Roman officials and the wealthier Macedonian Antiochenes lived on an island, formed by a curve of the River Orontes at the northern end within the city wall.  The never-neglected problem of administration was to keep a clear route along which troops could move from citadel to island when the rioting began.

On the island was the palace, glittering with gilt and marble, gay with colored awnings, where kings had lived magnificently until Romans saved the city from them, substituting a proconsular paternal kind of tyranny originating in the Roman patria potestas.  There was not much sentiment about it.  Rome became the foster-parent, the possessor of authority.  There was duty, principally exacted from the governed in the form of taxes and obedience; and there were privileges, mostly reserved for the rulers and their parasites, who were much more numerous than anybody liked.  Competition made the parasites as discontented as their prey.

But there were definite advantages of Roman rule, which no Antiochene denied, although their comic actors and the slaves who sang at private entertainments mocked the Romans and invented accusations of injustice and extortion that were even more outrageous than the truth.  Not since the days when Antioch inherited the luxury and vices of the Greeks and Syrians, had pleasure been so organized or its commercial pursuit so profitable.  Taxes were collected rigorously.  The demands of Rome, increased by the extravagance of Commodus, were merciless.  But trade was good.  Obedience and flattery were well rewarded.  Citizens who yielded to extortion and refrained from criticism within hearing of informers lived in reasonable expectation of surviving the coming night.

But the informers were ubiquitous and unknown, which was another reason why the Romans and Antiochenes refrained from mixing socially more than could be helped.  A secret charge of treason, based on nothing more than an informer’s malice, might set even a Roman citizen outside the pale of ordinary law and make him liable to torture.  If convicted, death and confiscation followed.  Since the deification of the emperors it had become treason even to use a coarse expression near their images or statues; images were on the coins; statues were in the streets.  Commodus, to whom all confiscated property accrued, was in ever-increasing need of funds to defray the titanic expense of the games that he lavished on Rome and the “presents” with which he studiously nursed the army’s loyalty.  So it was wise to be taciturn; expedient to choose one’s friends deliberately; not far removed from madness to be seen in company with those whose antecedents might suggest the possibility of a political intrigue.  But it was also unwise to woo solitude; a solitary man might perish by the rack and sword for lack of witnesses, if charged with some serious offense.

So there were comradeships more loyal the more that treachery stalked abroad.  Because seriousness drew attention from the spies, the deepest thoughts were masked beneath an air of levity, and merrymaking hid such counsels as might come within the vaguely defined boundaries of treason.