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The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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[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.
[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.