But even in the west, the Phœnicians could not maintain their footing

against the Greeks, and on the entrance of the latter into Sicily,

soon after the middle of the eighth century, they abandoned most of

their possessions in that island. On the opposite coast of Africa,

their colonies seem to have been more numerous, and since the rise

of Carthage, their influence had spread far into the interior. There

they came in contact with tribes wholly incapable of competing with

them, and Punic became the common language of the country, just as

Arabic did at a later period, though whether the cities there owed

their origin to Tyrians, Carthaginians, or natives, we are unable to

say. There were other Phœnician colonies beyond the straits, which are

said to have been destroyed by native tribes. When they were founded,

when destroyed, and how long an interval had elapsed before Hanno of

Carthage went forth, in the middle of the fifth century, to establish

fresh colonies there, are questions to which we have no answer. Punic

mariners seem to have been the first to visit the Canary Islands, and,

according to the report that has come down to us, Hanno’s expedition

reached a point sixteen days’ journey south of Cape Verde on the coast

of New Guinea.

Our information concerning the voyages of Phœnicians to the north, in

search of the tin which the nations of antiquity valued so highly, is

vague in the extreme. Ezekiel mentions tin among the metals brought

by Tarshish to the Tyrian market, but he may refer to that which was

obtained from Lusitania and Galicia. On the other hand, the Gaditanians

are said to have brought it by sea from the Cassiterides or Tin Islands

(the coast of Britain), and the story goes that a merchant of Cadiz who

steered his vessel on the rocks, in order to preserve the secret of the

route from the Romans who were tracking him, was compensated for his

loss out of the public funds. Again, the hypothesis that the Phœnicians

actually got as far as the Baltic shore, to traffic for amber with

the inhabitants of Samland, though conceivable, rests on nothing but

conjecture. It is possible that they never went as far as Cornwall, and

merely pretended that the tin of Spain was the product of the northern

isles to evade the risk of competition.

Phœnician enterprise was directed to the west rather than to the east,

and chose the way of the sea rather than that of the land. The reason

was simple; sea-transport was exposed to fewer risks, and tribes in a

low stage of civilisation accorded to settlers and merchants who came

among them to barter treasures from the remotest ends of the earth, for

the raw produce of the soil, a very different welcome from what they

could expect from the rulers of the civilised East. But, few as their

settlements were, the Phœnicians, nevertheless, drove a thriving trade

with oriental nations. The products of Armenia must have come into the

Tyrian market before the days of Ezekiel; Syria and Palestine supplied

Phœnicia with food, with raw material and articles of commerce, and

with labour for her wharves. In the time of Herodotus, the spices of

Arabia passed through the hands of Phœnician merchants, and he mentions

that in Egypt there was a Tyrian quarter of the city [Memphis] and a

temple of the “foreign Aphrodite,” presumably Astarte.

The Phœnicians do not seem to have felt bound to interfere with the

Israelite occupation of the land west of Jordan, and, with a few

insignificant exceptions, the two nations appear to have lived side by

side in peace; a state of things advantageous to both parties.

[Sidenote: [1100 B.C.]]

The migration of the Pursta, by destroying the Hittite empire, gave

rise to a number of petty states, whose impotence may be estimated

by the fact that in 1110, Tiglathpileser I, King of Assyria, pressed

forward to the very shores of the Mediterranean. But more than two

hundred years had yet to elapse before the kings of Assyria could

seriously contemplate the conquest of Phœnicia. Tyre, strong in her

monopoly of the trade with Tarshish, remained mistress of the seas, and

mother of remote colonies long after the glory of Phœnicia had waned in

the Ægean, and entered upon the heritage of Sidon, which had formerly

held a similar position. Whether there was any political compact in

virtue of which she took the lead in Phœnician affairs, we cannot tell;

the foundations of her supremacy were her fleet and commerce, and the

gradual extension of her sovereignty to a wider area.

The list of the kings of Tyre supplies useful chronological references

for Jewish history, and to this accident we owe it that Josephus has

preserved some extracts from Menander’s _Annals of Tyre_. The first

monarch mentioned in these extracts is the son and successor of

Abibaal, Hiram, who ruled Tyre from 969 [980] to 936 B.C.[b]

[Illustration: TYRE FROM THE MAINLAND]

CHAPTER III. THE PHŒNICIAN TIME OF POWER

THE REIGN OF HIRAM I

The sources of information for the reign of Hiram are richer than for

any other period of Phœnician history. They no longer offer merely a

few scattered notices and chance remarks, or names which have scarcely

any historical value, but they furnish data which are important, not

only from their contents but relatively also in their extent, and which

are all the more valuable because they touch upon the most remarkable

period of the history of Western Asia. These sources may be divided

into three classes. In the first rank are the priceless remnants

of Phœnician historiography which Josephus, for the comparison and

verification of the Biblical accounts of King Hiram and his relations

with Solomon, has preserved from the historical works of Menander and

Dius. Second, and even more important in their way, are the Biblical

accounts themselves, which give information concerning the political,

commercial, and social relations that were established between Israel

and Phœnicia and their rulers. A third source of information in which,

to be sure, has been incorporated many a legend from this brilliant

period of both countries, consists mainly of later versions of

Phœnician and Israelitish history, fragments from the works of Chætus,

Theophilus, and Eupolemus, which have been preserved by ecclesiastical

writers as a supplement to the above excerpts of Josephus and for a

like purpose.

[Sidenote: [_ca._ 980-936 B.C.]]

After the death of the little-known King Abibaal, his son Hiram I

ascended the throne at the age of twenty. The date of this event has

been proven by chronological research to have been 980 B.C., eight

years before the death of the great Israelite king David.[7]

From all that the above-mentioned sources relate or that can be

inferred from comparison with the conditions before the reign of

Hiram, it is apparent that Phœnicia was already in a condition where

her affairs needed only to be more firmly moulded and secured. Hence,

in this respect also, the Phœnician and Israelitish states, whose

rulers, Hiram and Solomon, were friends and had so much in common in

character and tastes, were in very similar circumstances. For it was

but recently that in Tyre, too, a kingdom had been established in

place of the government of the suffets, and at the same time the bond

of dependence completely severed which had united Tyre as a colony

to Sidon. It is probable, indeed, that in the weakness of the mother

state this relation had before this time been maintained solely from a

feeling of filial duty.

The relations with Israel and the recognised position as hegemonic

state which Tyre maintained under Hiram, may have been established in

the period immediately preceding, but what the records tell of this

renowned king nevertheless makes him appear as the real founder of the

Tyrian state. The records of the sources concerning his buildings on

the island of Tyre, by which he secured the metropolis of the country

against the reverses of a continental war, point to this. This work was

carried out on a magnificent plan and made the formerly insignificant

island town a protecting bulwark not only for Tyre, but for the whole

of Phœnicia. These edifices must belong to the very beginning of his

reign, for the accounts of Menander and Dius, which are evidently

arranged in chronological order, mention them first, and the buildings

which were erected at Jerusalem, at the beginning of his reign and with

his co-operation, make it presumable that some occurrence of that kind

had already taken place at Tyre.

A glance at the political position of the neighbouring states of the

continent throws light upon the next point. The Israelites had very

recently subjugated all the peoples of the vicinity with the sole

exception of the Phœnicians; the smaller Syrian states, hitherto

divided, formed a closer alliance with one another, and under the king

of Damascus were beginning, even at that time, to form the second power

in Western Asia.

So, threatened by the fresh danger of the combined forces of the

hitherto divided Israelitish and Aramæan races, the Phœnicians spared

no efforts in increasing the fortifications of the island city. It

may well be presumed that in these early days of the new Tyrian royal

state, Palætyrus, which in the period immediately subsequent continues

to appear as the more important and as the seat of the royal residence,

was the site of many new buildings, especially of such royal palaces

as Hiram’s workmen also erected in Jerusalem. Of these, however, the

sources give no information, because they bear upon the island town

which was subsequently the more important, and because only a few

remains of Palætyrus were in existence when these records were written.

Furthermore, the religious ceremonies took quite a new form under this

king. Some of the old sanctuaries already in existence in Tyre he

rebuilt, others he replaced with entirely new ones. According to the

records the latter was the case with the temples of the two guardian

deities, Melkarth and Astarte, while they mention the restoration

of the cedar roofs of other temples not named, but in regard to the

magnitude of these latter buildings, they relate how Hiram went to

Lebanon and had a whole wood of cedar trees cut down for the work. The

third great temple, that of Baalsamin, was adorned with golden votive

offerings, amongst which was that famous golden pillar, often mentioned

in later times and still on view in Tyre until the last centuries of

its independence.

As through these enterprises, indicative of the love of splendour

and the great wealth of the king, provision was made for the

magnificence of the new royal city and of its religious services, so

too, another regulation of Hiram’s, mentioned by Menander, points to

a reorganisation of the cult, or at least of the order of festivals.

For Menander relates that Hiram was the first to have the Awakening

of Hercules celebrated in the month of Peritius, when he was starting

forth on the war against the Cypriotes.

We learn from the records that the king not only reorganised the

internal structure of the Tyrian state, but also took measures to

safeguard the foreign acquisitions of his predecessors. The passage

from Menander, cited above, tells that Hiram made war against the

Cypriotes, who did not pay their tribute and were again subjugated by

Hiram. From this it is clear that the Island of Cyprus had already,

under Hiram’s predecessor, passed from the possession of Sidon, which

had colonised it during her hegemony, to Tyre.

As all the records we have had under consideration indicate that Tyre

had gained its position as leading state during the previous reign,

and in Hiram’s time was looking to the organisation and strengthening

of what had been won, the same thing may be said of the relations with

Israel. The records on this subject are relatively complete, and of

the most manifold interest for the history of both these flourishing

states. We shall therefore have to treat them somewhat more in detail.

Through David’s successful wars the Israelitish state had grown from

its former insignificance to a power greater than had for a long

time existed in Western Asia. The whole of Syria and Palestine,

with the exception of the northern coast, belonged to the kingdom

of Israel, so that Phœnicia, on the continent side, was nearly

surrounded by Israelitish territory. All the routes of commerce which

led from the Euphrates, from Arabia and Egypt, to the emporiums of

the Mediterranean, were controlled by the Israelites, and after the

conquest of the Edomite district, they also possessed the commercial

ports on the Red Sea, where the Phœnicians had long carried on an

extremely profitable trade with Arabia and Ethiopia, and perhaps also,

even before David’s time, with India. Under these circumstances the

Phœnicians made an effort to enter into closer relations with their

powerful neighbours.

Soon after the beginning of his reign, Hiram sent an embassy to David

which resulted in his despatching Phœnician workmen to Jerusalem to

build the Jewish king a palace. There is no mention of compensation

for this service; so it seems, especially from the short account

which makes the messengers and the workmen go to David together, that

the Phœnician ruler had the building erected simply in order to show

himself well-disposed towards the Israelite. However that may be, with

the continued friendship of their rulers there could be no lack of

important results for the political and commercial relations of the two

states; and commercial undertakings and alliances, such as we find in

greater extent in the reign of Solomon, may even at that time have been

entered into by them.

After the death of David, Hiram sought to maintain the cordial

relations between the two countries under Solomon’s rule, and therefore

took occasion, upon the latter’s accession to the throne, to send

an embassy to Jerusalem with congratulations, and to request the

continuation of the friendship. Solomon was then cherishing the project

of building the temple which David had desired to erect after the

completion of the palace which Hiram’s workmen had built for him in

Jerusalem towards the end of his reign. For the pious king considered

it unfitting that he should dwell in a “cedar palace,” while the

dwelling of Jehovah was a tent. But in view of the continuance of

internal disturbances and the still incomplete subjugation of the

provinces that had been incorporated in the kingdom, he was withheld

from his project by the prophet Nathan, who showed him that the

execution of it was destined to his successor.

In carrying out his father’s plan, Solomon could not dispense with

Phœnician workmen and artificers, so he took the opportunity afforded

by the friendly overtures of the Tyrian king to make a treaty with

him. According to the more ancient version of this treaty, Hiram

was to furnish cedar and cypress wood, together with carpenters and

stone-masons for the building, and to send the materials already shaped

on rafts to Judah. In return Hiram stipulated that he should receive

yearly as long as the work continued, twenty thousand measures of

wheat, as “food for his house,” that is, for the royal household, and

twenty, or according to the reading of the Septuagint and according to

Josephus, twenty thousand measures of oil of olives.

After the temple at Jerusalem had been completed with the assistance

of Phœnician artificers, other compacts for similar purposes must have

been made by the pomp-loving Solomon with the Tyrian king. For we

learn that the supplies of cedar and fir trees and gold continued for

twenty years. That at the same time the commercial relations of the two

countries were regulated by treaties, import duties for wares fixed,

the position of the Phœnician merchants resident in Judah, as well as

that of the numerous Israelites settled in Phœnician lands determined,

lies quite in the nature of the case and is also in part supported by

definite statements.

[Illustration: THE SO-CALLED “TOMB OF HIRAM”]

A Phœnician tale represents the wise Solomon in a dispute with his

friend Hiram, confounding him with riddles, and then being himself

overcome by a Phœnician wiser than himself. As the legend of the wisdom

of Solomon is here ingeniously linked with the friendly relation with

Hiram, so another legend of the extraordinary wealth of the Israelitish

king makes use of the same relation, by ascribing to him a remarkable

votive offering in the temple of Melkarth, that golden pillar which,

according to the excerpts from Menander and Dius, King Hiram had set up

in the said sanctuary, where it was admired by Herodotus. Now, a legend

which Eupolemus has preserved, says that this pillar came from Solomon,

who sent it to Hiram in gratitude for his assistance in the building of

the temple.

This tale has too much the character of a popular tradition to be

deemed a mere invention of Eupolemus; and it is too vexatious to

the spirit of later Judaism to be of Jewish invention. According to

another Phœnician story, Solomon sent the gold that was not used in

the building of the temple to the Tyrian king, and the latter is said

to have had that famous column made as a setting for the statue of his

daughter, who was married to Solomon. That Solomon married a daughter

of Hiram is reported by two authors who have written on Phœnician

history, Chætus and Menander of Pergamus. Biblical history records the

marriage of Solomon with the daughter of an Egyptian king, and also

mentions the Jewish king’s large harem, in which were also Sidonian

women, for whom Solomon established the racial cult of the Sidonians,

the worship of Astarte. This would indicate for the Sidonians an

unusually high position in the harem.

[Sidenote: [_ca._ 980-887 B.C.]]

As Tyrian legend and history take pains to honour Hiram for his

connection with Solomon, who was early a resplendent figure in eastern

tradition, on the other hand we must not overlook a similar effort in

Jewish historiography, which tells us with pleasure of the friendship

of the two Israelitish rulers with Hiram, and does not conceal the fact

that the external brilliancy and wealth of Solomon were a consequence

of the connection with the rich and artistic neighbouring nation.

Even later Jewish tradition relates many a strange thing about this

famous Tyrian king. He is said to be that prince of Tyre who in

Ezekiel xxviii. 2, walks amid the precious stones of Paradise, and, in

accordance with a further interpretation of Ezekiel’s prophecy, he is

said to have perished at the siege of Tyre by Nebuchadrezzar, after

having lived five hundred years.

According to another not quite unfounded tale, Hiram had a temple

built at Tyre like that at Jerusalem, and introduced Jewish customs

in it, in which respect Hiram may be compared to the Emperor Julian,

who transferred Christian usages to heathendom. This story is allied

to another Syrian tradition that the ecclesiastical translation of

the Old Testament which the Syrians use is that which Hiram requested

Solomon to have made. As the traditions of the Phœnicians and of the

neighbouring Hebrews and Syrians so long preserved the memory of the

two kings, they look upon this time as the period of splendour of both

Phœnicia and Israel.[b]

THE SUCCESSORS OF HIRAM

Hiram was succeeded by his son Baalbazer, who died after a reign of

seven years. He was succeeded by his son Abdastarte, who reigned

nine years. At the age of twenty-nine he fell a victim to a palace

revolution. The four sons of his nurse conspired against him and

removed him from their path. The oldest of them, Metuastarte, son

of Leastarte mounted the throne and held the government twelve

years. [Most of the authorities differ from Pietschmann in assigning

twenty-four years to Metuastarte’s reign, in the last half of which he

associated with himself on the throne a scion of the royal house who is

known as Astarte or sometimes Abdastarte II.] His successor was one of

his brothers, Astharymus, who nine years later was put to death by his

brother Phelles. Only eight months afterwards a like fate overtook the

latter. He was murdered by Ithobaal, (Eth-baal), priest of Astarte.

[Sidenote: [_ca._ 887-723 B.C.]]

With Ithobaal’s accession orderly conditions were again restored. He

entered into friendly relations with the kingdom of northern Israel,

concluded what Amos calls a “brotherly covenant” with it, and gave

his daughter, Jezebel, in marriage to the warlike king, Ahab, son of

Omri. The drought which visited northern Syria in Ahab’s time is also

mentioned in the annals of Tyre; they limit its duration to one year,

and ascribe its cessation to an intercessory procession which Ithobaal

performed. Under his government the heavy doom which was to fall on the

Syrian countries from Assyria, drew nearer to Phœnicia. Asshurnazirpal

marched with his army (876 B.C.) down from the upper valley of the

Orontes into the low-lying coast district of Djun Akkor, and proceeding

southward across it, penetrated to the Nahr-el-Kelb, where one of

the Assyrian rock sculptures appears to date from him. The towns of

Phœnicia made haste to buy him off with presents, and thus escaped

for this time. Ithobaal, it is said, founded Botrys, probably in the

well-grounded anticipation that this raid would not be the last of the

kind which would take this direction. From Botrys the passage of the

Ras-el-Shakka could be commanded.

The successor of Ithobaal was his son Baalazar, who reigned six years,

and the latter’s son Mettenus (Metten) then ruled during twenty-nine

years. After his death the crown passed to Pygmalion. With this king,

who occupied the throne forty-seven years, the consecutive list of the

kings of Tyre which has come down to us from Menander’s works, comes to

an end. No more of it has been preserved intact.

In Baalazar’s time the danger threatening Phœnicia from the growing

power of Assyria, seems to have been recognised at Aradus and in

the neighbouring towns. In the battle of Qarqar (854) Mettenbaal

[Matinu-Baal of Shalmaneser II’s records], King of Aradus, fought on

Ahab’s side against Shalmaneser II, and so perhaps did also the troops

of Ushu and Sian, two places which the Assyrian inscriptions generally

mention, together with Simyra and Aradus, and also those of Akko. These

would be the towns which were least protected by natural boundaries on

the side of northern Syria. Shalmaneser II boasts that on his campaigns

against Hazael of Damascus, he had taken tribute from Tyre, where

Metten was then reigning, and Sidon (842 and 839 B.C.), and also from

Byblus (839); this may be a bragging name for voluntary presents he had

received there. In Pygmalion’s time Sidon and Tyre seem to have been

under an obligation to pay taxes to the Assyrian king, Adad-nirari III,

whose conquering expeditions twice attained Phœnicia (804 and 803). It

then had peace from the Assyrians for more than half a century, until

the time of Tiglathpileser III. This king’s inscriptions announce that

he wasted the territory of the towns of Simyra, Akko, Ushu, and Sian,

installed there Assyrian captains and established colonists who were

brought thither from the farthest corners of the empire. Hiram II of

Tyre and Sibittibi’li of Byblus are named amongst the kings whose

homage he received in Syria, and on another occasion Mettenbaal of

Aradus, while Tyre had to pay him one hundred and fifty talents of

gold. Aradus, Byblus, and Tyre were apparently the only independent

states of Phœnicia at this time.

[Sidenote: [723-671 B.C.]]

Tyre remained the most independent and the most powerful. Elulæus, who

reigned there about 728-692 B.C., under the name of Pylas, succeeded,

at the outset of his reign in subduing the rebellious Cypriotes by

means of his war-ships. In his time Shalmaneser IV, the successor

of Tiglathpileser III, overran the whole of Phœnicia. A peace was

concluded, by which Sidon, Akko, even Palætyrus, and many other towns

passed to the Assyrian king. Apparently they wish to make themselves

independent of the island city, even at the cost of their political

independence. But since the Tyrians showed themselves dissatisfied

with this, Shalmaneser again advanced into Phœnicia, and in order to

reach the island fortress, he collected sixty ships with eight hundred

rowers, from which it appears that they were of small dimensions.

But the Tyrians defended themselves bravely; with twelve ships they

scattered the enemy’s fleet, and took five hundred prisoners. Then the

Assyrian king marched away, but left behind a part of his army, to

hold the mainland opposite Tyre and cut it off from the river which

there fell into the sea, and from the aqueducts, and thus prevent the

Tyrians from supplying themselves with drinking water. This is said

to have lasted for five years, while the Tyrians had recourse to the

water which collected in wells they dug on their island. In the end

they appear to have grown weary of resisting. Apparently the annals

of Tyre do not assert that the efforts of the Assyrians were entirely

without result. Sargon ascended the throne of Assyria in 722, and it

is supposed that the Tyrians came to terms with him in 720, when he

appeared in Syria to crush the alliance of Arpad, Simyra, Damascus, and

Samaria. Sargon boasts that he drew the Ionians like fish from the sea,

and quieted Cilicia, and Tyre, and he speaks of Tyre as a town which

belonged to him. Sennacherib set up a king in Sidon, named Tubaal, that

is Ithobaal, on whom he imposed a tax; Abdili’ti of Aradus and Urumilki

of Byblus also did homage to him. From Syria he took workmen to

Nineveh, who had there to build ships for him after the pattern of the

vessels of their own country. These were manned with Tyrian, Sidonian,

and also Greek, _i.e._, probably Cyprian, seamen, and with them he was

able to undertake a maritime expedition on the Tigris to subdue the

people of Bit Yakin and the Elamites “with their gods,” and to carry

them away as prisoners (694 B.C.). These vessels are represented on a

bas-relief at Kuyunjik, round transports, with the hind and foreparts

bent upwards, and war-ships with a great projecting keel. Both classes

had two decks. On the upper one, behind high side railings, outside

which the warriors have hung their shields, the prisoners and men armed

with spears, are seen seated. Between the decks sit the oarsmen, their

backs turned to the forepart of the ship. Two rows of oars are at work,

one above the other; two long poles serve instead of a rudder and are

disposed right and left of the stern of the vessel.

[Sidenote: [671-586 B.C.]]

Soon after Sennacherib’s son Esarhaddon had begun his reign,

Abd-milkot, king of Sidon, the successor, apparently, of that Ithobaal

or Ethbaal whom Sennacherib had installed there, allowed himself

to be beguiled into an effort after independence, in unison with

Sanduarri, ruler of the two towns of Kundu and Sizu, which are to be

sought inland, to the east of Sidon. The attempt failed. Sidon was

taken (678 B.C.), plundered, and laid waste; the fortifications were

demolished, the inhabitants led away into exile, and on its site a

new settlement was established, which was peopled by men from the

eastern districts of the Assyrian empire and received as a colony the

name of Kar-Asshur-akhe-iddin (the city of Esarhaddon). In the year

671 B.C. Esarhaddon took the field against Tirhaqa of Egypt; and Baal

of Tyre, trusting in Tirhaqa’s power, exhibited insubordination. As

in Shalmaneser’s time, Tyre was again cut off by the Assyrians from

all its supplies of food and water. It is not stated whether Baal was

thus reduced to submission. But certain it is that in Asshurbanapal’s

reign Baal was again besieged by the Assyrians, in his island city.

Defences were again erected on the mainland opposite, and all

approaches were blocked by land and sea. To quench their thirst the

besieged are said to have been finally reduced to drinking salt water.

The final result was that Baal submitted and tendered guarantees for

a more loyal demeanour in future. He delivered up his own daughter

and those of his brother as wives for the supreme king, together

with a rich dowry, and also surrendered him his son Yahi-melek. This

was more than Asshurbanapal required, and he sent Yahi-melek back to

his father. Probably with the assistance of Baal’s war-ships, the

Assyrians then proceeded to the subjection of the other island king

of Phœnicia, Yakinlu of Aradus. He also was compelled to send his

daughter to Nineveh with many presents; every such addition to his

harem was peculiarly grateful to Asshurbanapal. Subsequently, however,

Yakinlu again fell into disgrace, and was deposed; perhaps not without

the co-operation of his ten sons, who all presented themselves, with

valuable presents, at Asshurbanapal’s court, to make application

for the vacant throne. It was given to one of them, called Azebaal;

the rest were bought off with honours. The period to which these

events belong cannot be exactly determined; it is possible that they

may have some connection with the fact that Asshurbanapal’s brother

Shamash-shum-ukin succeeded in rousing the vassals in the west to

rebellion. In connection with a campaign which was undertaken against

the Arab prince Yauta about 640 B.C., the towns of Ushu and Akko were

punished in exemplary fashion, for negligent payment of the tribute and

for repudiating their allegiance. This may have been the last warlike

action which an Assyrian army performed in the territory of Phœnicia,

although an Assyrian governor of Simyra, with the rank of an eponymos,

or limmu, is mentioned as late as the year 636 B.C.

Syria and Palestine did not escape the blows of fate whose force

wrecked the Assyrian empire after Asshurbanapal’s reign. Hordes of

Scythian horsemen, carrying bows and javelins, broke in from the

north and penetrated as far as the frontiers of Egypt (about 625

B.C.). Presents from Psamthek I are said to have induced them to turn

back. Before leaving Syria the stragglers plundered the sanctuary of

Aphrodite at Askalon. The power of Egypt was again increased under the

rule of Psamthek, for his special care was the creation of a mercenary

army composed of Carians and Ionians, and so strong did it become

that his son and successor, Neku II (608 B.C.), was able to go still

further and attempt to recover the dominion which the Pharaohs of the

New Kingdom had possessed in Syria. Josiah of Judah, who was foolhardy

enough to oppose him at Megiddo, was by him defeated. Syria seems to

have submitted to him, as far as the countries bordering the Euphrates.

Gaza offered resistance, but was taken.

But it was only for a short time that Neku II could feel himself a

conqueror. Nabopolassar sent his son Nebuchadrezzar against him, and at

Carchemish on the Euphrates a battle was fought in the year 605 B.C.

which Neku lost. Nebuchadrezzar could not at once completely follow up

his victory, for he had to return to Babylon, where his father had in

the meantime died. Still the Babylonians now had a free hand in Syria,

and Neku did not again venture to face them.

[Sidenote: [586-532 B.C.]]

The Phœnicians had long learnt how to make the best of a foreign

supremacy. A strong party which held it advisable to side with

Nebuchadrezzar as the most powerful of the rivals for the lordship over

Assyria, appears to have held the reins of government in Tyre, when

Apries (Uah-ab-Ra) attained that of Egypt. The latter, as Herodotus

relates, immediately on his accession, took the field against Sidon and

gave battle to the Tyrians by sea; and then only does it appear that

opinion changed and Tyre allowed herself to enter into negotiations

with Egypt. Otherwise, in 587 Nebuchadrezzar would have had no grounds

for not only proceeding with his army to renew the siege of Jerusalem,

but also advancing against Tyre. Apries did not venture to march

against the Babylonians, but left the Jews and Tyrians to their fate.

Already in July, 586, the capital of the kingdom of Judah had been

conquered: the town was destroyed and the people led away into exile

in Babylonia. According to Ezekiel the Tyrians hailed the fall of

Jerusalem with joy: the gate which barred the nations was broken,

another commercial route was opened up. But according to Menander, in

587 Nebuchadrezzar had already begun to blockade Ithobaal II in his

island. Tyre resisted longer than ever before, and Ithobaal II did not

surrender for thirteen years (574), and probably then only because

he was compelled to do so by the straits to which the isolation from

the mainland and the cessation of all industries had reduced his

subjects. The town was neither taken by storm nor plundered and ruined.

Ithobaal’s family had to remove to Babylon, so that in case Baal II, to

whom Nebuchadrezzar gave Tyre in fee, should prove insubordinate, the

Babylonians might not want for pretenders to the crown. To frighten the

Pharaohs from further attempts to interfere, Nebuchadrezzar undertook a

campaign against Egypt (in 568). The Tyrians remained docile. Nabonidus

still called Gaza the southernmost landmark of his kingdom.

The reign of Baal II, which lasted ten years (to 564), was followed

by an interregnum, a period in which Tyre was not under kings, but

under judges, suffets--that is, rulers who could lay claim to no sort

of legal right. Thus Tyre was in a state of anarchy. Finally a party

prevailed, which sent for a legitimate king from Babylon, namely

Maharbaal (Greek Merbalos), who reigned four years. He was succeeded by

his brother Hiram (III), who was also fetched from Babylon. The annals

of Tyre place the transference of power into the hands of Cyrus, the

Persian, in the fourteenth year of the twenty years’ reign of Hiram III

(538 B.C.). As a matter of course, when Babylon fell into the hands of

the Persians, Phœnicia, like the rest of Syria, also changed masters.

It seems as though the wearisome siege of Tyre, under Nebuchadrezzar,

and the period of anarchy which followed it, had stifled in the

Tyrians the last remains of the desire for independence. Hiram’s

passive demeanour may have been determined by doubt of the safety of

his own throne, if not by considerations respecting his kinsmen who

had remained at Babylon, and dread of the nomination of a rival king

by Cyrus; and if Hiram possessed some of the hereditary wisdom of the

former princes of Tyre, who appeared even to Ezekiel as in their way

“wiser than Daniel,” he may also have recognised in the Persians the

people to whom belonged the future in southwestern Asia.

The modest extent of Phœnicia did not, from the first, correspond to

the inordinate number and distant position of the colonies, which the

Phœnicians, chiefly for the sake of the successful preservation of

their commercial interests, had been obliged to establish on foreign

shores. The loss in internal strength and able-bodied population thus

inflicted on the mother country, was not compensated by the treasures

laid up in that mother country itself, whose surroundings permitted

of no extension of territory, and whose own prosperity would have

been permanently hazarded by any attempt at an aggressive increase of

power. And if, in many instances, the despatch of emigrants may have

disposed of an excess of population, nothing could prevent the colonies

from becoming, in course of time, more and more estranged from the

interest of the mother city, and attaining a position in which they

were entirely dependent on their own resources. To sail from the Syrian

coast to Gades (Cadiz), took eighty days in the time of the Greeks,

and before that probably much longer, and it was necessary to traverse

the whole of the Mediterranean. Even if Phœnicia had been spared the

continual pressure of the exigencies of war, it would still have been

impossible permanently to maintain the dominion over the colonies in

their entire extent, and to prevent the development of independence.

But the very period in which the Phœnicians had most to suffer from

attacks of the Assyrians, when the inhabitants of Tyre had to confine

themselves to the defence of their citadel in the sea, coincides with

the time in which the Hellenes founded their colonies in Sicily. The

immediate connection with the Phœnicians of the west was thus lost. The

latter were now compelled to defend themselves against the adversary

with their own arms, and, as it were, with a complete change of front.

At the same time, in the beginning of the seventh century, according to

all appearance, there arose in the land of Tarshish a native dynasty,

whose representative in legend is the long-lived king, Arganthonius,

who is supposed to have attained the considerable age of one hundred

and fifty years, and the rulers of this dynasty no longer exclusively

favoured the commerce of the Phœnicians. When, about the year 690,

the merchant Chalæus of Samos, arrived there, he was able unmolested

to sell so much silver, that he is said to have made sixty talents by

the transaction, and his example was imitated, especially by Phœnician

seamen. Wherever the Hellenic merchant or seaman was admitted, he

began to cast the Phœnician into the shade, and when, in the reign of

Psamthek I, Egypt made herself more than ever accessible to foreign

intercourse, it was not the Phœnicians but the Hellenes who derived

the most advantages from the fact, although it may be true that, at

Neku’s bidding, the Phœnician seamen were the first who attempted

the circumnavigation of Africa, and successfully accomplished it. In

Cilicia, even before the Persian epoch, Hellenic civilisation had begun

to be generally adopted, and about the same time at which Phœnicia

became subject to Cyrus, the towns of Cyprus, which had long been for

the most part Hellenic, passed, though only temporarily, under the

supremacy of Egypt. From this date down to the time of Alexander the

Great, the history of Phœnicia forms a part of the history of the

Persian empire, while from the middle of the seventh century B.C. the

history of the Phœnicians of the west, merges more and more in that of

the city which there constituted herself the energetic mistress of the

colonies; that history is connected in the closest fashion with the

destinies of Carthage.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[7] [Pietschmann makes the beginning and end of his reign 969 and 936

B.C.]

[Illustration: PHŒNICIAN VASES]

CHAPTER IV. PHŒNICIA UNDER THE PERSIANS

Although Tyre does not appear to have lost its independence in its

wars with Nebuchadrezzar, it was impossible that it should endure a

siege of thirteen years without great injury to its prosperity. At

the commencement of the Babylonian war it was evidently at the head

of the Phœnician states; the people of Sidon and Aradus furnished its

fleet with mariners and soldiers; the artisans of Byblus wrought in its

dockyards. But from this time the pre-eminence of the Tyrians is lost.

Aahmes II dispossessed them of Cyprus, though a family of Tyrian origin

seems to have acquired the sovereignty in Salamis, which they retained

till deprived of it by Evagoras. We do not find any mention made of the

Phœnician naval states, as forming a part of the alliance into which

the Babylonians, Lydians, and Egyptians entered, for the purpose of

resisting the danger which threatened them all from the rising power of

Cyrus. But whether they were connected during this time with Babylon,

or, as is more probable, with Egypt, whose power had revived under

Aahmes II, they would be equally in opposition to the policy of Persia;

and it was as a preparatory step towards obtaining possession of the

seacoast, that Cyrus secured himself an ally in Palestine, by showing

the Jews other marks of favour, and allowing them to rebuild Jerusalem,

in doing which they availed themselves of the aid of Sidon and Tyre in

felling timber on Lebanon. Without this security, it would have been

very impolitic in Persia to allow the fortification of a place of such

natural strength as Jerusalem.

During the whole of his reign we find no mention made of his employing

the Phœnician navy in his enterprises, which indeed were exclusively

military. Towards its close he unquestionably meditated an expedition

against Egypt; but his attention was drawn off to the nomadic nations

on his northeastern frontier, in warfare with whom he lost his life.

Xenophon indeed attributes to him the conquest of Cyprus, Phœnicia, and

Egypt, in his _Cyropædia_; but his assertion has not obtained credit.

Cambyses, his son, almost immediately undertook an expedition against

Egypt, in which he employed the naval forces of the Phœnicians. Both

Cyprus and Phœnicia gave themselves up unresistingly to the power

which was evidently destined to inherit the ascendency in Western

Asia, previously possessed by Babylon. When the conquest of Egypt was

effected, he wished to attack Carthage; but the Phœnicians refused,

alleging the religious obligations which forbade them to take part

in a war against their own descendants. Cambyses had no means of

compelling them; he had no fleet of his own; they had given themselves

up, by preference rather than necessity, to the Persians. The Cyprians

had not the same motive as the Phœnicians for refusing to act against

Carthage; but the strength of the naval armament lay in the Phœnician

ships, and Cambyses desisted from his project.

[Sidenote: [525-466 B.C.]]

In the more perfect organisation, both of its revenues and its forces,

which the Persian monarchy owed to Darius, the navy of Phœnicia became

a regular and very important part of the public power. By its means

Darius made himself master of the islands on the coast of Asia Minor.

Along with Palestine and Cyprus it formed the fifth of the twenty nomes

into which his empire was divided, and they paid jointly a tribute of

350 talents--just half the money-tribute which was levied from Egypt.

Although these nomes are called by the general name of satrapies, and

had each a separate governor, it does not appear that the internal

constitution of the several kingdoms was disturbed; at least, in

Phœnicia and in Cyprus the native princes continued to reign.

The commercial prosperity of Tyre and Sidon remained unimpaired,

except by the rivalry of their own colonies of Carthage and Cadiz; for

the Persians, like the Turks and Tartars, never became themselves a

maritime power. The rich traffic of Arabia and the East still passed

through the hands of the Phœnicians, and their manufactories of

purple and glass were in full activity. Throughout the long struggle

between Greece and Persia, which began with the burning of Sardis, the

Phœnicians constituted the naval strength of the Persian armaments. The

Cilician and Egyptian troops, destined for the reduction of Cyprus,

were conveyed to that island in Phœnician ships. In the conflict by

sea and land which subsequently took place, the Phœnician fleet was

defeated by that of the Ionian Greeks; but the Persians having been

at the same time successful by land, the revolt was suppressed, and

Cyprus, after a year’s independence, returned to its subjection. The

Persian commanders proceeded from the conquest of Cyprus to attack the

Ionian cities themselves. A naval force of 600 vessels was assembled

for the reduction of Miletus, the city of Aristagoras, by whom the

Ionian revolt had been instigated, among which the Phœnicians were

conspicuous for their zeal and bravery. In the sea-fight off the

island of Lade, opposite to Miletus, they defeated the Ionians, who

were deficient in naval training and discipline, and weakened by the

defection of the greater part of the Samians. The conquest of Miletus

speedily followed; and the Phœnician fleet, having subdued the islands

of Asiatic Greece, crossed over to the Thracian Chersonesus. Miltiades,

afterwards the conqueror of Marathon, narrowly escaped capture by

one of their vessels, and his son Metiochus fell into their hands.

It was no doubt by means of the Phœnician fleet, as well as that of

the Ionians, that the islands of the Ægean were reduced, and the land

forces of Persia conveyed to Marathon, though no specific mention is

made of them in the subsequent operations.

When Xerxes carried out the project of a renewed invasion of Greece,

which Darius had been prevented by death from executing, we find the

Phœnicians bearing a conspicuous part among the naval forces which

he assembled for that purpose. To them, in conjunction with the

Egyptians, was committed the construction of the bridges of boats,

by which the Hellespont was passed. The Phœnicians were also engaged

in the construction of the canal, by which Xerxes cut through the

isthmus which joins Mount Athos to the mainland, thus avoiding the

fate which had befallen the fleet of Mardonius. They alone had

sufficient experience in works of this kind to make the sides of their

excavation a gradual slope; the other nations who were employed in it

dug perpendicularly down, and increased their own labour by the falling

in of the sides. Before crossing the Hellespont, Xerxes mustered his

troops near Abydos, and caused his naval forces to try their skill and

speed against each other by a contest in the Straits, in which the

Phœnicians of Sidon were victorious over the Greeks as well as over

the other barbarians. They furnished to the armament which assembled

at Doriscus and the mouth of the Hebrus, 300 ships; the Egyptians

sending 200, and the people of Cyprus 150. The names of their several

commanders, probably their kings, have been preserved by Herodotus;

Tetranestus the son of Anysus the Sidonian; Mapen the son of Sirom the

Tyrian; and Merbaal the son of Agbaal the Aradian.

[Sidenote: [466-390 B.C.]]

We do not hear again of the Phœnician navy, until the Athenians, who

had been left predominant in Greece and at the head of her naval

confederacy, transferred the war to Cyprus and the coast of Cilicia.

When the Persian generals, Artabazus and Megabyzus, mustered their

troops in Cilicia for the reconquest of Egypt, they marched through

Syria and Phœnicia, gathering the naval forces of this latter country

on their way. After the main body of the Athenians had surrendered

in the island Prosopitis, a reinforcement of fifty triremes, which

had sailed into the Mendesian mouth of the Nile, in ignorance of

what had happened, was attacked by the Phœnician fleet and almost

entirely destroyed. The Athenians being thus threatened with the loss

of their ascendency in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, Cimon,

the conqueror at the Eurymedon, was sent with a fleet of two hundred

triremes to occupy Cyprus. He attacked Citium, but died before it was

reduced; his successor, Anaxicrates, hearing of the approach of a

Phœnician and Cilician armament, sailed out to meet them, and defeated

them off Salamis in Cyprus. Many of their ships were sunk, a hundred

with their crews taken, and the remnant pursued to the coast of

Phœnicia. This success, however, was not followed up by the Athenians,

who returned almost immediately to their own country.

The Egyptians having revolted from Persia and set Amyrtæus [Amen-Rut]

on the throne in the year 405, endeavoured to possess themselves of

Phœnicia, the great source of the naval power of Persia; but their plan

was frustrated by this return of the Phœnician fleet. We next find them

mentioned (394 _B.C._) as auxiliaries of Athens in the destruction

of the naval superiority which Sparta had gained by the battle of

Ægospotami. Persia, which had aided Sparta in the Peloponnesian war,

faithful to its policy of distracting Greece by siding with the weaker

party, and alarmed at the progress of Agesilaus in Asia Minor, raised

by its emissaries a war in Greece, which occasioned the recall of the

Spartan king. At the same time Pharnabazus collected a naval armament

from Cyprus and Phœnicia to attack the Spartan fleet at Cnidus. The

Athenian forces were commanded by Conon, and in the battle which

ensued, the Spartans were defeated at sea with the loss of fifty

triremes and many of the crews, who after swimming ashore were made

prisoners by the land forces. The victorious fleets pursued their way

to Greece, and being left by Pharnabazus under the command of Conon,

assisted in rebuilding the walls of Athens.

From this time it appears probable that more intimate and permanent

relations were established between Phœnicia, and Athens. Phœnicians

settled there, and had their own places of worship and interment.

[Sidenote: [390-350 B.C.]]

The cities of Phœnicia were involved in the consequences of the war

which arose between the Persians and Evagoras of Cyprus. Being forced

into hostilities, he did not confine himself to the defence of his own

kingdom, but reduced nearly the whole island, sent a fleet against

Phœnicia, and took Tyre, according to Isocrates, by assault. In the

incidental mention of Phœnician affairs which we thus gain from the

Greek historians, Tyre appears as the predominant state, in naval

strength, while Sidon was the most flourishing and wealthy, and, as

being one of the residences of the kings of Persia, was more difficult

to detach from its allegiance.

We next find Phœnicia engaged in the extensive revolt of the Persian

provinces, which was encouraged by the successful resistance of

the Egyptians under Nectanebo, the hostility of Sparta, and the

disaffection of the Asiatic satraps. Nearly the whole maritime

region from Egypt to Lycia, including Phœnicia and Syria, Cilicia,

Pamphylia, and Pisidia, was in league to throw off the yoke of the

Great King; Sparta aided them by a land force, sent to Egypt under

Agesilaus, and the Athenian Chabrias commanded the fleet. Tachus, the

king of Egypt, successor of Nectanebo I, advanced with an army into

Palestine and began to reduce the strong places which were held by

the Persians; but in the meantime disaffection had arisen among his

subjects and the army, and he was compelled to abandon his kingdom and

take refuge in Persia. Artaxerxes Mnemon died soon after, in the year

358 B.C. During the first part of the reign of his successor Ochus,

Egypt, being successful in maintaining its independence against his

feeble attempts for its reconquest, appears to have acquiesced in his

possession of Phœnicia; but now Egypt was invited to take part in a

revolt. The satrap and generals of Ochus [Artaxerxes III], who resided

in the territory of Sidon, had treated its inhabitants with great

insolence, and in a general assembly of the Phœnician cities held at

Tripolis (352 B.C.), it was determined to renounce their submission to

Persia. They began by destroying the royal residence and the stores

of forage collected for the use of the cavalry, and put to death the

Persians from whom they had received injuries. Having thus provoked

to the utmost the hostility of Ochus, they raised a numerous fleet of

triremes, hired foreign mercenaries, prepared arms and stores, and sent

a message to Nectanebo inviting him to join them.

[Sidenote: [350-345 B.C.]]

Even the sluggish nature of Ochus was roused by these insults to his

authority, and he prepared to take a terrible vengeance upon Phœnicia,

and especially upon Sidon. He assembled a large force of infantry and

cavalry at Babylon, with which (351 B.C.) he began his march towards

the coast, commanding Belesys the satrap of Syria, and Mazæus the

satrap of Cilicia, to unite their forces and invade Phœnicia. Four

thousand Grecian mercenaries, however, whom Tennes the king of Sidon

had received from Egypt, commanded by Mentor of Rhodes, sufficed along

with the native troops to drive back both the satraps. Meanwhile Cyprus

had followed the example of Phœnicia. The nine petty kings who governed

an equal number of towns, in subordination to Persia, asserted their

own independence. Evagoras, whom we have formerly known as tyrant

of Salamis, had been assassinated soon after the termination of his

war with Persia, but had left two sons, Pnytagoras and Evagoras.

Pnytagoras, the elder, had been expelled by his younger brother; but

the Persians had reinstated him, and given Evagoras a command in Asia.

Idrieus, the prince of Caria, who had remained faithful to Persia

amidst the general defection of the maritime states of Asia, sent a

fleet of forty triremes to attack Salamis; Evagoras and the Athenian

Phocion brought eight thousand mercenary foot-soldiers, and began the

siege on the land side. The island was flourishing, as the result of

several years of peace, and the hope of plunder drew adventurers from

the opposite coasts of Syria and Cilicia, by whom the army of Evagoras

and Phocion was soon swollen to double its former amount, so that

dismay and apprehension prevailed not only in Salamis, but among the

rulers of the minor states.

[Sidenote: [345-333 B.C.]]

While Ochus was on his march from Babylon, Tennes the king of Sidon,

alarmed at the magnitude of the forces which were about to be brought

against him, sent Thessalion, a confidential minister, to treat with

the Persian king for the betrayal of the city when his army should

appear before it, promising besides, his advice in the conduct of the

expedition against Egypt, the localities of which he knew accurately.

Ochus joyfully accepted the offer; but his pride was so much offended

when Thessalion demanded, on behalf of Tennes, the pledge of the

royal right hand, that he ordered him forthwith to be beheaded. An

exclamation of Thessalion, that the king might do as he pleased, but

that without the aid of Tennes his projects would fail, recalled him

to a better mind, and he gave the pledge of his right hand,--the most

sacred in the estimation of the Persians,--and proceeded on his march

through Syria. The Sidonians had availed themselves of the king’s delay

to make ample preparations for defence. They had collected a fleet of

more than a hundred quinqueremes and triremes, fortified themselves

with a wall and triple fosse, and carefully drilled their youth in

martial exercises. But all was frustrated by the treachery of Tennes,

and Mentor, the commander of the Egyptian mercenaries. Under the

pretext of going to attend a general council of the Phœnician states,

Tennes led one hundred of the most illustrious citizens of Sidon to

the Persian camp, and betrayed them into the hands of Ochus, by whom

they were put to death, as the alleged authors of the revolt. As he

advanced towards the city, he was met by five hundred of the Sidonians

with the branches of supplication in their hands. Before he gave an

answer to their petition, he asked Tennes whether he was confident that

he could place the city in his hands. Tennes replied that he could;

and Ochus, who desired to have an opportunity of signal vengeance upon

Sidon, which might strike terror into the other revolted states, not

only refused the capitulation for which they supplicated, but caused

them all to be put to death. It remained for the consummation of the

treachery of Tennes to persuade the Egyptian mercenaries to admit the

Persian troops within the walls.

The Sidonians had previously burnt their own fleet, that none might

withdraw from the common danger; and now reduced to despair, they shut

up themselves, their children and their wives in their houses, and set

them on fire. Including slaves, forty thousand persons are said thus

to have perished; and so large was the treasure buried in the ashes of

the conflagration, that the king sold for many talents the right of

extracting it. This tale of unexampled perfidy and cruelty terminated

in a signal display of retributive justice. Tennes, having served the

purposes of Ochus, was put to death by him, or, knowing that this fate

was designed for him, attempted suicide; but wavering in his purpose,

was killed by his wife, who immediately slew herself upon his body.[8]

Retribution awaited Persia also. Sidon lost by this event her chief

naval forces, but became again a flourishing city under kings of its

own. The cruelty of Persia, however, was never forgotten; and when

Alexander invaded Phœnicia, Sidon opened her gates to him. Cyprus was

reduced soon after. Salamis was the last place which held out.

Ochus, who had at first favoured the claim of Evagoras, listened to

the accusations of his enemies, and adopted the cause of Pnytagoras.

Evagoras afterwards cleared himself from their charges, and received

a government in Asia from the Persian king; but being guilty of

malversation in his office, he escaped to Cyprus, where he was seized

and put to death. Pnytagoras submitted to the Persians, and was

confirmed in his sovereignty, and he held it to the time of Alexander,

in whose service he engaged, commanding the fleet which besieged Tyre.

[Illustration: THE SIEGE OF TYRE]

The conquest of Egypt, which soon followed that of Phœnicia, was

the last rally of the Persian power, before its final struggle and

overthrow. In the interval between the conquest of Phœnicia and the

invasion of Asia by Alexander, Athens, the chief maritime state of

Greece, was occupied with the protection of her own independence

against the growing power of Macedonia, and Persia was left quietly to

enjoy the command which she had acquired over the fleets of Cyprus,

Phœnicia, and Egypt. Her interference in Grecian politics was confined

to sending a force to aid the Perinthians in their resistance to

Philip, and supporting, with her gold, that party in Athens, which, by

opposing Macedonia, delayed the attack that had been long anticipated,

when Greece should be united under a single head. Ochus, on his return

from Egypt, gave himself up to the congenial vices of the Persian

court, tyranny and luxury; but he had two able ministers, Mentor the

Rhodian, who governed his western provinces, and Bagoas, the eunuch,

the eastern. He had become odious to his subjects, and was killed by

Bagoas (338 B.C.). Arses his youngest son, whom Bagoas raised to the

throne, in the hope of ruling by his means, soon showed the purpose of

avenging his father’s murder, and shared his fate in the third year of

his reign. His children having been put to death, and the direct royal

line thus become extinct, Darius, a great-nephew of Artaxerxes Mnemon,

was placed on the throne, nearly at the same time (336 B.C.) that

Alexander became king of Macedonia and master of Greece, whose forces

he immediately prepared to employ for the invasion of Asia.

[Sidenote: [333-332 B.C.]]

The battle of the Granicus (334 B.C.) had given to Alexander the

possession of Asia Minor; by that of Issus (333 B.C.) Darius was

driven beyond the Euphrates, and the whole coast of Phœnicia was left

open to the Macedonians. Alexander appointed Menon to the satrapy of

Cœle-Syria, and himself marched southward along the coast. On his way

he was met by Strato, the son of Gerostratus, the king of Aradus and

the adjacent territory, who offered him a golden crown, and surrendered

to him the island of Aradus, with Marathus and some other towns on

the opposite coast. Gerostratus himself, with Enylus of Byblus and the

other kings of the Phœnicians and Cyprians, was at this time at Chios,

with Pharnabazus and Autophradates who commanded the Persian fleet.

Rejecting the offer of alliance made him by Darius, Alexander continued

his march, received the submission of Byblus, and occupied Sidon at

the invitation of the inhabitants, who remembered the cruelties of

Ochus. Strato their king, who had been placed in the sovereignty by the

Persians, and was upheld by them, favoured the cause of Darius, and was

probably at this time serving in the Persian fleet, with the contingent

of Sidon. He was deposed by Alexander; and Hephæstion, to whom the

choice of a successor was left, called to the throne Abdalonymus, a

remote scion of the royal family, at that time following the occupation

of gardener in the suburbs.

Azemilcus, the king of Tyre, was with Autophradates; but ambassadors

delegated by the community, and consisting of his son and the most

illustrious men of the state, met Alexander on his way, professing,

according to Arrian, that they were ready to submit to his command.

They probably hoped that, satisfied with this nominal submission, he

would pass onward to Egypt, and that they should not be compromised

with the Persians, if Darius regained the ascendency. There were

obvious reasons, however, why Alexander should not be content with

anything less than complete possession of Tyre. It would have been

dangerous for him to attack Egypt, while the Persians had the command

of the sea; still more dangerous to follow Darius into Upper Asia,

leaving behind him Tyre doubtful, and Egypt and Cyprus hostile. While

he marched against Babylon, the Persian fleet would reconquer the

seacoast and return to Greece, where Lacedæmon was openly hostile,

and Athens retained rather by fear than affection. Tyre once secured,

the naval power of Phœnicia, the strongest arm of Persia, would be at

his command; for the mariners and the sailors would quit her service

as soon as they found that their country was occupied by the Greeks.

Cyprus would follow the example of Phœnicia; the expedition against

Egypt might be easily effected, and the Persians being cut off from the

sea, the march against Babylon might be undertaken with safety, and the

advantage of an augmented fame. As a cover to his design he requested

permission to enter the island, and sacrifice to Melkarth [Hercules]

the tutelary god of Tyre, and the progenitor of the Macedonian kings.

The Tyrians were not imposed upon, and returned for answer that there

was a temple of Melkarth in Palætyrus on the mainland, in which he was

at liberty to sacrifice. He prepared therefore to possess himself of

the island by force, and the Tyrians to defend themselves.

Probably, had the question of surrender been decided by the wishes of

the upper classes, Tyre would have passed quietly into the hands of

Alexander. Those who are in possession of honour and wealth are not

disposed to put them to hazard for the sake of national independence;

they are rather eager to gain merit by submission and co-operation.

But in the minds of the common people there arises in such a crisis

a passionate, unreasoning sentiment of patriotism, which prepares

them to dare and endure everything for the sake of their country.

The stubborn resistance of the Canaanites to the children of Israel,

the self-devotion of the Sidonians, the desperate struggle of the

Carthaginians when their city had been doomed to destruction by the

Romans, the horrors of the last siege of Jerusalem, prove what fierce

determination characterised the whole race to which the Phœnicians

belonged. Perhaps a tradition still lived among the Tyrians, that

the kings of Assyria and Babylon, in the days of their highest power,

had been foiled in the attempt to possess themselves of their island

city. Nor was success altogether hopeless, according to the calculation

of probabilities. It might reasonably be expected that, instead of

Darius wasting his time in fruitless offers, and not beginning to make

preparations till Alexander had taken Tyre, a Persian force would

erelong make its appearance in Syria, to interrupt the siege. The

obstinate defence made by the Persian commander of Gaza shows what

might have been the result had Persia been able to throw succours

into Tyre. The boldness of the operation by which Alexander joined

the island to the continent had no parallel in the practice of war

and would have failed, notwithstanding his most strenuous exertions,

had not the naval forces of Aradus and Sidon abandoned the cause of

Phœnicia. Carthage, which was bound by ties of origin to Tyre, and had

a common interest with her in preventing the naval preponderance of

Greece in the Mediterranean, might be expected to give aid, and even in

the event of defeat, afforded an asylum. At the moment when Alexander

was about to begin the siege, a Carthaginian embassy arrived, bringing

gifts to Melkarth, and encouraged the Tyrians to resist. No blockade

could be formidable to a city which commanded the sea, and possessed

ample wealth for the purchase of supplies. Had the Persian government

displayed ordinary vigour, the delay of a seven months’ siege might

have changed the history of the Eastern world.

Alexander perceived that his efforts would be vain as long as

the Tyrians remained masters of the sea, and gave orders for the

construction of new machines, and of a new mole of greater breadth,

which, by inclining towards the southwest, instead of crossing the

strait in a direct line, was less exposed to the action of the wind

and current. While the necessary preparations were making, he himself

went to Sidon to collect a fleet. The Sidonian triremes were with

Autophradates, along with the ships of Aradus and Byblus; but their

commanders, Gerostratus and Enylus, who had heard of the surrender of

their respective cities, but not of the defeat of Alexander before

Tyre, deserted the Persian cause, and at this critical moment brought

their vessels into the harbour of Sidon. A fleet of eighty Phœnician

ships was thus collected, which were joined by vessels from Rhodes,

Soli, Mallus, and Lycia, and a penteconter from Macedonia.

Not long after, the kings of Cyprus, having heard of the defeat of

Darius at Issus, and the occupation of Phœnicia by Alexander, anchored

in the same harbour with 120 ships. The fate of Tyre was already

decided. While these vessels were being fitted up for the peculiar

service to which they were destined, Alexander with his cavalry and

light troops made a rapid expedition of eleven days into Cœle-Syria,

where he repelled the Arabs of the Desert, who had interrupted his

soldiers in cutting down wood on Anti-Libanus, and made terms with the

inhabitants of the country. Returning to Sidon, he found that Cleander

had arrived from the Peloponnesus with 4000 Greek mercenaries, and

having manned his ships with his bravest soldiers, in order to avoid

those naval manœuvres in which the Tyrians were more skilful, and to

fight hand to hand from the decks, he set sail for Tyre in order of

battle, leading in person the right division of the fleet, and anchored

in the northern roadstead opposite to the Sidonian harbour. In his

absence the construction of the new mole had been proceeding rapidly,

though not without obstacles. The Macedonians had thrown whole trees

with their branches into the sea, and covered them with a layer of

stones, on which other trees were again laid. The Tyrian divers,

approaching the mole unseen, laid hold of the projecting branches,

and dragging them out, brought down with them large portions of the

superincumbent mass. In spite of these exertions, the mole was nearly

completed.

Notwithstanding the proximity of Sidon, the Tyrians had not yet heard

of the accession of the Cyprian and Phœnician fleets, and were dismayed

at the sight of the large force under Alexander’s command. They

renounced the intention of giving him battle, began to transport their

children, wives, and aged men to Carthage, and blocked up the mouths

of their harbours with a line of triremes ranged side by side. As the

Tyrian fleet did not come out against him, he sailed towards the city;

and finding it impossible to force his way into the Sidonian harbour,

he attacked and sunk the three outermost of the triremes, and then

anchored under the lee of the mole, which had again advanced nearly to

the walls of the city. The next day the Cyprian fleet stationed itself

off the Sidonian harbour, the Phœnician off the Egyptian, near that

part of the mole on which Alexander’s own tent was pitched. The attack

upon the walls was resumed, and every device for assault or defence

known in ancient warfare was put in force on both sides.

Defeated in this way, the Tyrians resolved to attack the Cyprian fleet,

and took their measures for the purpose with the utmost secrecy. They

spread sails before the mouth of the harbour, so that their operations

could not be overlooked; they chose for their attack the hour of

noon, when the sailors were at their meal, or engaged in their other

avocations, and when Alexander had retired to his tent, pitched on that

side of the mole which was most remote from the Sidonian harbour. To

avoid alarm they came out of port in single file, rowing gently and

in silence, till they were near the enemy, when they plied their oars

vigorously, and the _celeustæ_ set up the customary shout of signal

and exhortation. Alexander had remained that day a shorter time than

usual in his tent, and speedily returned to the place where the fleet

was stationed. The surprise had been complete; the Tyrians had found

the Cyprian ships deserted, or hastily manned in the midst of confusion

and alarm; they had already sunk the ships of Pnytagoras, Androcles,

and Pasicrates, and were fast disabling the others and driving them on

shore. His first object was to prevent any more of the Tyrian fleet

from coming out of the harbour, for which purpose he directed his own

ships, as fast as they could be got ready, to station themselves before

its mouth, thus hindering both the egress of reinforcements, and the

return of the others if they should be unsuccessful. He placed himself

on board one of those which lay on the southern side of the mole, and

sailed round the island to come upon the Tyrian fleet unawares from the

north. This movement, though unseen by those who were fighting off the

harbour, was perceived by the Tyrians on the walls, who called aloud

to them to return, but were unheard amidst the uproar of the battle.

Repeated signals were made, but they did not perceive the approach of

Alexander’s fleet till they were close upon them. They then turned and

fled towards the harbour; a few only were able to enter, the rest were

intercepted, and either disabled or taken. The soldiers and crews for

the most part saved themselves by swimming to the friendly shore which

was near at hand.

This victory allowed the Macedonians to carry on their unobstructed

operations against the wall. But its height and solidity opposite to

the mole baffled their efforts to make a breach in it, and they were

equally unsuccessful in an attack made at midnight by the floating

batteries on the part near the Sidonian harbour. A storm had suddenly

arisen; the quadriremes, which had been fastened together and covered

with planks to afford footing to the soldiers, were torn asunder and

dashed against each other, the men who were stationed on them being

precipitated into the water. In the darkness and noise, signals could

not be seen, nor the word of command heard. The soldiers overpowered

the pilots, and compelled them to seek the shore, which they reached in

confusion and with much damage. The Tyrians began a second wall within

the first, that they might still have a defence, in the event of a

breach being effected; but their fears were indicated by the awakening

of superstition. It was a prevalent belief that the gods abandoned a

city which was about to fall into the hands of an enemy. A citizen

reported that he had seen in a dream Apollo preparing to desert Tyre.

He was not one of their ancient divinities; but the Carthaginians had

brought a statue of him from Syracuse, and had placed it at Tyre,

where it had attracted the veneration of the people. To prevent the

desertion of the god, they bound his statue by a golden chain to the

altar of their native deity, Melkarth. There were some who would have

propitiated Saturn, as the Greeks and Latins called Moloch, by the

sacrifice of a child of noble birth, according to the immemorial custom

of the Phœnicians in times of public distress and alarm; but the wiser

counsel of the elder men prevailed. It was probably, however, at this

time that the Tyrians, having taken some Macedonians who were on a

voyage from Sidon, put them to death upon the walls, in view of their

countrymen, and cast their bodies into the sea. If any reliance had

been placed on aid from Carthage, it was dissipated by the arrival

of an embassy, which informed them that none could be expected. The

republic had been exhausted by its wars in Sicily, and had not long

before concluded an humiliating peace with Timoleon. They could only

promise the Tyrians an asylum for their wives and children, part of

whom had been transported thither before the capture of the city.

The attack upon the walls was carried on with the greatest energy,

and repelled by the use of all the arts of defensive warfare. To

deaden the blows of the battering-ram, and the force of the stones

hurled from the catapults, bags of leather filled with seaweed were

suspended from the walls. Tyre as a naval city abounded in ingenious

mechanicians, who devised new engines for its defence. They erected

on the walls circular machines, the interior of which was filled with

several layers of yielding materials. These were set in rapid motion,

and the darts and other missiles which struck upon them were either

blunted and turned aside by the force of their rotation; or, if they

penetrated beyond the surface, were stopped by the soft substances

within. The Macedonians raised towers upon the mole, which had now

advanced to the island, equalling the wall in height, and by throwing

bridges from them to the battlements, endeavoured to pass over into

the city. The Tyrian mechanicians constructed long grappling-hooks,

which they fastened to ropes, and, throwing them out to a distance,

laid hold of the soldiers on the towers. If their bodies were caught,

they were miserably mangled; if the hook fixed itself on their shields,

they were compelled either to abandon them, and expose their undefended

bodies; or if, from a feeling of military honour, they clung to them,

they were dragged over the tower and precipitated to the ground. Others

of the assailants met with the same fate, having been entangled in

nets, which rendered them unable to use their hands. Masses of red-hot

metal were thrown from the machines, which among the dense crowd never

fell ineffectually. A new mode of annoyance was devised against those

who attempted to scale the walls. Sand intensely heated in shields of

brass and iron was poured out upon them from above, and, penetrating

between the armour and the skin, inflicted such intolerable pain

that the soldiers threw off their coats of mail, and were pierced by

the arrows and lances from the wall. With long scythes fixed to the

end of yard-arms, the Tyrians cut the ropes and thongs by which the

battering-rams were worked. Towards the end of the day they sallied

from the walls, armed with hatchets, and a deadly struggle took place

on the bridges, which ended in the Macedonians being driven back.

Diodorus and Curtius, who are supposed to follow Clitarchus the son of

Dinon, a general of Alexander, represent him as meditating to abandon

the siege and march on Egypt after this repulse. This is not probable

in itself, since his whole enterprise must have failed had he left Tyre

behind him, not only unconquered, but triumphant.

[Illustration: DEATH OF ADMETUS]

The next day but one being calm, he ordered the ships on which the

battering-rams were planted to be brought up against the wall, in

which they soon made a breach. They then drew off, and two other ships

were brought up on which the bridges and storming parties were placed.

Admetus commanded one of these, Cœnus the other, Alexander keeping

himself in reserve with a body of his guards, to attack wherever an

opening should be made. The triremes were directed at the same time to

sail to both the harbours, that they might force an entrance, if the

attention of the Tyrians should be absorbed by the main assault. The

vessels which carried the machines for throwing darts, or whose decks

were manned with archers, were commanded to sail round the island,

and, approaching as near as possible to the walls, to distract the

attention of the troops upon them by simultaneous attacks on many

points. The conflict was short, when once the bridges were laid to the

breach in the wall, and the Macedonian soldiers could advance over

a firm and level surface. Admetus was the first who mounted; he was

killed by a lance at the moment of his setting foot upon the wall, and

died exhorting his soldiers to follow him. Alexander, with his guards,

immediately entered and directed his march towards the palace, as the

readiest access to the city. The Phœnician fleet had in the meantime

burst the boom by which the Egyptian harbour was closed, and dismantled

the Tyrian ships or driven them ashore. The Sidonian harbour had no

such defence, and was easily entered by the Cyprian fleet. The city

being thus occupied on all sides, the Tyrians assembled round the

Agenorium, where they were attacked by Alexander and killed or put to

flight. Many of the inhabitants shut themselves up in their houses and

died by their own hands; others awaited their fate at the doors of

their houses; many mounted to the roofs and thence flung down stones

and whatever was at hand on the heads of the soldiery.

[Sidenote: [332-323 B.C.]]

The Macedonians had been provoked by their obstinate resistance, and

enraged at the recent murder of some of their comrades, as before

mentioned, and little mercy was shown. The city was burnt; eight

thousand were killed, and the rest, with the exception of those to whom

the Sidonians gave shelter on board their vessels, sold for slaves

to the number of thirty thousand, including the mercenary troops.

Two thousand are said to have been crucified, as a reprisal for the

death of the Macedonian prisoners. The king and the chief magistrates,

with the Carthaginian deputation, had taken refuge in the temple of

Hercules, and their lives were spared. Alexander offered sacrifice to

him and led a naval and military procession in his honour, accompanied

with gymnastic games and a torch race. He consecrated also to Hercules

the battering-ram which had made the first breach in the walls, and a

Tyrian ship, sacred to the service of the god, which he had captured.

And thus, after a siege of seven months, Tyre was taken in July of the

year 332 B.C. Alexander replaced the population, which had been nearly

exterminated, by colonists, of whom a considerable part were probably

Carians, a nation closely allied to the Phœnicians.

The capture of Tyre took place in July, that of Gaza in October. The

following winter (331 B.C.) was occupied by Alexander in Egypt, partly

in laying the foundation of Alexandria, which was destined to become

the great commercial rival of the Phœnician cities. Having visited the

oracle of Ammon, he returned in the ensuing spring to Tyre, where his

fleet was assembled, sacrificed again to Hercules, detached one hundred

Phœnician and Cyprian ships to the Peloponnesus, and appointed Cœranus

as collector of the tribute of Phœnicia.

After the battle of Arbela, Alexander incorporated Syria, Phœnicia,

and Cilicia in one province, of which he gave the command to Menes.

He had broken the power of Tyre, but the commercial activity and

maritime enterprise of Phœnicia remained unimpaired. The Phœnicians

followed his army on the march to India for the purposes of traffic,

and loaded their beasts of burden on their return through the desert

of Gedrosia with the gum of the myrrh and the nard, which it yielded

in such abundance as to scent the whole region with the fragrance

which was diffused, as the army in its march crushed them under foot.

The Phœnicians are mentioned first, along with the Cyprians, Carians,

and Egyptians, as composing the crews of the ships which were to sail

down the Hydaspes to the Indian Ocean and thence to the mouth of the

Euphrates and the Tigris. After his return to Babylon, he commanded

forty-seven Phœnician vessels of various rates to be constructed and

then taken to pieces, conveyed overland to Thapsacus on the Euphrates,

and put together again that they might descend the river to Babylon.

They were manned from the Phœnicians engaged in the fishery of purple,

and other seafaring people from the coast; and wherever in Syria or

Palestine any one could be found possessed of nautical skill, if he

were a freeman he was enlisted, if a slave purchased. It was one of his

vast projects to colonise by their means the islands in the Persian

Gulf and its seacoast--a region not less fertile, says Arrian, than

Phœnicia itself. His views of conquest extended to the whole Arabian

peninsula--a country whose marshes, he was told, yielded cassia; its

trees, myrrh and frankincense; and its shrubs, cinnamon. This scheme,

with others still more gigantic, was rendered abortive by his death at

Babylon in 323 B.C.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[8] [Other authorities attribute this end to Tennes’ father, Strato,

and its cause to the failure of an alliance with Tachus of Egypt

against the Persians.]

CHAPTER V. PHŒNICIA UNDER THE GREEKS, THE ROMANS, AND THE SARACENS

Ptolemy, to whom Egypt fell in the first division of Alexander’s

empire, almost immediately attempted the conquest of Syria and

Palestine, agreeably to the policy which the sovereigns of Egypt have

always adopted, when that country has been ruled by an enterprising

king. The forces which Antipater had left there were unequal to its

defence, and Ptolemy easily made himself master of them, Jerusalem

alone offering any resistance. He placed garrisons in the Phœnician

cities, of which he kept possession till the year 315 B.C., when

Antigonus, returning victorious from his war in Babylonia, easily

reduced the other towns of Phœnicia, and took Joppa and Gaza by storm,

but met with an obstinate resistance from Tyre.

Only eighteen years had elapsed since its desolation by Alexander, but

the elastic power of commerce had repaired its strength, and though

joined to the mainland by his mole, it was nearly as unassailable by

an enemy that did not command the sea as while it remained an island.

Antigonus blockaded it by land, and collecting a body of eight thousand

wood-cutters and sawyers, felled the cedars and cypresses of Lebanon,

which were conveyed to the coast by one thousand yoke of oxen, and

fashioned into a fleet at Tripolis, Byblus, and Sidon. With the ships

constructed in Phœnicia, Rhodes, and Cilicia, he reduced Tyre at the

end of fifteen months. His son Demetrius, however, having advanced to

Gaza, was totally defeated there (312 B.C.) by Ptolemy, who regained

possession of the whole coast of Palestine and Phœnicia, but was

compelled almost immediately to resign it to Antigonus and retire into

Egypt, having destroyed the fortifications of Akko (Acre), Joppa,

Samaria, and Gaza, the first of which was the key of Syria, the second

and third of Judea, and the fourth of Egypt. Having defeated the fleet

of Ptolemy before Salamis in Cyprus, and reduced that island, which was

a chief source of his naval power, Antigonus, in 307 B.C., with his

son Demetrius, attempted without success the invasion of Egypt, and on

their retreat Ptolemy again possessed himself for a short time of the

seacoast of Phœnicia, with the exception of Sidon. False intelligence

of a victory gained by Antigonus caused him to make a truce with

Sidon and withdraw into Egypt. By the battle of Ipsus (301 B.C.), in

which Antigonus lost his life, his son Demetrius was dispossessed of

the throne of Syria. He still, however, retained Cyprus, and having

obtained possession of the harbours of Tyre and Sidon, reinforced

his garrisons in those cities, when required by Seleucus to surrender

them, as belonging to his kingdom of Syria, in the new division of

territory consequent on the battle of Ipsus. During the war between

them, terminated by the surrender of Demetrius in 287 B.C., Ptolemy,

who had conquered Cyprus, appears quietly to have reoccupied Phœnicia

and retained it during his life.

[Sidenote: [301-63 B.C.]]

The possession of Phœnicia had become still more important to the kings

of Syria, since Seleucus (300 B.C.) made Antioch on the Orontes, with

the harbour of Seleucia at its mouth, a principal seat of his power.

Hence a series of struggles between the Seleucidæ and the Ptolemies

during the latter part of the third century B.C. Ptolemy Euergetes, the

third of the dynasty, had marched an army into Syria in the beginning

of his reign (246 B.C.), and had placed an Egyptian garrison in

Seleucia, of which his son, Ptolemy Philopator, still kept possession,

when Antiochus the Great undertook (218 B.C.) the reconquest of Syria

and Phœnicia. He took Seleucia by assault; Tyre and Akko were put

into his hands by the treachery of Theodotus, Ptolemy’s lieutenant;

and Nicolaus, who commanded the Egyptian army and fleet, was defeated

and driven to take refuge in Sidon. In the following year, however,

Antiochus, having collected his forces at Raphia, between Gaza and the

frontier of Egypt, was totally defeated by Ptolemy, and Phœnicia and

Syria remained in the possession of the Egyptians till the death of

Ptolemy and the succession of his infant son.

In the year 203 B.C. Antiochus led an army into Syria and Palestine,

and recovered possession of them. The Egyptians sent a force under

Scopas, which gained some temporary advantages, but they were defeated

at Panium and shut up in Sidon, where they were compelled to surrender.

Thus Phœnicia once more (198 B.C.) fell under the power of Syria.

Tyre suffered a severe blow, when Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed

the harbour of Berenice on the Red Sea, and established a road with

stations and watering places between that place and Coptos, reopening

at the same time the canal which joined the Pelusiac branch of the

Nile to the Gulf of Suez. The traffic of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean,

which had hitherto passed from Eloth and Ezion-geber across the Desert

to Rhinocolura, and thence been conveyed by Tyrian vessels to all

parts of the Mediterranean, was now brought by the Nile or the canal

to Alexandria. The opening of the safe and easy route by Kosseir and

Coptos, which saved the dangerous navigation of the northern end of the

Red Sea, gradually drew to Egypt the wealth that had previously flowed

into Phœnicia.

The sufferings which the Syrians endured from the civil wars of

the Seleucidæ induced them in the year 83 B.C. to place themselves

under the dominion of Tigranes, king of Armenia, who took possession

of Syria. This state of things lasted for fourteen years, when, in

consequence of the victories of Lucullus, Syria and Phœnicia returned

for a short time (67 B.C.) to the dominion of the Seleucidæ. Four years

later Pompey reduced Syria into a Roman province, making Gaza, Joppa,

Dora, and Turris Stratonis free.

[Sidenote: [63 B.C.-636 A.D.]]

The dominion of Rome, however, was exercised mildly; and though Tyre

and Sidon ceased to have any political importance, they retained

their ancient fame for nautical science, for the manufacture of

glass, and the preparation of the purple dye. A school of philosophy

arose here, whose doctrines, like those of Alexandria, combined Greek

and oriental elements, and endeavoured to reconcile philosophy with

theology. Strabo mentions several contemporaries, eminent in their

day, whom Tyre and Sidon had produced. Philo, to whom we owe the

translation of Sanchoniathon, was a native of Byblus; his pupil,

Hermippus, of Berytus. Porphyry, whose original name was Malchus, was

of Tyrian parentage, though born at Batanæa, on the eastern side of the

Jordan. Berytus became the seat of a school of law, which for three

centuries furnished the eastern portion of the empire with pleaders

and magistrates. Marinus of Tyre, who lived in the early part of the

second century after Christ, was the first author who substituted

maps, mathematically constructed according to latitude and longitude,

for the itinerary charts which had been in use before. The maps of

Marinus, like those of Ptolemy, which were only an improvement upon

them, must have been founded on records of voyages and travels, of

which the measured or computed distances were translated into latitudes

and longitudes. Nowhere could such records have abounded more than

in Phœnicia, which for so many centuries had taken the lead of all

other nations in navigation and commerce. Had the invention of maps,

in the modern sense, been due to the geographers and mathematicians

of Alexandria, it is not probable that Ptolemy, himself a native of

Alexandria, would have based his own work entirely on that of Marinus

of Tyre.

After the sale of the empire by the Roman soldiery to Didius Julianus

and his subsequent assassination (A.D. 193), Septimius Severus and

Pescennius Niger were competitors for the purple. Niger, who commanded

in the East, had his headquarters at Antioch, and all Syria as far as

the Euphrates and the coast of Phœnicia was under his power. Antioch

and Berytus favoured the cause of Niger; Laodicea and Tyre, through

jealousy of their neighbours, that of Severus. On the news of Niger’s

unsuccessful attempt to obstruct the march of Severus through the

passes of Taurus, they destroyed the insignia of Niger, and proclaimed

his rival. Niger sent against them his Mauritanian light troops, with

orders to destroy the towns, and put the inhabitants to the sword.

The commission was cruelly executed by the barbarians entrusted with

it; they fell on the Laodiceans by surprise, and having inflicted

great injury upon them, proceeded to Tyre, which they plundered and

burnt after a great slaughter of the inhabitants. It had no longer the

protection which its insular situation would have afforded it against

an invasion of cavalry; Alexander had joined it permanently to the land.

Niger had been defeated by Severus in the battle of Issus (A.D. 194),

and was soon after slain at Antioch. In his subsequent settlement of

the affairs of the East (A.D. 201), Severus recruited the population of

Tyre from the third legion, whose quarters had long been in Syria and

Phœnicia, and rewarded the attachment of its inhabitants by giving it

the title of Colony with the _Jus Italicum_. Its prosperity appears to

have received only a transient check from its conflagration. A writer

of the age of Constantine describes it as equalling all the cities of

the East in wealth and commercial activity; there was no port in which

its merchants did not hold the first rank. St. Jerome, about the end

of the fourth century, in his _Commentary on Ezekiel_, speaks of it as

the noblest and most beautiful city of Phœnicia, an emporium for the

commerce of the world, and is at a loss how to reconcile its actual

condition with the threat of its perpetual desolation.

[Sidenote: [636-1124 A.D.]]

The conquest of Phœnicia and Syria in the seventh century, by the

Saracens, led to the establishment of an imperial dye-house at

Constantinople, the products of which are repeatedly mentioned in the

writings of Anastasius, the librarian of the Vatican, under the popedom

of Leo III; but the Tyrian purple still enjoys its former celebrity,

and is among the articles of luxury imported by the Venetian merchants

into Lombardy in the time of Charlemagne.

Under the tolerant and enlightened sway of the caliphs, the

civilisation of Phœnicia suffered no decay. At the time of the

Crusades, Tyre retained its ancient pre-eminence among the cities

of the Syrian coast, and excited the admiration of the warriors of

Europe by its capacious harbours, its wall, triple towards the land

and double towards the sea, its still active commerce, and the beauty

and fertility of the opposite shore. To the manufacture of glass was

added that of sugar, which for its medicinal virtues was carried to the

remotest parts of the world. Joppa was at first the only harbour which

the Christians possessed; but in the first ten years of the twelfth

century, Baldwin, the successor of Godfrey on the throne of Jerusalem,

reduced Antipatris, Cæsarea, Acre, Byblus, Tripolis, and Berytus. Sidon

was induced to surrender (A.D. 1110) by the opportune arrival of a

fleet from Norway, manned by Crusaders, and commanded by the brother of

the king, which, passing through the British Channel and the Straits

of Gibraltar, anchored in the port of Joppa. Tyre and Askalon alone

remained in the hands of the infidels. Baldwin collected his forces

(A.D. 1111) for an attack on the former city; but the Norwegian fleet

had returned home after the capture of Sidon, and the ships which he

hastily collected from the seacoast were of little value. The city had

a numerous garrison, the troops, withdrawn from places less defensible,

having thrown themselves into Tyre. Sieges were still conducted after

the ancient manner, with the battering-ram and the balista. The

besiegers made repeated attacks upon the walls, had forced the first

and second, and at last brought up against the third two wooden towers,

of such a height as to command the interior of the city, and covered

with hides of oxen and camels to prevent their being set on fire; the

besieged, however, had erected within towers of still greater height,

from which they hurled Greek fire and combustibles of every kind upon

the works of the Crusaders. Both the towers were utterly consumed. The

approach of an army of twenty thousand men from Damascus was announced,

and after a siege of four months, Baldwin, despairing of success, drew

off his army to Acre and Jerusalem. From Tiberias the Christians made

incursions into the territory of Tyre; but Baldwin having built a fort

on the site of Palætyrus, undertook no further enterprises against the

maritime towns during the remainder of his reign. No re-enforcements of

ships and warriors arrived from the West, and the Christian power in

the Holy Land was weakened by the dissensions of its chiefs.

His successor, Baldwin II, was taken prisoner in the year 1123, and

the Sultan of Egypt was encouraged to attack Joppa with a fleet of

ninety sail. The barons of the kingdom of Jerusalem assembled at Acre,

appointed Eustace de Grenier viceroy, and sent a pressing message to

the Venetians, who had set out with a powerful armament for the East,

but had halted on the way to besiege Corfu. Before their arrival,

however, the Egyptians had raised the siege and retired on Ibelim,

where thirty thousand of them were totally defeated by eight thousand

Christians, animated by the presence of their bishops and their holiest

relics. The Venetian fleet followed the Egyptian to Askalon, and

destroyed it in a battle before the walls of that fortress.

[Sidenote: [1124-1187 A.D.]]

The presence of such powerful auxiliaries encouraged the Christians

to undertake aggressive operations, but it was difficult to decide

whether Askalon or Tyre should be first attacked, the neighbours of

each naturally considering it as the most formidable. The dispute was

settled by an appeal to Heaven. Two pieces of parchment were placed in

a box upon the altar, on one of which was written “Tyre,” and on the

other “Askalon.” The child who was sent to make a choice drew forth

that which was inscribed “Tyre,” and preparations were forthwith made

for the siege, which began on the 15th of February, A.D. 1124. The

Christians fortified themselves on the land side against the attempts

to relieve the city which the Turks of Damascus might be expected to

make, and began to construct machines with which to assail the walls.

The population of Tyre, devoted to commerce, and become rich and

luxurious by its means, was unwarlike; but the garrison was composed

of Damascenes and Egyptians, who put in force all the known means for

obstructing the progress of the siege. The tower of the Christians

was set on fire, and only saved from destruction by the heroism of a

pilgrim, who ascended it amidst its own flames and the missiles of the

Tyrians. They were skilful swimmers, and under cover of night swam to

the guardship of the Venetians, cut the cable by which it was anchored,

and fastening another to the vessel drew it to the shore.

In expectation that the blockade by sea would be broken by a fleet from

Egypt, or by land from Damascus, the Tyrians held out against assault

and famine till the month of June. But no effective aid came from

either quarter. The commander of Damascus twice marched as far as the

Leontes; but the first time he withdrew at the sight of the Christian

army, and the second he came to propose terms of capitulation. They

were readily granted by the chiefs, though the common soldiers murmured

that they were deprived of their hope of plunder, the infidels being

allowed to remain in the city on payment of a moderate ransom, or to

withdraw with their property. On the 25th of June the garrison marched

out; the banners of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the republic of Venice,

and the Count of Tripolis were hoisted on the towers, and Tyre once

more became Christian. Its archbishopric was given four years after,

with some diminution of the province, to William, an Englishman, and

the best historian of the Holy Wars. Askalon was not reduced till the

year 1153, when it surrendered to Baldwin III, after a siege of eight

months.

[Sidenote: [1187-1453 A.D.]]

The kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been in a state of gradual decline

during the twelfth century, notwithstanding the efforts made by Europe

for its aid, was overthrown by Saladin in the year 1187, and the

whole of the seacoast would have fallen into his power but for the

heroic defence of Tyre. The battle of Tiberias, in which the army of

the Cross had been annihilated, and the king Lusignan taken prisoner,

had spread consternation among the Christians; one city after another

had opened its gates to the conqueror. Conrad, the son of the Marquis

of Montferrat, arrived off the harbour of Acre a few days after its

surrender to the Saracens. He had heard nothing of the misfortunes

of the Christians, but the light of the setting sun, falling on the

banner of Saladin on the ramparts, showed him his danger, and with some

difficulty he made his escape to Tyre.

The Count of Sidon, who had taken refuge there, and the castellan of

Tyre were negotiating with Saladin for its surrender, and had already

prepared to hoist his colours on the walls, as soon as he made his

appearance before the gates. The people of Tyre, however, received

Conrad with acclamations; the Count of Sidon fled to Tripolis, and

preparations were made for the defence of the city. Saladin collected

some ships to blockade Tyre by sea, and in the end of the month of

December invested the city. Conrad had very few ships, but having

possessed himself of some of Saladin’s fleet, which he had enticed to

enter the harbour by the hope of a surrender, he manned them with his

own troops, and attacking the remainder, drove them on shore. The enemy

had taken advantage of his temporary absence to attempt to scale the

walls; but he promptly returned and compelled them to retire with the

loss of a thousand men. Saladin on this raised the siege, and did not

resume it in the following spring. The archbishop, William of Tyre,

had been engaged in soliciting aid from the Christian powers of the

West, and had prevailed on the king of Sicily to send a fleet to Tyre

with three hundred knights; other reinforcements arrived; the release

of the captive king, Guy of Lusignan, gave unity to the Crusaders, and

they became the assailants. In August of this year (A.D. 1189) the

siege of Acre began, which ended, after a succession of extraordinary

vicissitudes, in its capture by the united arms of Philip Augustus

and Richard Cœur-de-Lion. By the pacification of August, 1192, Joppa

is fixed as the southern, and Tyre as the northern boundary of the

Christian territories in Palestine.

Tyre continued to flourish as a commercial city during the succeeding

century, chiefly through the activity of the Venetians. In return

for the assistance which they had rendered to Baldwin II, they had

obtained for themselves the concession of a third part of the city

and its dependent territory, the right of being governed by their own

magistrates and tried by their own tribunals, and various commercial

privileges throughout the extent of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and they

succeeded in maintaining these rights, though often infringed.

The rise of the Mameluke power in Egypt was soon felt in the capture

of Antioch (A.D. 1268), and the subsequent reduction of the principal

towns of the seacoast. A temporary respite was obtained by the

second expedition of Louis IX, in 1270, and of the son of Henry III,

afterwards Edward I of England, in the following year. The dissensions

which followed the death of the sultan Bibars (or Beybars) by whom

Antioch had been taken, delayed the catastrophe which the nations of

the West took no means to avert. The sultan Kalavun (Kalaoon) resumed

the attack on the remains of the Christian kingdom. Margaret, the widow

of John de Montfort, who held the principality of Tyre, entered into

an agreement with him, by which she bound herself to withdraw from all

alliance with the Christian princes who harboured evil designs against

the sultan, to raise no new fortifications nor repair the old, and to

divide with him the revenues of all territory which they might hold in

common. Acre was again the scene on which the Christians and Saracens

tried their strength. Kalavun died on the march from Egypt, but Ashraf,

his son and successor, adopted his policy, and the siege was begun

in the first week of April, 1291. Since its reconquest by Philip and

Richard, it had taken the place of Tyre as the great mart of the Syrian

coast; every language of the East or West found an interpreter within

its walls. It was far more strongly fortified than when it defied for

two years the attacks of Saladin, and forces were assembled in it amply

sufficient for its defence, had they been wielded with vigour and

unanimity. But dissension reigned among them. On the 18th of May, 1291,

the whole city with the exception of the fort of the Templars, was

occupied by Ashraf, and this was delivered up to him by capitulation on

the next day. The few places which the Christians still held in Syria

attempted no defence. The Frank inhabitants of Tyre abandoned it on the

evening of the day on which Acre surrendered, and the Saracens entered

it the following morning.

[Sidenote: [1479-1516 A.D.]]

Othman, the founder of the present Turkish empire, began his reign in

A.D. 1288, three years before the reduction of Syria by the sultan of

Egypt. From the conquest of Asia Minor and the Danubian provinces of

the Greek empire, the Turks advanced in the middle of the fifteenth

century to the capture of Constantinople (A.D. 1453), and spread

a panic through Europe by the sack of Otranto in A.D. 1479. The

progress of conquest was checked during the reign of Bajazet II; but

his successor, Selim I, in A.D. 1516, conquered Syria in a single

campaign, and since that time it has been subject to the Ottomans,

the most barbarous of all the conquerors by whom it has successively

been subdued. The consequent decline of its prosperity has been rapid

and complete. The insecurity of life and property has been fatal

alike to manufacturing industry, to agriculture, and to commerce; the

traveller, if without arms or escort, has pursued his researches in

perpetual danger of being plundered or killed, and with the certainty

of vexatious delays and interruptions; the means of communication have

been suffered to fall into decay, and no effort has been made to check

the process by which nature is destroying the harbours of the coast.

Neither sieges nor earthquakes have done so much as Turkish oppression

and misrule to make Tyre what the traveller now sees, “a rock for

fishermen to spread their nets upon.”[b]

[Illustration: PHŒNICIAN SARCOPHAGUS

(In the Metropolitan Museum, New York)]

CHAPTER VI. THE STORY OF CARTHAGE

The city of Carthage was the culmination in history of the commerce,

ambition, and military prowess of the Phœnician people. It was a city

which never quite reached the first rank, yet always threatened to

seize the supremacy. As a collaborator with the Persians in the great

invasion of Greece, Carthage sent her forces against Sicily, only to

meet an equal discomfiture. Later she wrought the great city of Rome to

frenzies of terror, or hatred. Carthage appears constantly throughout

Grecian and Roman history, but it seems well to place here a brief and

consecutive story of her career as a city. The picturesque legends of

the foundation will be found in Appendix A. The date to be accepted by

historians was long uncertain, but seems now to be fixed at 818 B.C.

Utica and Gades (now Cadiz) were founded earlier than Carthage, but the

feverish ambition of the city of Dido soon told.[a]

Carthage so greatly outstripped them in wealth and power, as to acquire

a sort of federal pre-eminence over all the Phœnician colonies on

the coast of Africa. In those later times when the dominion of the

Carthaginians had reached its maximum, it comprised the towns of Utica,

Hippo, Adrumetum, and Leptis--all original Phœnician foundations,

and enjoying probably even as dependents of Carthage a certain

qualified autonomy--besides a great number of smaller towns planted by

themselves, and inhabited by a mixed population called Liby-Phœnicians.

Three hundred such towns--a dependent territory covering half the

space between the Lesser and the Greater Syrtis, and in many parts

remarkably fertile--a city said to contain 700,000 inhabitants, active,

wealthy, and seemingly homogeneous--and foreign dependencies in Sicily,

Sardinia, the Balearic isles, and Spain,--all this aggregate of power,

under one political management, was sufficient to render the contest of

Carthage even with Rome for some time doubtful.

[Sidenote: [813-600 B.C.]]

But by what steps the Carthaginians raised themselves to such a pitch

of greatness we have no information, and we are even left to guess

how much of it had already been acquired in the sixth century B.C.

As in the case of so many other cities, we have a foundation legend

decorating the moment of birth, and then nothing farther. The Tyrian

princess Dido or Elissa, daughter of Belus, sister of Pygmalion, king

of Tyre, and wife of the wealthy Sichæus [or Sicharbas] priest of

Hercules [Melkarth] in that city--is said to have been left a widow

in consequence of the murder of Sichæus by Pygmalion, who seized the

treasures belonging to his victim. But Dido found means to disappoint

him of his booty, possessed herself of the gold which had tempted

Pygmalion, and secretly emigrated, carrying with her the sacred

insignia of Hercules; a considerable body of Tyrians followed her.

She settled at Carthage on a small hilly peninsula joined by a narrow

tongue of land to the continent, purchasing from the natives as much

land as could be surrounded by an ox’s hide, which she caused to be

cut into the thinnest strip, and thus made it sufficient for the

site of her first citadel, Byrsa, which afterwards grew up into the

great city of Carthage. As soon as her new settlement had acquired

footing, she was solicited in marriage by several princes of the

native tribes, especially by the Gætulian Jarbas, who threatened war

if he were refused. Thus pressed by the clamours of her own people,

who desired to come into alliance with the natives, yet irrevocably

determined to maintain exclusive fidelity to her first husband, she

escaped the conflict by putting an end to her life. She pretended to

acquiesce in the proposition of a second marriage, requiring only delay

sufficient to offer an expiatory sacrifice to the manes of Sichæus; a

vast funeral pile was erected, and many victims slain upon it, in the

midst of which Dido pierced her own bosom with a sword, and perished

in the flames. Such is the legend to which Virgil has given a new

colour by interweaving the adventures of Æneas, and thus connecting the

foundation legends of Carthage and Rome, careless of his deviation from

the received mythical chronology. Dido was worshipped as a goddess at

Carthage until the destruction of the city: and it has been imagined

with some probability that she is identical with Astarte, the divine

patroness under whose auspices the colony was originally established,

as Gades and Tarsus were founded under those of Hercules--the tale of

the funeral pile and self-burning appearing in the religious ceremonies

of other Cilician and Syrian towns. Phœnician religion and worship

were diffused along with the Phœnician colonies throughout the larger

portion of the Mediterranean.

The Phocæans of Ionia, who amidst their adventurous voyages

westward established the colony of Massalia (as early as 600 B.C.),

were only enabled to accomplish this by a naval victory over the

Carthaginians--the earliest example of Greek and Carthaginian collision

which has been preserved to us. The Carthaginians were jealous of

commercial rivalry, and their traffic with the Tuscans and Latins in

Italy, as well as their lucrative mine-working in Spain, dates from

a period when Greek commerce in those regions was hardly known. In

Greek authors the denomination Phœnicians is often used to designate

the Carthaginians as well as the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon, so

that we cannot always distinguish which of the two is meant. But it is

remarkable that the distant establishment of Gades, and the numerous

settlements planted for commercial purposes along the western coast of

Africa and without the Straits of Gibraltar, are expressly ascribed

to the Tyrians. Many of the other Phœnician establishments on the

southern coast of Spain seem to have owed their origin to Carthage

rather than to Tyre. But the relations between the two, so far as we

know them, were constantly amicable, and Carthage even at the period of

her highest glory sent Theori with a tribute of religious recognition

to the Tyrian Hercules; the visit of these envoys coincided with the

siege of the town by Alexander the Great. On that critical occasion,

the wives and children of the Tyrians were sent to find shelter at

Carthage: two centuries before, when the Persian empire was in its age

of growth and expansion, the Tyrians had refused to aid Cambyses with

their fleet in its plans for conquering Carthage, and thus probably

preserved their colony from subjugation.[b]

THE SITE AND EARLY HISTORY OF CARTHAGE

The point of land still called Capo Cartagine, which projects from the

eastern side of the Gulf of Tunis, near the entrance of the Goletta,

was in ancient times more nearly a peninsula than it is now, and

corresponds exactly with the description given by Thucydides of the

sites selected for the purposes of commerce by the Phœnicians. Its

height, which is still nearly five hundred feet above the sea, afforded

a good lookout; and as a shelter for ships the qualities of the bay are

familiar from the description of Virgil, Æn. 1, 160. It was in this

way that all the principal colonies of Phœnicia arose, and in this

sense Carthage may have owed its origin to the times when Sidon was

predominant among the Phœnician cities. But its rapid rise to power

was due to a colony from Tyre about the end of the ninth century B.C.

The circumstances which led to the migration of Dido belong to the

special history of that city. The colony first established itself on

the hill called by the Greeks Byrsa, still recognised in the elevated

ground which bears the name of St. Louis. It is now only about one

hundred and ninety feet above the level of the sea; but its height

above the neighbouring ground, on which its strength depended, has no

doubt been diminished by the accumulation of ruins around its base.

The name, which, from its resemblance to the Greek word for hide, gave

rise to the story of Dido’s purchase of as much land as a hide would

cover, is Phœnician, and denotes a fortress. Like the Cadmea at Thebes,

which it resembled in name, it was the place of arms of the original

settlers, the _magalia_ of the civil population being gathered around

the base, and gradually forming the New City, the signification of the

name Carthage, by which both parts collectively are known, as Neapolis

(Naples) has absorbed its older neighbour, Palæpolis. The work of

excavating for themselves a dock, in which Virgil represents them as

engaged at the arrival of Æneas, would soon follow their settlement;

for, though they came with arms in their hands, they came rather as

merchants than as warriors, and their first accessions of population

were from the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, who flocked to them

for the purpose of trade. It was probably in the same place, on the

southern side of the peninsula, where we now see the remains of two

basins, designed to hold the war navy of Carthage, in the day of its

power. They have become a salt marsh; but under the Byzantine emperors,

and after the Mohammedan conquest, they retained their ancient use.

We have much cause to regret the diffidence or vanity which made

Sallust decline to speak of Carthage, because he had not space to

do justice to such a theme. In the wreck which has taken place of

ancient literature, even a few lines from his pen would have given us

information which we now seek in vain. Its history naturally divides

itself into three periods: from its foundation to the year 480 B.C.,

when its wars in Sicily began; from the year 480 to 265 when its wars

with Rome began; and finally, from 265 to 146, when it was destroyed.

We are entirely destitute of any continuous history for the first of

these periods. The primary cause of its rapid increase is no doubt to

be found in the fertility of the soil, and the fortunate selection of

its site, midway between the seats of art and civilisation in Asia

and the rich countries in the southwest of Europe,--within an easy

distance also of the coasts of southern Italy and the islands of Malta,

Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles. The richest portion of the

traffic with these western regions, that with the south of Spain, was

kept to itself by Phœnicia, during the time of its ascendency; but as

a compensation for its exclusion from the mines of Tartessus, Carthage

enjoyed ready access to the interior of Africa, by the caravans, in

which the nomadic tribes conveyed the salt and the dates with which

the north of Africa abounds, across the Sahara to the countries on the

Niger, and brought back thence gold-dust, precious stones, and slaves.

They had traffic with the natives of Ethiopia by a different channel.

They had visited and colonised the western coast of Africa, as low

down as Arguin, and dealt with the natives by dumb barter, receiving

gold-dust from them in exchange for their own wares.

[Sidenote: [600-520 B.C.]]

As the Carthaginian fleet was defeated in 600 B.C. by the force of a

single Greek city, Phocæa, its naval power was at that time not very

great. Sixty years later they came again into conflict off Corsica

with less advantage to the Phocæans, now expelled from their home by

Harpagus, the general of Cyrus. A great change had taken place in

Asiatic history. Soon after the first conflict of these powers, Tyre

underwent a siege by Nebuchadrezzar, in which, whether captured or not,

it suffered so severely that it was never able to regain its former

ascendency; and from this time we may date the entire independence of

Carthage, and its succession to that dominion in the West which had

hitherto belonged to Tyre. This increase of power is connected with

the name of Hanno; not the same who commanded the expedition to the

western coast of Africa, but of a generation earlier, and living about

the middle of the sixth century B.C. According to Dio Chrysostom,

“he made the Carthaginians to be Libyans instead of Tyrians, and to

inhabit Libya instead of Phœnicia, and to acquire much wealth, and

many emporia and harbours and triremes, and an extensive dominion both

by land and sea.” These words plainly imply, that in the time, and

by means of the measures of Hanno, Carthage, from being a dependency

of Tyre, became a substantive state, having its seat in Africa; and

that a great extension of its wealth and its power, both by sea and

land, took place at the same time and under the same auspices. In

an historian, we should have inferred from the phrase “that he had

caused the Carthaginians to inhabit Libya instead of Phœnicia,” that

he had been the leader of a large emigration from Tyre, to which this

increase was owing; in a rhetorician it appears to mean nothing more

than the preceding clause, namely, that before his time Carthage had

been virtually a portion of Phœnicia, but henceforth was an independent

African power. That such was the effect of the decline of Tyre after

the siege by Nebuchadrezzar is certain; and even if no large part

of its population migrated at once, during the siege and after it,

the decay of its prosperity and the loss of its independence would

naturally attract them towards Carthage, which was already powerful and

able to protect itself. Such an increase, coupled with the decline of

the Tyrian power throughout the western Mediterranean, would account

for the sudden start which Carthage appears to have made in the sixth

century B.C. The military talents of Mago, who lived between the middle

and end of this century, contributed to the same result. He organised

their military forces, and prepared the way for the extensive wars

which the Carthaginians carried on in Sicily.

[Sidenote: [480 B.C.]]

Cambyses, after the conquest of Egypt, wished to have attacked

Carthage, the submission of Cyrene and Barca having brought his

frontier into contact with theirs; but the Phœnicians, who must have

furnished the fleet for this purpose, refused to engage in hostilities

against their own colony. Darius solicited the aid of Carthage in his

projected invasion of the Greeks, but without success. When Xerxes

renewed his father’s undertaking, he entered into a treaty with the

Carthaginians, in virtue of which, in the same year in which he crossed

the Hellespont, they poured a large army into Sicily, gathered from

Gaul, Liguria, and Spain, as well as all their African territories. The

battle of Himera was as fatal to the plans of Carthage as Salamis and

Platæa to those of Xerxes; but Sicily continued for a long time to be

the scene of struggles between Carthaginians and Greeks, till both were

absorbed in the growing empire of Rome.[c]

MOMMSEN’S ACCOUNT OF CARTHAGE

The Semitic race stands amongst and yet apart from the peoples of the

old classical world. The base of the former is the East, of the latter

the Mediterranean; and as war and migration advanced the frontiers and

threw the races amongst one another, a deep sense of dissimilarity

still divided and yet divides the Indo-Germanic peoples from the

Syrian, Israelitish, and Arabian nations. This is also true of that

Semitic people which more than any other has extended itself westward;

namely, the Phœnician or Punic race. Their first home is the narrow

strip of coast between Asia Minor, the highlands of Syria, and Egypt,

which is called the plain--that is Canaan. This is the only name which

the nation applied to itself--in Christian times the Libyan peasant

still called himself a Canaanite; but to the Hellenes Canaan was the

“Purple Country,” or the “Land of the Red Men,” Phœnicia, and in the

same way the Italians were accustomed, as we are ourselves, to call the

Canaanites Phœnicians.

The country is well adapted to agriculture; but above all the excellent

harbours and the abundance of wood and metals are favourable to trade,

which here, where the superabundance of the eastern continent stretches

far into the Mediterranean Sea with its numerous islands and harbours,

may have first started in all its importance to man. What courage,

sagacity, and enthusiasm can contribute, the Phœnicians called into

play to unite the East and West and give full development to commerce

and what it involves, as navigation, manufacture, colonisation. At an

incredibly early period we find them in Cyprus and Egypt, in Greece

and Sicily, in Africa and Spain, and even in the Atlantic Ocean and

the North Sea. The region of their commerce extends from Sierra Leone

and Cornwall as far as the Malabar coast; through their hands pass the

gold and pearls of the East, the Tyrian purple, slaves, ivory, lion and

panther skins from the interior of Africa, Arabian incense, the linen

of Egypt, clay pottery and wines from Greece, Cyprian copper, Spanish

silver, English tin, the iron of Elba.

In contrast to the Indo-Germanic aptitude for political organisation,

the Phœnicians, like all Aramaic nations, lacked the inspiring idea of

self-governing freedom. In the best days of Sidon and Tyre, Phœnicia

was the eternal apple of discord of the powers which ruled on the Nile

and the Euphrates, and was subject now to the Assyrians, now to the

Egyptians. With half their force the Hellenic cities would have made

themselves independent; but the sharp-sighted men of Sidon calculated

that the barring of the caravan routes towards the East or of the

Egyptian harbours would be more costly than the heaviest tribute, and

consequently they paid their taxes punctually to Nineveh or Memphis, as

the case might be, and when nothing else would serve, even fought the

kings’ battles with their ships.

And as at home the Phœnician placidly endured the oppression of

their masters, so abroad they were by no means inclined to exchange

the peaceful ways of a commercial policy for one of conquest. Their

colonies are factories; to them it was of more importance to take their

wares from the natives and bring others to them than to acquire broad

lands in distant countries and accomplish there the slow and difficult

work of colonisation. They even avoided war with their competitors;

almost without resistance they allowed themselves to be driven out of

Egypt, Greece, Italy, and in the great sea fights which were fought in

early days for the dominion of the western Mediterranean, at Alalia and

Cyme it was the Etruscans, not the Phœnicians, who bore the brunt of

the battle against the Greeks. If, on occasion, competition could not

be avoided, the matter was compromised as well as might be; no attempt

was ever made by the Phœnicians to conquer Cære or Massalia.

Still less, of course, were the Phœnicians inclined to wars of

aggression. The sole instance in ancient times of their taking the

offensive on the battle-field, was in the Sicilian expedition of the

African Phœnicians, which ended with the defeat of Himera by Gelo of

Syracuse (480), and then it was only as obedient subjects of the great

king and in order to avoid taking a share in the campaign against the

eastern Hellenes, that they took the field against the Hellenes of

the west, as their Syrian kinsmen, in the same year, had to submit to

joining with the Persians in the battle of Salamis.

This was not cowardice; the navigation of unknown waters in armed

vessels demands brave hearts, and the Phœnicians have often shown

that such were to be found among them. Still less was it the want of

persistence and individuality in the sense of nationality; rather have

the Aramæans, with an obstinacy to which no Indo-Germanic people ever

attained, and which to us of the West appears as either more or less

than human, defended their nationality against all the seductions of

Greek civilisation, as well as against all the coercive force of both

eastern and western despots, alike with the weapons of the spirit and

with their blood. It is the want of a political sense which, though

co-existing with the liveliest racial feeling and the most faithful

adherence to the mother-city, still characterises the essential nature

of the Phœnicians. Freedom had no attractions for them, nor did they

possess any lust of rule; “they dwelt careless,” says the Book of

Judges, “after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure,” and in

possession of riches.

Amongst all the Phœnician settlements none throve more quickly nor more

securely than those which the Tyrians and Sidonians had founded on

the south coast of Spain and in the north of Africa, in regions where

neither the arm of the great king, nor the dangerous rivalry of the

Grecian sailors had reached, but where the natives stood face to face

with the foreigners as the Indians to the Europeans in America.

Amongst the numerous and flourishing cities on these shores one was

pre-eminent, the “New City” of Karthada, or, as the westerns called

it, Karchedon, or Carthage. Though not the earliest settlement of the

Phœnicians in this region, and perhaps originally a city standing under

the protection of the neighbouring Utica, the oldest Phœnician city in

Libya, she soon outstripped her neighbour and even the mother-country,

owing to the incomparable advantages of her position and the eager

activity of her inhabitants. She stood not far from the (former)

estuary of the Bagradas (Mejerda) which flows through the richest

grain-bearing district of North Africa on a fertile elevation of the

soil, which is even now set with villas and covered with olive and

orange groves, and which sinking gently towards the plain ends on the

sea side in a promontory encircled by the waves. Situated near the

centre of the Gulf of Tunis, the greatest haven of North Africa, where

that beautiful stretch of water offers the best anchorage for large

ships and the most excellent springs gush close to the shore, this

place is so peculiarly favourable to agriculture and commerce and the

connection between the two, that not only did the Tyrian settlement

there become the first commercial city of the Phœnicians, but in Roman

times also, Carthage, though scarcely restored, became the third city

in the empire, and even to-day under no very favourable conditions a

flourishing town of a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants still

exists. The agricultural, mercantile, and industrial prosperity of a

city in such a position and with such inhabitants explains itself; but

we need some answer to the question as to how this settlement developed

a political power such as no other Phœnician city possessed.

[Sidenote: [450 B.C.]]

Before the stream of Hellenic migration which was pouring itself

westward in unrestrained flood, which had already thrust the Phœnicians

from Greece itself and from Italy, and was preparing to do the like in

Sicily, Spain, and even Libya, the Phœnicians were compelled to make

some kind of stand if they did not wish to be utterly annihilated.

Here, where they had to do with Greek merchants and not with the Great

King, it was not enough for them to submit in order to be allowed to

carry on their trade and industry in the old fashion, in return for

the payment of a tax. Cyrene and Massalia had already been founded;

already the whole east of Sicily was in the hands of the Greeks;

it was high time for the Phœnicians to make resistance in earnest.

The Carthaginians assumed the task; in long and obstinate wars they

set a bound to the encroachment of the Cyrenæans, and Hellenism was

unable to establish itself west of the desert of Tripoli. Moreover,

the Phœnician settlements in the west of Sicily defended themselves

against the Greeks with Carthaginian help, and gladly and voluntarily

added themselves to the dependants of the powerful kindred city. These

important successes, which belong to the second century of the town,

and which saved the southwestern portion of the Mediterranean to the

Phœnicians, of themselves gave the city which had won them the hegemony

of the nation and at the same time an altered political position.

Carthage was no longer a mere merchant city; she aimed at the supremacy

over Lydia and over a portion of the Mediterranean Sea because she was

compelled to do so.