9 Tyre were the chief cities among several with which the Phoenician coast was dotted in ancient times. Each of these was inhabited by a distinct people, and governed by a separate king, whose powers were originally hereditary and absolute. But as the activity and opulence of their subjects were extended, and especially as the people of one city were brought into contact with those of another, the royal authority declined, and was in some instances totally overturned. A general confederacy was finally instituted, in which the merchant princes and the honorable traffickers, of whom the Prophet spoke, obtained, in all probability, the direction of public affairs," without much reference to the royal personages who yet, like autumn trees, retained a little while their honors.12 The means, however, of describing the formation of this league and of its assemblies have wholly vanished. It is only known that Tyre and Sidon were at one time 13 its prominent members, and that Tyre alone1 became the capital, if not the sovereign, 9 When Tyre was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar, the king was actually displaced by judges, dikaσraí. Josephus, Contra Apionem, I. 21. Flavius Josephus, born at Jerusalem in 37, died at the age of sixty or upwards, in Rome. He wrote two histories on the Antiquities and the Later War of his people, whose reputation he defended in this treatise Contra Apionem. 10 Isaiah, XXIII. 8. 11 Περὶ τῶν μεγίστων, says Diodorus, XVI. 41. 10 12 See Joseph., Contra Apionem, I. 17, 18, 21, for various particulars concerning the royal power and the vicissitudes of the nation. 13 Strabo, XVI. 2, sect. 22. It is mentioned in an extract preserved in the treatise of Josephus above cited (I. 18), that the tributaries of Tyre once revolted, and were reduced by a war to obedience. 14 See the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel. city, in after years. Nor can we trace in any way the growth of the popular magistracies established under the confederacy, and doubtless strengthened by the spirit which is clearly visible in the history of the nation. The old city of Tyre, for example, resisted Nebuchadnezzar thirteen years, "until every head was bald and every shoulder peeled "15 in the Assyrian army; and the new city of Tyre withstood Alexander with a resolution 16 he did not find in many places of the earth. Even when the whole country submitted to Cyrus, its laws were preserved, and its inhabitants compelled to no other service, besides the payment of tribute," than that of manning the Persian fleets,18-at once the most tolerable and the most honorable charge to such a people as the Phoenician. The great deity of the Phoenicians was Melkarth, known to other nations under the name, but not the character, of Hercules. The strength of the god adored in Greece and Rome as the healer of pestilence and the subduer of oppression was previously recognized in Phoenicia as consisting of craft and ferocity, which needed to be appeased in times of prosperity rather than to be invoked in times of danger. Yearly, in the spring-time, a multitude came to the spot selected for the horrid rites which made their service acceptable to the deity whom they never ceased to fear. If one had the heart to fix his eyes upon the scene, and watch the figure of the pontiff 19 who presided at 15 A. C. 567. Ezek., XXIX. 18. 16 A. C. 332. See Thirlwall's History of Greece, Ch. L. 17 Herod., III. 91. 18 As under Xerxes. Diod. Sic., XI. 3. Cf. Herod., IV. 89. 19 Whom Justin calls the next in honor, "honos secundus," etc., to the fiery sacrifice, he might seem to see the personification of the Phoenician character arrayed in golden robes, of ardent mien, and yet with a mind disturbed by objects unworthy of steadfast interest or unscrupulous devotion. The faith which the people received and the pontiff celebrated was a rock upon which the richest vessels of its worshippers would have been foundered, though freighted with a truer liberty and a truer humanity. Of those races, in ancient days, "which remained among the graves," the Phonicians were one; and the voice of the Prophet is heard once more:-"Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thy iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffic, . . . . . and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth." "20 Thus, then, there are two sides to Phoenician, as to all other history. On one, we find the people growing in energy and in liberty, from year to year, as they caught more of the spirit that walks upon the waters. Their adventures were neither the summer sailings of the random voyager, nor yet the wintry trials which the modern seaman, in his robust vessel, laughs almost utterly to scorn. The Phonician ships were feebly built and rudely managed, unfit to dare the seas beyond the sight of land, and rather employed in creeping along the shores, as if the king. Hist., XVIII. 4. An instance of the king's being displaced by the pontiff occurs in Joseph., Cont. Apion., I. 21. Cf. Pastoret, Hist. Légis., Tom. I. p. 328. 20 Ezekiel, XXVIII. 18. Cf. the Odyssey, and the heathen poem will σιν ἐώργει.— XIV. 288, 289. the earth, as much as the water, had been their element. In spite of such embarrassments, the Phonicians reached the remotest regions, and returned after long absences to renew their ventures upon the waves. One of their exploits remains recorded by the oldest of all the heathen historians. Neco, the Egyptian king, having resolved, it seems, to order the circumnavigation of his dominions, intrusted the attempt to certain Phoenician men, as the best of any to make the cruise successfully. They accordingly set sail down the Red Sea, hugging the land as they proceeded, and disembarking at seed-time, to sow their grain upon the coast, and wait its ripening, so that it was three years before they returned to Egypt, where they reported they had seen the sun to the north, "on their right hand."" Timid as such an expedition now appears, it was then enough to have brought back a crew of men unfit to be governed by principalities or castes, as if they had been slaves or warriors. The other side of their history relieves us from any wonder that the discoveries and the energies of this half-known people should have wrought no greater changes in the world. It shows, besides, that the character of a commercial was just as different as that of any other sort of nation, in ancient times, from the Christian conceptions we have been taught to form of what it is or might be now. The conquests of the Persians and the adventures of the 21 Which, says Herodotus, "is past my belief." IV. 42. Greeks put an end to the prosperity of Phoenicia, from which its colonies were already severed, or ready to be severed, by any fate befalling the mother land. Yet, though the civilization of the ancient world was less indebted to the Phoenicians than is often imagined, and though they had been unable to free themselves from a corrupt and a barbarous faith, they were nevertheless the first people, as such, apparent in antiquity. |