ship; and being in its origin, according to pagan no- tions, a sacred place, might not unnaturall}' be viewed by Jews and Jewish Christians as one "where was the throne of Satan" (ottov b Bpoi'oc; tov Earavci, Rev. ii, 13). After the extinction of its independence, the sa- cred character of Pergamos seems to have been put even more prominently forward. Coins and inscrip- tions constantly' describe the Pergamenes as viaiKopoi or I'tojKupoi TrpwToi rT/g 'Aff/af- This title always in- dicates the duty of maintaining a religious worship of some kind (which indeed naturallj' goes together with the usufruct of religious property). What the deities were to which the title has reference especially it is diflficult to say. In the time of Martial, however, /Es- culapius had acquired so much prominence that he is called Pergameus deus. His grove was recognised hy the Roman senate in the reign of Tiberius as possessing the rights of sanctuary. Pausanias, too, in the course of his work, refers more than once to the ^sculapian ritual at Pergamos as a sort of standard. From the cir- cumstance of this notoriety of the Pergamene ^scula- pius, from the title 'S.MTt'jp being given to him, from the serpent (which Judaical Christians would regard as a symbol of evil) being his characteristic emblem, and from the fact that the medical practice of antiquity in- cluded charms and incantations among its agencies, it has been supposed that the expressions o Srporo^ tov Sarrtra and oirov o ^aTCirai; KaroiKi't have an especial reference to this one pagan deity, and not to tlie whole citj' as a sort of focus of idolatrous worship. But al- though undoubtedly the jEsculapius worship of Perga- mos was the most famous, and in later times became continually more predominant from tiic fact of its be- ing conitiincd with an excellent medical scliool (which among others prochiccd tlie celebrated (ialen), yet an inscription of the time of Marcus Antoninus distinctly puts Zeus, Athena, Dionysus, and /Esculapius in a co- ordinate rank, as all being special tutelary deities of Pergamos. It seems unlikely, therefore, that the ex- pressions above quoted should be so interpreted as to isolate one of them from the rest. It may be added